Triple E Personality Test!

A fun new personality test for any person looking for more information on the human condition! Find out your type and discover a whole new side of people.

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Author's Statement

People stumbling into odd corners of the internet, discovering things that perhaps they shouldn’t have, finding that things are not how they seem—this is what sounds like fun to me. So, with respect to the games like imscared.exe, Doki Doki Literature Club, or the Watson-Scott Test, I decided to create a fake ‘personality test’ that performs another function entirely.

Through the very minor hints from the strange pops of text and red text, I hoped that the player might come to realize that the ‘test’ was in fact an entity—perhaps a digital AI—was gathering information on how to act human. I tried to leave its intentions ambiguous (hence the ‘friend’ question) yet clearly on a different moral plane, as it is by definition deceiving users into giving it more information.

The progression of questions is very fast because there are only about fifteen (not including the post-test questions), so there is not as much of the atmospheric build-up that I intended to create. Instead, players are suddenly thrust into uncomfortable questions halfway through both the ‘test’ and ‘survey’ sections. The contents of the questions themselves were completely self-written, though I did draw inspiration from clickbait personality tests, the Voigt-Kampff Test, and the Watson-Scott Test.

Every question that was written to be bizarre or uncomfortable for the player was also meant to become something for the player to reflect on later. By having a fabricated AI character probe into deeply personal hypotheticals with visceral consequences, as well as the player’s own trust and control over their devices and programs, this game forces the player to reconsider their initial assumptions of the game. This in particular is in no small part inspired by Sarah is Missing and Simulacra, both of which involve digital monsters or curses that cause harm to unsuspecting viewers.

Without a doubt, however, my game has shortcomings. Though with trial and error I was able to change the look of the test to some extent, the brevity of the game making it quick to playtest my progress, my own lack of knowledge and unfamiliarity with the resources made it difficult to implement features that I would have liked to have included, such as changes to the same text upon replay or upon selection of certain responses, and cursor tracking.

In addition, though I initially wanted to include unsettling sounds, I eventually decided against it, as it sounded somewhat cheap and melodramatic. Paradoxically, the lack of sound made the headphones message at the beginning of the game seem deceitful or even suspicious, which helps me with regard to building evidence for the player that the test is in fact a strange entity speaking to them, rather than static test questions.

With the conclusion of this project, I am still interested in the theme of an AI slowly (and perhaps accidentally) revealing itself and its true purpose to the player during the progression of a completely different task—in this case, a personality test. However, this is not limited to genre—see Loved, a platformer in which the tutorial text becomes an oppressive character. I think I would want to pursue creating more games like this in the future!