Month: January 2024

Game: The Sriracha Game 

Players: 2-4

Target Audience: potential Sriracha consumers lol 

    And families with young(ish) children

The rules are simple: the deck is split evenly between players, face down. The person who loves sriracha the most (eye roll) goes first, placing a card face up on the table. The cards are either a food item (tacos, burgers, eggs, etc) or a sriracha card: sriracha cards have anywhere between 1 and 4 bottles on them. Moving quickly in a circle, players place cards in a pile in the middle, until either a pair or sandwich (a pair with an unmatching card in the middle) is achieved, at which point whoever slaps the pile first claims the cards- Or until a sriracha card is drawn. When a player puts down a sriracha card, the next player has to add cards to the pile in accordance with the number of bottles on the sriracha card- OR until they either play a pair, sandwich, or another sriracha card. If a player accidentally slaps a sriracha card, they have to give up two of their own cards. Whoever gets all the cards first wins. 

I probably won’t play this game a second time. The illustrations on the cards are adorable (very similar style to Sushi Go), but the whole thing just feels like a money-grab from Sriracha. I think I read the word ‘Sriracha’ like 400 times in the twenty minutes we played. It might be a little more dynamic with more than two players but I doubt we’ll pull it out again. I have a short attention span and generally love high-speed low-stakes games like this one, but there just wasn’t enough going on in the game to make it fun for more than a round. Or maybe we just bought a children’s game on accident.

Tools I currently have:

-Drawing 

-Patience

-Teaching- I ran the training and education program for at my previous job

-Management 

Tools I have that need development:

-Illustrator

-Figma

-Webflow

-Communication- I’ve struggled with group projects because I either promise to do something I don’t know how to do, or volunteer to do something I don’t have time for

-Organization

Tools I need:

-Photoshop

-Asking for help- growing up with undiagnosed ADHD, my biggest take-away from school was that at all costs I needed to pretend that I knew what was happening when I didn’t. I made up for lost time later but when I started the second grade, I didn’t know how to read. It took the entire first semester for even my parents to figure out that this was the case. My mission at the time was to keep anyone from knowing that I was struggling, because I thought it must be an internal failure. I eventually did learn to read (or did i?) but I don’t know if I ever fully outgrew the compulsion to pretend that I was learning at a normal pace alongside my peers. 

-everything?

This was my first time using AI image generation and I loved it. I didn’t get anything close to the image I had in mind when I started but that was what delighted me so much about it. It was like telling a four year old (with infinite skill) to draw what they thought my idea looked like. I chose the prompt, pet-friendly interstellar vacation. I wanted an astronaut and pet dog floating above the sun- the astronaut would be roasting a hot dog by the heat of the sun and the dog would be eagerly looking on. I realize this is a totally unsafe situation but a girl can dream.

My first prompt was “photo of an astronaut in space roasting a hot dog over the sun, with her pet dog who is also in a space suit,” which generated these results:

I tried to correct by adding more emphasis on the human in the picture with “photo of an astronaut and pet dog in space, dog and human wearing space suits, human roasting a hot dog over the sun:”

Gencraft didn’t seem to want to put two space suits in the picture (I found myself anthropomorphizing this product a lot) so I tried adding a bit more action to each character. My last, still unsuccessful prompt, was “photo of an astronautic a space suit roasting a hot dog over the sun pet dog in a space suit wants the hot dog.”

After three failed attempts I decided to try the Enhance Prompt option just to see what would happen, which changed the prompt to “A playful (((human astronaut in a sleek space suit))), with a (((hotdog roasting on a stick))) above the (((Sun))), with a (((curious pet dog in a miniature space suit))) eagerly looking on and wanting a bite.” While it didn’t deliver my desired results, I definitely got my favorite image from this one:

My experience is limited but I like Gencraft and will probably end up paying the $10 for a monthly subscription. I tried a couple others out before deciding to use Gencraft for this assignment and found it to be intuitive to use. It yielded, if not accurate results, generally realistic images. The Enhance Prompt option may still need work but in the mean time it may serve users like me by providing an idea of the kinds of keywords we should be inputting to fine-tune our results.

Note: something I hadn’t expected was, as I said earlier, how much I found myself anthropomorphizing. I don’t know how to describe it exactly, I don’t have the same reaction to AI chatbots. Asking it to generate something from my own thoughts and then seeing what it came up with felt like a game, and the responses, because they were so strange, felt playful and a little childish. My friend has a parakeet that, in playful moods, will whistle your tune back at you if you sing to it, sometimes adding a spontaneous addition at the end. It felt like that: like an interspecies- not communication- but interaction. For the record, I fully understand that this isn’t communication of any kind- but I’m sure I’m not the first person to have this experience. It’s a wild time to be alive.