Reality is a Game

Game thinking from Adam Clare

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My Twitter Bots Talk About Escape Rooms & Cryptocurrency

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On 01/03/2018

In Design, Experimental

y2kCash Zcoin

Back in the final days of 2017 I decided to create at least one Twitter bot after hearing about the Russian-backed bots. Plus, it was one of the coldest days of the year so staying inside and playing around with Twitter seemed rather appealing. I opened Cheap Bots, Done Quick and began creating some bots. Plus Dave was convincing me it’s a good idea to create bots after making one with Yifat.

So I created two Twitter bots:

@Y2KCash which talks about cryptocurrency, art, and technology.
@EscapeRoomBot which provides automated commentary on escape rooms.

Getting the bots up and running is simple enough and if you need help look there are plenty of online resources. Cheap Bots Down Quick uses Tracery as its language and if you’re new to Tracey there’s no need to fear as Katie Rose created a great guide on Tracery and Twitterbots (and here’s the full documentation).

Getting data

Escape Game Bot

Using the architecture list.

For my bots the hardest part was generating the content and not the code. Terms specific to escape rooms and cryptocurrencies was easy enough, as was some unique sentences I wanted them to say. However, for more general things I needed to look elsewhere.

I figured there’s no point in creating generic lists of objects since inevitably somebody else already has. Sure enough, Darius Kazemi nicely created just that very thing in his Corpora project. “The project is a collection of static corpora (plural of “corpus”) that are potentially useful in the creation of weird internet stuff.” It includes lists of common objects and terms, which proved very useful for my weird internet project.

Adding lists greatly increased the diversity of commentary the bots could espouse. Sometimes the results from the lists are unexpected like this:

I decided to go further and add emoji and hashtags. Emojis were easy enough but hashtags took some figuring out (to add a hashtag in Tracery preface it with “\#” ie) \#hashtag \#escaperoom). Adding emojis to EscapeRoomBot was clearly a smart move as the commentary on escape games including emojis get more impressions. Also, the emoji are just fun to add.

Now go make your own Twitter bots!

Some final thoughts from the bots:

 

Designing Immersive Experiences in Escape Room Puzzles

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On 19/09/2017

In Design, Video

Immersive experiences come in many flavours, my specialty is the delicious world of escape rooms. The most important design within an escape room are the puzzles themselves. Puzzle making can be difficult and challenging even to just think about. In this presentation I cover ways to approach designing puzzles to create an engaging experience. Creating puzzles is just one of many steps. Putting puzzles into the right sequence to create flow is vital to a successful game, just like in a video game.

Beyond puzzle designs I go into ways that designers can get inspiration to make games from video games or other fields they are interested in.

The talk was given at FITC Toronto in the spring of 2017.

Looking for escape game designs? At Wero Creative we make boutique immersive escape rooms for anybody who wants one.

If you want to know more about escape room design then check out my book.
escape the game

Video edited by (and special thanks to) Wish You Were Here Productions.

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