Pyschasthenia 3: Dupes is a Unity-based videogame art project that explores the hard problem of how we can retain awareness of the narrow-casted nature of our everyday lives in the face of ubiquitous data-collection, analysis, and digital remediation of everyday life. The game draws upon challenging workplace relationships and gamified assessment environments, revealing the ubiquity of data shadow construction, the erosion of personal privacy, and the amplified power of the external instantiation of an avatar self. Dupes is set in a dystopic, yet banal, workplace environment, where every interaction, whether in person
or online, is logged and judged against a series of internal evaluation factors. These success factors are in turn revealed at the end of the game in the form of a comprehensive Success Report, which resembles a credit report in its presentation and measures, and which forecasts what your ultimate workplace fate will be.
The seeming premise of the game is that you as the user must complete an HR personality test before the end of a game world workday. However, you are continually interrupted with other demands. Over the course of the day you visit the company shrink, attend a staff meeting, stop by the communal water cooler, and are summoned for a meeting with the boss, following by a dispiriting trudge back to your basement cube. During these side trips, your interactions with archetypal co-workers are secretly logged, the interactions themselves playing a critical part in building up your success
profile. Each character reflects a different workplace archetype: The Psychotic, The Artiste, The Narcissist, The Celebrity, The Sophist, The Bombast, The Charismatic, The Dominator, The Ingenue, The Shopper, the Sycophant, the Melancholic, and the Egoist. Interactions with each character reveals his or her core attributes, with your responses increasingly limited as the day goes on. During the endgame, these archetypal figures recombine into a modern-day tarot, augmenting and illuminating the success index ostensibly compiled from the formal test. The system reveals the characters representing your spiritual twin and your nemesis, with a numerical Success Index derived via the OCEAN Five Factors of Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism - but here re-imagined as Gullibility, Grinding, Glad-handing, Subjugation, and Internalization.
The revealed estrangement of the holistic individual from authentic human experience is predicated on the assumption that nothing within the workplace remains outside the evaluatory system. Human
indirection within the game reveals the extent to which a gamified, logged quotidian experience becomes subject to exploitation and summary judgements re-appropriated into an evaluatory matrix. Dupes also ultimately also complicates our ever-more-entangled relationships with computer mediated communication by positioning the user in the uneasy position of not being sure whether they themselves are only individuals playing a game, or if they are being logged and judged through their game interactions with a larger purpose in mind. The subject position of the user as a Dupe puts him or her back into the endless regression of surveillance and recuperation, making us as the game's creators also inherently complicit with the system.