Telepathy

Irina Chen, Fall 2022

My story is based on my derive with a friend on 4/10/2022. We both are spontaneous people and doesn’t plan a trip ahead, but we were surprised to find out that when a chance to decide our next move comes, our decisions were almost always identical. This made me feel like being on a same wavelength is one necessary component of forming friendships. I want my player to go through all the decisions we made on the day, and figure out their compatibility with me. To extract all the smallest detail I can remember out of the derive, I narrated the day to Otter.ai.

One of the oblique strategy I got was “Listen to the quiet voice”, so I wrote the game in a narrative from a person who can’t voice their opinion, and would just take notes on things that aren’t working and ghost their date after. Other two cards I got was”Only a part, not the whole” and “go slowly all the way round the outside”, so instead of making people pick big decisions we made that day, I focused a lot on picking how to get to the locations, and what to do in there.

The third strategy I got was “abandon normal instruments”, so I used N+7 to change the names of crystals that was sold in revolution. I changed Michigan Native Copper to Michigan Necklace Cordial and Dessert Rose to Determiner Roughcast. I plugged yelp reviews I agree with into bonik to generate a “thought” as my description for the places the character visits to follow my oblique strategy “Consult other sources -promising -unpromising”.