Sentient Games
Last year I made a Twitter bot to tweet “great again” slogans, out of frustration at the number of marketing campaigns I had seen echoing Trump in the run-up to the US elections.
I recently let Great Again Bot go to pasture, and overhauled the account for another purpose. Now I’ve got it tweeting about media - specifically, parroting the way we talk about games, films and other media as if they had a will of their own. It was kicked off by Ian Bogost’s recent piece containing the question “Why are games still obsessed with narrative?” and responses such as Patrick Klepek’s “Video games don’t have a choice but to tell stories”.
As with Great Again Bot, I came into this wanting to lampoon somebody else, but as the bot whirred on generating new phrases, I felt surprised to see myself implicated in what it was saying. It was humbling. Perhaps escaping facile rhetoric is harder than I thought.