Guerrilla Gallery

When art is easy to generate, what happens to the artists? A narrative mini point-and-click game.

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Inspiration

Our project was inspired by the Guerrilla Girls, an activist group who looked to expose injustice in the art world. We were also inspired by the current rise in AI use, and how many artists works were stolen in order to train the AI generative image making.

What it does

To fit with the theme, we’ve looked to ‘Flip the script’ through changing the perspective at which you come across these problems. You play as a bored office employee looking to add some excitement into their life. You begin using AI image generation, trained off your friend's artwork, and post it online. You begin to gain traction on social media as your 'art' gets more popular, but you are unaware of the impact it has on the people around you. We used interactable objects to develop the worldbuilding, helping show the impact of AI on the real world. As you get to the end of the game, you can meet real artists and see their opinions on AI and the impact it has on their life. And how did it impact your friend..?

Long-form plot explanation You start as an employee in a dead-end office job. You’re bored, you want a way out. Your friend is an artist and is having a lot of success with their career, wouldn’t it be nice to have a taste of the fame? You learn very quickly that it’s not easy to draw well when you’ve only just started, seems like a dead end… But there’s a button in the corner, let’s see what this AI business is all about… From scrappy doodles to full blown masterpieces, you begin to create many AI generated ‘artworks’, all using your friend’s work as a model. Your posts gain traction online, and you finally get a taste of that fame that you’ve been looking for! But your friend doesn't seem to be doing so good.. You wait for them to come along to the gallery but they never show up. You can interact with artists and see how their life has been impacted by AI image generation. When you find them, you discover the severe impact the AI image generation has had on their life, they've lost their job through corporate culture shift to AI and loss of interactions on social media.

How we built it

Blood sweat and tears went into this. And many hiccups, literally. Ask Maddie. We used Phaser to code the game using javascript. All the drawings were done using Ibis PaintX.

Challenges we ran into

Within the first 12 hours, Maddie had persistent hiccups at least 4 times. GitHub did not always work in our favour and the UI at times was difficult to structure and organise.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that we have used this as an opportunity to have raised awareness of the Guerrilla Girls activism, what they stand for and how to fight for it. Additionally we want to raise awareness of the impact AI image generation is having on the artistic world. We used real statistics to highlight the significance of this, and found quotes from real artists in regards to how they feel about AI and the impact it’s had on their lives.

What we learned

Game development is hard. We all require early bedtimes. Sometimes a spillproof mug isnt spillproof. For some of us, Phaser was a new resource, so we learnt how to code in it on the fly. This meant expanding our knowledge base of javascript, which pushed us outside of our comfort zones. Some of us also dabbled our hand in digital art in order to help keep the work flowing when the pacing slowed down.

What's next for Guerrilla Gallery

We are looking to adapt the artstyle, so that it changes as the story progresses. We would like to develop more of the game, as we were only able to code the beginning scene with the time restrictions we had. We had a lot of good concept art that did not get to see the light of day in the game.

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