I started by drawing 4 Oblique Strategies cards. I got: “Make a sudden, destructive, unpredictable action”, “Organic Machinery”, “Be less critical more often”, and “Mechanize something idiosyncratic”. These were my guides for the whole project. “Organic Machinery” I took very literally, basing the story around creatures called Machines. I used “Mechanize something idiosyncratic” in a similar way, making the main Machine based on a shopping mall I’d added to the Quiet Year game which my collaborators did not use for anything. The word “idiosyncratic” is one I take very loosely; I have a love of dead malls, so I figured that was pretty idiosyncratic for me. I also indulged any element or theme that commonly appears in other stories I’ve come up with, such as shapeshifting, surreality, or distortion of perception, making them all related back to the Machines. In a broader sense, I used easter eggs as a way to expand the story within its medium, and I consider that both idiosyncratic to me since I’m an ARG fanatic, and sort of idiosyncratic to the medium of hypertext fiction as well. Related to that, the “mall maze page” and its destinations are my destructive, unpredictable action. “Be less critical more often” is one I tried to take to heart, because I’m a perfectionist. This partly came into play when I was actually writing, as I just wrote from my stream of consciousness without going back.
That idea of being less critical also played into how I used otter.ia, the Markov generator, and the Travesty generator. I had written a rough outline of a story and I didn’t like it, but instead of revising it, I fed the text into the Markov generator and the Travesty generator. I first used the Markov generator, then lightly revised the text so it worked grammatically, adding characters and sentence subjects in places based on the context of the sentence. Then I went through and wrote down any interesting changes it had made to my concept. Afterwards, I fed the Markov text into the Travesty generator and did the same process of editing and analyzing. In the final story, instead of looking at my original notes, I used only the results of what the two generators did with my ideas. Some of the original outline still shines through, but it has been heavily changed. Many of the contributions from this method related to making the setting more surreal. Examples include: Machines being like plants; “distance” as an abstract concept which one can get or become; the “Lab of Loneliness” and the fact that it is part of the mall; the process of becoming a Machine being called “twisting”; and the ideas for most of the endings.
I used otter.ia in a similar fashion to develop the world and backstory more. I simply recited my memory of what happened in our Quiet Year game, then made a note of anything it misheard, and I used a lot of it as part of the story. I didn’t use as much from this method, but a big contribution was the term String Metal, which came from mishearing “strange metal”. A couple other things I got from this were the sick boy’s name being Mark (I had “Terry” as a placeholder before), the idea of a newspaper being found in the car, and the mercenary’s nickname being “the Hawk”. One other contribution was that it somehow misheard me as speaking in the first person at one point, which gave me a way to incorporate the player’s character into the world. It is implied though that the player’s presence changed the other characters’ memories and that they weren’t actually there, because the player is not analogous to any character from the campaign.
I added a major character that was developed through crowdsourcing. For this, I asked my friends to take turns creating a character piece by piece. I gave vague instructions like “third comment is eyes, fourth comment is shirt”. It included body parts, clothes, and traits. I got 9 people to contribute and then allowed some to contribute again so I could fill all 13 categories I came up with. The name was decided by the last contributor, and thus Grimble was born. The original image I showed my friends is posted below, though I made a decision to add “hat” when two people contributed shirts at the same time. The only element I didn’t get to use was her “like”, which was European EDM.
Another major character was my autobiographical character. I didn’t exactly make a character so much as a species, so I decided that I would use a member of that species to be the Machine. I explained this by her having shapeshifting abilities, which I hadn’t exactly mentioned in the bio for the character, but it had always been in the back of my mind. She was originally based on “Jo” from the character bio, and was supposed to be a more benevolent and fun character, but she became more sinister due to the Markov and Travesty edits. I wrote something about her being lonely in my outline and it turned into Loneliness being a type of energy she had. Not that much of the original character description ended up being used, so I decided not to call her Jo in the end, and instead I decided she had been another member of the Joanna species. The fact that I’m an animator did play a role though, as it related to my original idea for Machines as objects given souls (ie. animated).
I used Googlism to develop my characters further. Many of them came from the Quiet Year campaign, but there wasn’t much more than a vague idea. To do this, I had to give them all names. The lunatic and the mercenary’s last names start with the first letter of their titles, and their first names are just based on some guys who I was watching livestream an “exploration” of that weird house you showed us in class. Mark’s name was Terry before, which I picked at random, so I used traits for that name and not the name Mark. Sam’s name was picked by my mom when I described what sort of character I had in mind. I threw the Machine and Grimble into the mix, using the name “Jo” for the Machine and “Britney” for Grimble. Through this, I got: the lunatic is greedy, and a “history man”; the mercenary is involved with “youth evangelism”, and is “ultimately a disappointment”; Mark is “a fool” but also “hardcore” and in 5th grade; Sam is “smarter than you” and “a mean jerk who hates you”; and Jo is “now a part” (of the Machine), a good singer, and a “true survivor”. Grimble already had some traits from how she was created, but with this I added that she was “a bitch” (not my words), and “a hippie”.
Finally, I used the predictive writer to make a poem that became the Machine’s song. I did some light editing to fix grammar, change the order of the lines in a couple spots, and arrange it into stanzas. The “voice” I left set to Radiohead, not out of laziness but just because I’m a Radiohead fan and thought their moody music went with what the story was becoming. I can’t remember now if I intentionally moved to shape more of the story around this “song”, or if the song happened to work well with themes in the story. I think it was a little of both.
I also used the Travesty generator more directly to create pages where the text is becoming glitchy and nonsensical. I thought it would be a good way to portray the player character losing their mind.
After that, all that was left was the anagram generator, which I only used in two places. For one, the title of the game, “Phantom’s Wing”, which is also the name of the mall and the name of the “song”. It’s partially an anagram of “Shoppingtown Mall”, a local mall that shut down recently. This is sort of my tribute to it. It’s not a perfect anagram I don’t think, I might have discarded some letters to make it sound better. I know that’s what I did with the other one, which was Snowbird. Our town in the Quiet Year was just called “bird town”, which didn’t have any interesting anagrams. I added the word “server” though, because my otter transcript had misheard that word somewhere in my description of the town, and I got the anagram “snowbird revert”. I thought it sounded nice, so I kept it. As a last note, the term “Phantom’s Wing” secretly has to do with the player character’s true identity, though I kept this ambiguous in the story.
There was one thing used which isn’t on the checklist but it bears mentioning- ai imagery. The character images are from a website called “This Person Does Not Exist”, the key image was made by a website called “Artbreeder”, and the backgrounds were made using “Deep Dream Generator” to combine two photos. “Artbreeder” was also used on the mall map page for the clickable images. Those are the main places each thing was used, anyway.
