Flying boots- a Social Satire Story Simulator
Flying Boots is a videogame that incorporates biting social commentary and satire into a fun story that the player and program build together. It is immersive, thought provoking, and induces creativity.
This game works by taking turns with the reader to build a story. The player organizes elements to create the story, and the AI advances events and characteristics in ways that satirize aspects of our world and society. In this era, our style is much sharper than it used to be. This program reflects that intellectual cynicism and both hails/criticises it (it lets the player form their own opinion). It creates interest-through-exposure to things like language, history, and culture. It is essentially modern: it combines a new media platform with the modern sharpness of language and biting commentary that is associated with our culture of no hidden opinions. Events in the game explore pressing modern issues (such as racism, politics, consumerism, ecology, poverty, and Mac vs. PC) and incorporate current events – all within the context of the story the player builds. Think of Harry Potter’s Dobby- he was not an untouchable in India or a slave on a southern household, yet he certainly represented the same strife. Flying Boots creates parallels like this in the story you create together.
The other focus of the game is to prompt the reader to explore different aspects of language and composition. The program uses sophisticated language and a variety of tones and styles to fit the story as it moves along. Needless to say, it also helps with grammar skills as the reading level of the software is extremely high and continues to escalate along with the student’s progress. The program analyzes the player’s input writing for things like vocabulary and word difficulty, sentence length variation, alliteration and rhetorical/poetic devices, and (to its ability) tone and pacing. It at times mimics the players style, which makes the player more aware of his/her own style of writing. This lets the player analyze and develop his/her voice (and the linguistic strategies the student already uses) as well as recognize how even subtle changes in diction and syntax change the feel of a piece. Basically, it promotes metacognition. It makes students more aware of when certain styles of writing are more effective and how to use different language strategies to achieve different effects. The program also at times satirizes the writing styles of different eras or particularly recognizable writers, making it a multilayered exploration of language. Also, it is a chance for students to delve into a realm of writing that few can at school: what makes a good story? What issues are worth exploring? How does one go about writing fiction?
This product allows students to explore these questions while also learning language concepts closer to a school’s curriculum.
The market for this product is primarily students of high school age for educational supplement, and for people of all ages for entertainment. We already know there is a consumer base for this based on the following trends:
The popularity of the Hunger Games and dystopian fiction- teenagers are into works of social satire.
The rising number and popularity of “amateur” authors and self publication (made easier of course by the internet), the prevalence of fanfiction, and the immense interest in and fascination with “worldbuilding” (just see the Onion’s video review of The Hobbit: the Desolation of Smaug). People want to create- this software is all about creation.
The immense popularity of sarcasm amongst the young crowd.
People will “dig” what this product has to offer.
So, how does it work?
Ideally, I would have like this to be an entirely text based program. But for an AI to read and understand high level text, make connections between that and real world events, and use this information to create rich and thought provoking plot advancements, it would have to be nearly omniscient (really, it would be an english professor who is also a novelist who has also memorized wikipedia). It would be impractical, but more importantly it would take over the world. In order to prevent the destruction of humanity, I have divided the program into two elements: the text and the tree-line.
The tree-line (combination of tree and timeline, if no one got that) is what lets the computer know what is happening in your story. It has, built in, thousands of things which I can only generalize as “aspects of a story”. You can start by specifying a time period and adding things to it, or else by creating some basic rules to a world that is completely fictional, and working off of there. The treeline relates events, characters, places, and basically anything that could be a part of a story (such as character emotions, relationships, etc) to each other in a tree-like structure. It also related events in the story to one another chronologically (like a timeline). It basically just looks like a giant weblike thought diagram. The game is turn based- each turn, you add a passage (however long you want) to the text, and add things to the tree-line, and then end you turn. Then the AI adds things to the treeline and adds a block of text, and it is your turn again. Only a few things are added per “turn”, so it is not overwhelmingly complicated. It can be intense if you want it to be, though. The text, on the other hand, is the actual story. Each turn, you write out a bit of the story. You connect key words in the text to objects in the tree-line (in a way similar to a tagging system), and thus the computer can follow the story and knows when you are talking about what. The treeline, while necessary for the computer to understand the relationship between events, characters, etc, also becomes a visual map of the story that you are creating. It- also serves another important purpose: it is what the AI uses to create its commentary. The AI looks for patterns in the treeline and correlates them to real life events and issues. It then expands on the events in the story in order to both incorporate social satire and keep the story appealing. Theme is very important here- both the AI and the player keep themes in mind that unify the story and (in the AI’s case) make the story culturally relevant.
In conclusion, this program plays off of the appeal and popularity of worldbuilding, satire, and dark humor to create a rich and educational- as well as immensely thought provoking and fun- experience for people of all ages. Well, maybe not all ages, as it is designed to steal the innocence of any child it comes across. As for why the program is named “Flying Boots” – That is a story for another day!
(monday, to be exact.)
