Flag Factory

Flag Factory

Game Description

Flag Factory is a one-player, clicker game with an unfolding story. Players build and run a flag factory. They have to grow the factory's production, while balancing exponential costs of machinery. The factory can reach full-automation. When fully-automated, it imagines, designs, produces, and sells flags without player oversight. The player discovers the factory is selling tons of flags for opposing sides of issues.

Meanwhile, the game has begun to change. When automating sales, players use a mockup of a woman holding a flag to increase revenue. This image, like the center of a donut, becomes a byproduct of digital automations. With continual usage, it develops a life of its own and manifests as the ghost of a woman. Within the game, this transition occurs visually. The image changes from a simple, line drawing in ascii-art into a realistic depiction of a scene. With the introduction of this ghost, the player is also tasked with the role of "repairman." At the ghost's urging, the player works toward the destruction of the factory and all flags.

When creating under stress and at scale, humans become less discerning. It becomes almost impossible to stop and consider what we use and the consequences of using it. In this story, a stranger's image becomes an asset and the player uses it for their own goals.

Research into print-on-demand products on Amazon shows the complex reality within this narrative. The hyper-competitive environment of Amazon leads to the reduction of actual people into editable jpegs. With this transition, a photo of a person is detached from the individual it actually shows. Instead, it is an image of the concept of an individual, imagined into existence, by producers and consumers alike.

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Background

For this project, my research consisted of analyses of similar games, conceptual, artistic, and academic research, an experimental-making practice, and independent investigatory work. The experimental practice involved digital and analog experiments ranging from training machine learning models on image data to photographing paper cut-outs. The investigatory research involved data-collection through web scraping via Google image search, as well as a journalistic investigation involving personal interviews, consultations with subject matter experts, and observations of facebook groups.

This work began when I observed Amazon listings using a photoshopped image of a woman at a Trump rally to sell every type of flag imaginable. From what I observed, I strongly suspected that the image was being manipulated without its subject’s full consent. Without knowing what, if any consent, had been given, I set out to try and inform this person of the usage of their image.

How could I critique the usage of a stranger’s image, while also using the image for my own gain? I had to find a way to ensure that this person had some type of agency over my work. Researching individuals who have had to confront the popularization of their own image, I found Lily Chin’s How to survive a public faming: Understanding "The Spiciest Memelord" via the temporal dynamics of involuntary celebrification. One particular phrase from that work served as an important summation of what I was feeling, “…there is something inherently harmful about unasked-for public attention.”

Uncovering this woman’s identity, I found myself less willing to be experimental with her image. My imagined version of this woman was not and is not who she actually is in the world. There was a tension for me between the woman of the photo and the woman the photo was of. When collecting tens of thousands of iterations of the flag image, I again found myself forgetting about the person. I was focusing my attention on the flag content and literally could not see the person anymore. It was so easy to forget that she was real. It was in those moments that I would return to Lily Chin’s work and analysis of her own experience. My footsteps into this stranger’s life, this additional ‘unasked-for public attention’ were and are intrusive. What has fueled this work, in process and in project, is the need to ensure that that harm was being minimized.

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