The Boat Scenario
This is my Net Art project using html coding. It is a choose your own adventure story made to test whether your choices would be that of a human or a machine.
Concept
Due to war and famine humanity has declined. The last bastion of man decides to take their chances at sea. The remaining 500 people (and you) are on two boats. 300 people are on one boat and 200 are on the other. Each boat is already at max capacity. There is a leak in both boats. You are the only mechanic that can fix the leak but you only have enough time to save one. Which do you choose?
In this scenario story you are given choices and numbers. Will you make only the choices that lead to the best results at the great cost of others? By always choosing the majority? Or will you try to balance the choices and think about a way out?
The concept was to create an interactive narrative where the choices you make define whether you are a conscious being or a killing machine. Through my research I stumbled upon the greedy algorithms, an algorithm used for problem solving and optimizing only the best results. Thinking about this I imagined that a machine given a greedy algorithm, would only optimize its results rather than the potential costs of outcome. Meaning that if a machine was to create or destroy something then it would go on doing it if no end was made to its programming.
Initially when coding in html I underestimated how many mini scenarios I would have had to make to extend the story. It starts with two initial routes then those two would each lead to two and so on. To make it somewhat doable I merged some of the routes and choices together. I made three different gifs, boats moving, gunshots, and glitches. I wanted it to feel like an old computer game and made the background black and the text green. The headers and choice options are in red. I didn’t want to incorporate too much imagery/gifs mainly to focus more on the narrative choices.
Critique
The people in my critique group liked the personal interaction that the story gives. Each choice would be different depending on the person. One person from the group mentioned that it reminded them of the self driving car scenarios. Where if you had to choose, would you have the car run into the CEO’s or the hobo’s? The results of your decisions would be catalogued and compared to others. When I asked about images and image placement they said that having too many images might detract from the story and having a few gifs would be better. They also liked the simple color scheme throughout, rather than having each page be unique it all stays cohesive.
