Flash Back: QByte’s Many Themes
Cats, dating simulators, dystopian futures and beer propaganda. Over the past year the team have explored a number of metaphors to help deliver a game about quantum computing. In today’s post — the first Flash Back — we review where these treatments have come from and gone to. This will help pave the way for future Collective Chats about the look, feel and theme of this odd thing we’re making.
The strangeness of quantum is iconic, and a small number of images already exist in popular culture to help the curious get a foothold on the topic. Gedanken experiments about cats, intelligent sounding Canadian Prime Ministers and the parallel universes of Gwyneth Paltrow are all popular touchstones for those new to quantum.
For us the start of this problem was trying to create an emotional connection to this strangeness: particularly superpositions and entanglement. From very early on the team latched onto the fickleness of human decision-making as a helpful link.
Your personal opinion can be binary — You either hate something, or love it —but your opinion can also be in a state in between, a conflicted state where things are more complex than that, much like a superposition. However, when it comes to decisions time, whether it be at the polling booth, the cashier or the eve of Valentine’s Day, you really can only make an either / or decision.
This gave rise to our earliest theme.
That universal problem of ‘should I have a(nother) beer tonight?’ It’s a choice that’s influences by a number of factors for which people hold strong opinions. It was also a nice way to make the topic relatable, especially when talking to them over a pint (as we did back in May).
The other anchor for our team was both the imagery and meaning of quantum circuits. At it’s core this game is a simulation that allows you to create quantum circuits. The potential of these mechanics has always been appealing, and is part of the reason why we chose quantum in the first place.
In mechanics, metaphor and outcome it revolves around manipulation. As a designer you are manipulating these circuits, which manipulates the states of bits in the computer, as well as the opinions of people in the game.
In a similar way, human opinions can be manipulated by many things: propaganda, the opinions of others, lies and miss-information. Back to beer: you as a designer were trying to manipulate people’s opinions of beer by using propaganda, secret agents and conversational persuasion to get them to purchase.
This example nicely captures the last piece of strangeness: entanglement. You could manipulate your audience into states of group-think. Once one customer went to the bar to purchase, and their superposition is forced to collapse to a binary state, the others entangled with them would also come to some profound point of agreement.
While beer had a lot going for it, there were doubts about the stakes being high enough to engage people, and some parts of the metaphor felt a little clumsy (how we’d justify goals past ‘get everyone to buy beer’, for starters). But the team still felt that an egocentric view of the theme was important.
Next we explored the power of story telling. By having a narrative based outcome users might be able to have more ownership of the outcomes, and the diversity of outputs could be very strange yet compelling to explore. What’s a genre that has high stakes decisions that impact the way the story evolves?
Having a self-confessed soft-spot for visual novels and dating simulators, there was a really appealing fit with the genre. By manipulating the emotional state of characters in the stories it could lead to really interesting an bizarre stories (something the genre is accustomed to). Additionally, it’s got a theme that’s a little higher stakes: love.
Buying beer or not isn’t the worlds most challenging decision, but your romantic feelings towards someone else can certainly feel like it sometimes. Maybe people would be able to relate to the ambiguous states between liking someone or not.
Also the motivation to manipulate these circuits to create interesting storylines leads to lots of drama. Characters could be set against each other, spread rumours and lies to persuade others, or end up in very interesting states of affairs. The stories, as it turns out, weren’t all that awful either.
We also found that love triangles were both compelling, because they created a great sense of investment and drama, but achievable because it used a total of 6 bits to simulate (something of a technical limitation). We started to experiment with this theme: a dating simulator simulator? A quantum retelling of Pride and Prejudice? A Sliding Doors choose your own adventure? Something involving Shakespearian forest sprites messing around with love potions?
Once again these things reached their limits. Mostly they felt lacking in their replay value. What would bring users back for further playthroughs? Other than a quirky throw-away toy these themes didn’t feel like they were worth the effort. Along with this was the issue of justifying the measurement — the point where a decision needs to be made — making it both believable and repeatable, because you can only have so many weddings, or nights at the ball before things get boring.
One place where tough decisions get made every episode is reality TV. Whether it’s voting off competitors, or selecting winners, there’s always a repeated and justified decision to be made. From a circuits builders point of view too you could be a director manipulating all this drama for the sake of your audience.
Now you’re up to date. From here we’ve been discussing how this thing will look and feel with a new blog to follow. Tell us your thoughts so far? What sounds appealing to you? Which of these bizarre takes might you like to get your hands on? Let us know in the comments below.
