itch.io

Ooh, I get to check “convince a skeptic that hypnosis is real” off my list of goals I had for this thing! Sounds like you had quite the experience with it, it’s great to hear you responded so strongly.

Hypnosis is a real, well-studied effect, although the details are up for a lot of debate. There are a lot of ways to get hypnotic responses out of folks; nothing is reliable because it’s very dependent on how each individual person processes communication and information they receive, but to me it also feels like everything works, at least for someone, at least some of the time. Which is pretty consistent with the general consensus of current research – insofar as there is a consensus – which can be summarized as “everyone is alarmingly suggestible most of the time”.

Vacation uses a lot of conventional (and unconventional) techniques of suggestion. The primary thing that inspired it was realizing I could use the basic structure of an endless runner game to produce a “pattern break” structure. I also started thinking of how a game tutorial is a structure for getting folks to interactively follow instructions with the intent of learning how to automatically perform a task (to control a character in a game, you want to not be thinking about the controls all the time), and voluntary compliance is an important basis for rapport – so I wanted to see what I could build up from there.

It sounds like I built up quite the thing for you! I’m pretty sure that getting so hypnotized you can’t play the game is how you actually win, score be damned. I wanted to implement something to actually detect that and comment on it at the end-of-game screen but ran out of space in the Pico-8 cartridge and time in the game jam, although I should probably revisit it to see if I can cram it in anyway now that I’m not under time pressure.