Trigger Happy
Reality TV meets social gaming, but doesn’t click for Steven Poole
As if 2020 had not been bad enough, right towards the very end of it Facebook released an experiment in ‘interactive storytelling’ called Rival Peak. It was marketed (and obediently reported in the mainstream press) as an “AI”-driven cross of reality TV show and videogame, in which animated contestant characters competed to avoid being voted off by the human audience. What, in a way, could be more zeitgeisty? We had all binged our way through Selling Sunset on Netflix but little new reality content was being filmed during the plague year, for obvious reasons. Maybe artificial intelligence could plug the yawning gap in our lockeddown souls. I for one was thrilled to find out whether it could.
Happily, in a way, it turned out that no artificial intelligence was harmed during the making of this audiovisual product, since the bot-contestants exhibited no more acumen than the kind of NPC you’re supposed to protect on an escort mission who instead stands in a doorway in order to prevent you from shooting their attackers. Indeed, “AI” in this sense has not come very far since the fons et origo of all these sim games, Activision’s Little Computer People (1985), which was itself a gentle satire on the first reality TV shows in the 1970s.
What the virtual characters in Rival Peak do is wander around the forest trails where they are supposed to survive, and occasionally try to accomplish a task. They do this for eight hours a day, and earn points the more humans they get watching their particular follow-cam. Since recording hundreds of hours of spoken dialogue evidently wasn’t in the development budget, the characters don’t speak to one another when their paths cross, but just wave awkwardly or at best emit a pictographic speech bubble containing, say, a picture of a burger, while a horrible soft-rock loop plays in the background.
Of course, you’re not supposed to watch this all day, you’re meant to dip in and out.
When you log back in, the host helpfully keeps you up to date with the nondevelopments with what are supposedly text messages. How do you know they are text messages? Because each orange block of text literally starts with the word “(txt-msg)”, like real text messages don’t. There is some attempt to imply that the producers of the show (whose major plot points are scripted by writers) like to engineer conflict, but this idea has already been raised to gleeful heights of epic awfulness on the TV show Unreal.
No, what really marks Rival Peak out as something remarkable is the game part of it.
Imagine that the character you are following now has to put up a tent, and you as the player have to help her. What do you do? Why, you click quickly and repetitively on an on-screen circle until the progress ring has filled up. Yes, a full decade after Ian Bogost’s legendary Cow Clicker, a parody of all the worst aspects of social games, a Facebook game – sorry, “AI-driven experiment in interactive storytelling” – is still getting you to click meaninglessly on meaningless stuff. You couldn’t make it up, because if you were going to make up an ambitious new Facebook entertainment project, you would assume it would be somehow very compelling in an evil way, rather than simply spirit-crushingly boring.
Or is that the whole trick of Rival Peak? There’s no point criticising the developers, since they presumably delivered what Facebook wanted; the question is why Facebook wanted it in the first place. And one is driven to conclude that the epic levels of whimsical tedium are the whole point, as with FarmVille and all the rest: this isn’t meant to be an artwork in its own right but a cynical mechanism to keep people coming back to Facebook on a regular basis, only to get bored and click somewhere else on the website so that Facebook can then earn money for showing them adverts about how Donald Trump really won the election and vaccines will kill you.
To be scrupulously fair, as I write this column the show has been running for only a week out of its scheduled 12-week run, and for all I know in three months’ time, or even by the time you read this, it will have become a global cultural phenomenon that really does point the way towards the future of entertainment. If that turns out to be the case, I will of course take credit for being one of the OG fans whose patient repetitive clicking of a circle on a screen made it all happen, and deny I ever wrote this column.
One is driven to conclude that the epic levels of whimsical tedium are the whole point, as with FarmVille and all the rest
Steven Poole’s Trigger Happy 2.o is now available from Amazon. Visit him online at www.stevenpoole.net