Taboo for a new generation
As a youth, I became temporarily obsessed with an early Rare title for the NES called Taboo. It was a simple fortune telling game that used virtual Tarot cards to predict your future, but it inspired a deep level of fascination within me and my friends. If this game existed, it must have some purpose, right? There must be some meaning we could squeeze out of it, some understanding that we could eke out of its code. If there was method to its madness, and we could come to understand that method, maybe we would understand what adults thought was important, and then figure out a way to outsmart them forever.
That lasted about a week before we gave up. If we had something like #Fortune back then, we may have never given up. #Fortune‘s creator Zach Gage (SpellTower, Ridiculous Fishing) probably knows what I mean. He’s been playing the game himself since 2013, when it first manifested as physical instillation piece. It was a follow up to Best Day Ever, a bot account that Gage had designed in 2009 to aggregate pure positivity from Twitter. #Fortune was also a bot, but instead of positivity, it worked to use Twitter to predict your future.
What appears to be a random set of daily message at may start to reveal some interconnected meaning over time, or it just might make you laugh to read a distorted picture of your future as crafted by your present online persona. As Gage puts it “Who we are online is often a carefully crafted version of who we want to be. Tweets might be like mantras, tiny self-fulfilling prophesies… Or they might just be little lies we tell ourselves. #Fortune is both.”
Published: Feb 5, 2015 10:00 pm