Psychographic Categorization Neural Network Simulator 2000

Posted on Dec 11, 2017

For my computational media final project I wanted to make a game about Cambridge Analytica and about the current cultural moment in data science and AI. I have seen the rise of the imperative to make one’s identity known and intelligible for collection online by various state and corporate actors as a sinister reach to further institutional control over the everyday, but I also think that the practice of psychographics is a silly pseudoscience. I’ve also recently been interested in games that have an anti-interface with the simplest possible values (especially cookie clicker games but also internet quizzes and ClickHole ClickVentures) so I wanted to limit the interface to just the fewest possible elements.

You can play the game here.

And see the code here. It is run via express server serving a p5 sketch. All the interactive elements are dom buttons that “switch on or off” different arrays of text written to a p5 canvas. Note some buttons are confusingly labeled.

The song is Mirandolina by Burnier e Cartier (1974).