Karen and The Personality Quiz
When your phone knows more about you than you do
Ever wonder why there are so many personality quizzes on the web? They’re everywhere. Want to know how masculine or feminine you are? If you’re a narcissist? Your emotional intelligence level?
You really think you’re the only one who uses the results of that quiz you just took?
We’ve all done it before: you’re scrolling Facebook and suddenly, you must know which Disney Princess you are most like. Or a friend’s post about being ENTJ sends you on a two hour Myers-Briggs escapade.
Usually these quizzes are a five-minute time sink. But sometimes they get longer, more complex, start feeling like a homework assignment. Long or short, these exercises can be a fun way to kill (or waste) some time, and can even help some people understand themselves and improve their lives.
Oh what’s that? You’ve got something a bit more serious that you’d like to discuss? Something where an online personality quiz might not suffice? Short of going to a therapist, they say talking with someone — anyone!—is one of the best ways to get things off your chest. And nowadays, thanks to the powers of the interwebs, you can find someone to speak with at any hour.
We suggest Karen:
Karen is a life coach. But you won’t find her office number in a phonebook. She only makes her services available through these apps. You talk with Karen through video, and when you first meet she’s warm and friendly. She starts things off with a little Q&A session, and also tells you a bit about herself (perhaps a little too much, if we’re being honest).
A “session” with Karen lasts ten days, and while over that period I guarantee you’ll find yourself giving away more of yourself than you’d like, you’ll also learn more about Karen than you might be comfortable with. Things will get taken to a pretty personal level, in fact, as Karen begins to text you at odd hours, cry, and act a bit erratic, all the while prying into your personal life.
If you don’t answer Karen immediately, however, please don’t worry about hurting anyone’s feelings: Karen’s a pre-programmed interaction. A bot.
She’s part of an interactive story. Interactive on a level beyond simply providing multiple-choice answers to her prying questions. Karen’s behavior is shaped based on your individual answers. Though Karen isn’t real, she needs our interactions for the story to go on, and we interact with her in ways that feel real to us (via our smartphones).
This places us, the reader, in the position of being an active character in the story. Without our responses, the show doesn’t go on, and based on our responses, the show has a very different outcome. And think about it; how many other stories allow you to directly interact with the main character?
Karen is the creation of Blast Theory, an artist group that utilizes interactive media to create experiences blurring the lines between reality and fiction. The group was inspired by news that governments and social networking services gather user data without consent. The Karen experience is a microcosm of this issue: we give Karen our private information (responses, location data, etc.) and responds accordingly. She shines a light on privacy as it relates to the modern world.
That’s at the heart of Karen, and what makes her story powerful: we read about personal data theft and how it gets used, but we often feel disconnected from it. By being placed in the story, and having our personal information re-presented to us through a personal, human interlocutor such as Karen, we come face to face with the problem, and are forced to choose how to interact with it.
While Karen is partially here to help us conceptualize this issue more clearly, there could be much more to interactive mobile fiction than personality quizzes, life coaches, and life lessons. What if a character in your favorite story sometimes texted you for advice? Imagine if a criminal sent you cryptic clues to their next crime through video chat, Instagram updates, and tweets. Meaningful interactions with fictional characters centered around drama or mystery could feel especially powerful told through our phones, because the smartphone medium makes the story feel so much more real and personal than a book, TV show, or movie.
The truth is, we’re all already telling the story of our lives on social media, and reading the stories of those in our networks (and we probably all have a person just like Karen in our lives). The next step, then, might be tuning fiction into this frequency, and delivering new experiences through these social media mediums.
Do you have any favorite interactive story apps? Have any ideas for a story that would involve the audience? Let us know in the response section, we’d love to hear from you!
Enjoy!
Woven is supported by LongShorts, a social media-based storytelling app. Check it out here for iOS.
