Centrist Simulator v1.1

Hello, it feels like it has been too long.

Thank you to everyone who played the game and left comments. I'm really proud of this project and I intended to circulate it around and add finishing touches that I wanted to do post-jam. 

Unfortunately, this coincided with a pretty significant event in the politics of France where I'm based. In reaction to the dissolution of parliament and the likely threat of a far-right takeoever, left wing parties united under the banner that they used a century ago to fight fascism. I did fully expect it to fail like it did, but I do think it is the best chance the left is ever going to get to stop fascism and neoliberalism, considering the right more divided than ever, the centrists losing all legitimacy, the fact that the left finally had a narrative that spoke to emotions and meaning, not to mention the very public genocide harder and harder to deny and the olympics giving the left a perfect chance to organize strikes against this bourgeois pageant. I still think that it was now or never (which means it will be never). So I threw everything I was doing on the side and focused on this faint hope full time, otherwise this would make me (and this game) pretty hypocritical, wouldn't it.

Anyway after all this went back to the normal capitalist realist world order, and after a sizeable depression episode as a backlash, I am back to give this game the sendoff it deserves. But to justify a push so long after the fact, I felt like I needed a big significant feature, so I tackled a stretch goal I was too scared to touch.

It always felt weird working on the identifiable bias victim with only text, when it’s pretty well documented that pictures are the main drivers of empathy for humans. I wanted the victims to have faces so that people would really relate to them, but this was pretty hard.

AI images are not yet so free and cheap that I can just generate new people on the fly, so I tried to procedurally generate portraits, but the results were not very good. So I turned to using precomputed datasets of faces. A lot of the datasets used in research don’t include children, and the ones that did seemed to have been built in ethically dubious ways. Therefore, I ended up using a dataset from thispersondoesnotexist.com, which seemed to me like the least harmful option.

The main challenge was to integrate this to the narrative engine. I classified pretty loosely my dataset along gender and age to synchronize it with the text. This vague mapping makes plenty of errors, but the only way to prevent inconsistencies would be to hardcode pretty strong rules about race, gender, etc… and I really don’t want to do that. So I decided to ship it as it is.

Yes, it often yields weird stuff, but so did the narrative engine in the first place. I’m hoping that the 90% of the time it works will be enough to provide an interesting experience. This is not a AAA game ^^ Not to mention that even if I make the best engine possible, the dataset of faces is pretty biased to begin with towards white people. So in the end I’ve decided to embrace the feeling of uncanny by reminding myself that this game is about centrists, so white people are probably what is going to trigger their empathy the most, and that’s also probably how they conceive the world.

As the feature is pretty wonky, you can of course deactivate it in the options, but I’ll leave it active by default for new players.

Anyway with all these caveats I leave you with Centrist Simulator v1.1. I also did a few readability fixes to hopefully make it even clearer how the game works and hint towards the victory conditions. This game now contains everything I wanted it to, so I can start turning towards future projects, in hope that they won’t be sabotaged by megalomaniac centrist extremists.

Cheers

PS: I also had fun writing an entry for my presskit for this game, if you're into this kind of stuff