johncutterdesign.com
John Cutter
  • Home
  • Bio
  • Games
  • Other Interests
  • Blog
  • Resume / CV

my Laptop might be racist

6/25/2015

0 Comments

 
Big Fish Games used to run a community games site, similar to EA's Pogo.com.  I was initially hired to Design and Produce games for this site, and one of my creations was a word search game called "Madame Libra":
Picture
The game never really caught on, but I still think it was a fun premise. Madame Libra was a gypsy fortune teller, so the game took place inside her crystal ball.  After players found all the words in the list she would choose 3 or 4 at random and generate a mad-lib style fortune using those words.

I wrote a tool in Excel that allowed me to build word lists for different "categories" (i.e. "action words", "animals", "places", "people", etc.)  Then on another sheet I could type in funny fortunes using this format:

You will slip on a [food] and fall into a giant vat of [food_plural].  A large [adjective] [animal] will lick you clean.

(This might create a fortune that looked like this: "You will slip on a kumquat and fall into a giant vat of chocolate pudding.  A large hairy lizard will lick you clean."

Everything was going great until a few days before launch. I was on the bus to work, adding some last minute fortunes, when I came up with this one:

You will travel to [place] and [action word] many [adjective] [animals]. 

Seems pretty safe, right? Figured it would generate fortunes like this:  "You will travel to Timbuktu and tickle many slippery zebras." Imagine my horror when I hit the "Generate Fortune" button and my lovely computer randomly generated THIS fortune:

"You will travel to Africa and capture many colorful humans!"

I literally gasped, and very nearly fell off my chair on the bus. Needless to say, I had to pour over all the word lists and look for other potential issues. (I found the word "hairy" in the adjective list and "clams" in the plural animals category... we had a lot of grandmothers playing so that was clearly a heart attack waiting to happen.)

I'm sure I didn't find everything, but I never heard about any complaints so I guess it worked out okay.

  
0 Comments

    Author

    Veterans in any industry tend to have lots of stories and I'm no exception. Here are a few of my favorites... and other ramblings.

    Archives

    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    February 2015
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013

    Categories

    All
    Celebrity
    Coding
    Design
    Family
    Game
    Psychology
    Robot
    Story

    RSS Feed

    View my profile on LinkedIn
© 2015 John Cutter, All Rights Reserved                                                                                                                                 The views expressed here are my own and do not represent any current or former employers