I started writing this story and game after going on my derive walk. Initially, I did not want to turn this story in since it felt like it might be a bit too much. I ended up obsessing and overthinking about it and that's how it kind of wore me down to the point where I just decided to finish it.
I actually got the same Oblique Strategies card thrice in a row, which was funny. My cards were:
The one I ended up getting three times was 'Spectrum Analysis'. I chose to interpret that as the main character having several ways of reacting to the situations presented to them according to the player's mentality. Sort of a wide spectrum of responses that led to analysis of the happenings in the story. I think the furthest thing to desire is disgust and that is how I attempted to 'Disconnect from desire'. Since the main character has no idea of how they are being seen, they are genuinely 'Lost in Useless Territory'. Nothing is really happening for the most of the story. I 'took away the elements in order of apparent non-importance' as I stripped down the contents of the story to the feelings of the main character. I chose to have the main character grasp reality quite firmly. Maybe even too much. 'What is the reality of the situation?' ended up depending entirely on their current state of mind.
For the crowdsourcing portion, I had a bit of trouble understanding what
needed to be done and I ended up using the tweets from the people I follow
to fill up the different randomized things that could appear on our main
character’s phone.
A surprising amount of tweets had the word “disgusting” in them, so I used
those. Any time I came across the word, I would copy paste it into my
notes app to put in later.
I tried a bunch of words and phrases for the anagram, but I was only
satisfied with the word ‘Permeate’ which gave me “Repeat Em” and “Repeat
Me”. This ended up being a theme through the story where the main
character repeats themselves often. They blame themselves and the feelings
resonate in their brain.
Botnik was used with Taylor Swift’s voice to make up a nonsense lyric of a
fake possible song. Botnik actually steered the story in this direction as
it reminded me of that day that I roamed around the street near my
apartment and the whole day was ruined by unnecessary comments from
strangers. People should really mind their business.
The N+7 was really not that helpful for me this time. It barely changed
any words and when it did change them, it was not that great. I had to
play a bit with it. But I think some parts of the initial passage got
changed into a more crude and disturbing phrase. I particularly like the
use of the word “throat”.
Finally charNG gave a little broken down poem that I used as replacement
for the scattered thoughts one might have while falling asleep.
I used the $firstname to make the game more personal at a point and I also used random cases along with $randomRoom. I made use of flexboxes as well for one small page.