Different people experience different levels of response to hypnotic suggestion. Getting hypnotized is a skill that can improve with practice, but there’s wide variance in baseline experiences. Different “kinds” of suggestion work in different ways – some people experience vivid hallucination very easily (and would feel the sun and the waves quite directly!) while others might be more susceptible to identity-play, amnesia effects, etc.

Clinical hypnotherapy research suggests that it is possible to induce an REM state in someone hypnotized with their eyes closed. But I’m not going to get that when the eyes are busy reading text! Vivid, dreamlike sensory hallucination is definitely possible under hypnosis for some folks, but I’ve only experienced it myself on a couple of occasions, and never with a prerecorded file of any sort, only in a live session when I was unusually responsive and my friend hypnotizing me was especially on point. I typically get effects much closer to vivid daydreaming, from a sensory perspective. Bending my motivations, desires, behavior, cognition, and memory is all easier – but it’s taken a while to get to that level of experiential susceptibility. Behavior is the easiest thing to elicit but folks rarely subjectively “feel” particularly hypnotized – one technique that I used but needed to lean into more is that of using behavioral suggestions to produce something that a subject will recognize more directly as an altered state; that’s what the bit about “you can’t look away when you try, which you should do” was about.

“Zoned out” is a light trance state. People used to focused work (software engineering, including game dev, is a notable example) are typically familiar enough with a state of focus that it takes a bit more work to persuade them that they’re hypnotized, since “focus” and “hypnosis” are such closely related states that hypnosis doesn’t feel unfamiliar enough. I tried to lean into avolition – acting without experiencing intent to do so – but that’s hard to emphasize in a short session, since the subjective experience is of just going along with the suggestions. I can do more with it directly. It’s hard to convert skills I’ve built around noticing how someone is reacting to being hypnotized and using that into a “prerecorded” context like this. Which is pretty common, which goes back to why prerecorded things usually work poorly for less-experienced subjects. My ambition with this was to see if I could make it more participatory in ways that would help produce stronger effects for less-experienced subjects, as well as use hypnotic techniques not typically attempted in a text form, but overall I think I got a pretty “normal” level of response out of folks, reading the comments here.

Maybe I should still be pretty satisfied with that – I got a “normal” level of response out of folks from my first hypnosis software, which I did in Pico-8 (not known for its suitability for this use), in a shorter form with a non-traditional induction. I’d like to do more, and I already have ideas for what a rewritten script could do better – and I do plan to write an alternate version with a totally new script, aimed at slightly different kinks, pushing harder into them to an extent I wouldn’t put in a game jam because it’d be more than the other developers were signing up for when agreeing to rate games. (Which is part of why this was on the lower-key end.)

It’s reasonable to be vigiliant about whether a hypnotic thing is appropriate for you – “check out the file first without going into trance” is common advice in the hypnokink community. That internal hypervigilance can definitely be headache-inducing – I’ve been there – and I don’t think it’s unreasonable at all to have a hard time handing over that level of trust to, in this case, a computer program written by a complete stranger. Vacation is roughly the same every time – word spawning in the arcade stages is partially randomized, but the other text is constant. (The arcade stage text is structured to be suggestive in ways that might not be apparent at first, so it is suggestive, but its themes are constant.) You can also open up the source (vacation.p8) to review the script, including the word lists, in its entirety. But that only does so much; I guess what I’m saying with this long rambling comment is that I think you’re having a very normal experience for any prerecorded Hypnosis Thing. My writing in the game about how vivid the experience would be is, in a word, optimistic – if I don’t try for it I’ll never push anyone’s experience that far, but (like a lot of hypnotic suggestion) it is very exaggerated relative to a reasonable expectation.

In writing the hypnotic script, I went out of my way to avoid referring to the Unseen Narrator as a character – no use of “I” or other reflexive pronouns – because I didn’t think I had space to develop a character people would feel connected to, but pointing it out like this makes it clear that was a straight-up error on my part; hypnosis depends on rapport and it’s easier to develop that rapport with someone.

I’m already planning a mod with a new script rewritten around different themes, based on the prior work of another regular participant in this jam, which would have a character-centric presentation, but it will also push harder into its kink themes. Writing for a game jam creates some odd constraints – I was leaning on “curiosity” and “openness to trying new things” as a core motivation to wanting to participate, because its content revolves around specific kinks I don’t expect the majority of folks to have! When writing a version that doesn’t need to be evaluated by 75 people who are, statistically, not likely to be into my specific thing, I can assume more personal interest and get much further into kink-related suggestions that, even with all the “only if it’s your thing” safeties in the world attached, I was unwilling to push into game jam content. I felt like going all the way to “this isn’t just about hypnosis abstractly or specific hypnokink aesthetics, this is literally designed to hypnotize you” was pushing the line far enough as it was; I was concerned (and still remain concerned, in all honesty) about consent issues with dragging people trying to just review 75 or 76 games into a more personal experience with hypnokink than they had intended to sign up for.

I’m sorry to hear about your cat – I hope they’re feeling better now.

I think it’s difficult to make the primary hypnotic content in “a hypnosis game” feel like they fit into the rest of the game in most circumstances; it has the most natural presentation in an adventure game with a first-person viewpoint, and this is most definitely not that…

So I swung for the fences on writing suggestions to merge them into the same state of flow, and tried to use the “two distinct modes” structure as a strength rather than a weakness. When using hypnosis to express concepts and kink other than the literal process of hypnosis itself, a hypnotist needs to find room for playing with the suggestions and altered state of consciousness they’ve induced, after getting them established in the first place. I think that’s hard to do in anything prerecorded, including a game, because with no feedback, how do you match the “play” portion to your subject’s attention span and the parts of the suggestions that resonated with them the most? Permissive phrasing and vague insinuation are the traditional tools here (for good reason; they’re also important elements of hypnotic suggestion in general!), but Vacation represents my experiment with a different approach: abandoning the structure of language and using words as items in and of themselves that the subject is using in an activity that has, itself, been associated with the hypnotic effects I intended to elicit.

Association gets stronger through repetition, so it doesn’t surprise me that the modes feel better-integrated later on, when the interplay between them feels more familiar. I also expect the mode alternation to produce fractionation effects and generally increasing hypnotic susceptibility, so the arcade portions get longer as I expect time loss / time dilation and extension-of-attention-span effects to be intensifying. Glad to hear the interaction between them worked out for you!