For U
#001A six-stage first-person experience about the emptiness algorithmic feeds leave behind — built so the participant recognises themselves as both victim and accomplice.
- Année
- 2026-ongoing
- date
- 2026.07 – Present
- dimension
- 1920×1080
- media
- Unity / C# / MCP-assisted development
- role
- Solo concept-to-production designer & technical artist
A — PREMISE
Short-video feeds run on borrowed pleasure. The reward lands inside a stimulus–response loop measured in seconds; the debt comes back, with interest, as emptiness the moment you stop. Byung-Chul Han calls it the erosion of deep attention; Anna Lembke describes the same drift as a pleasure–pain balance sliding toward pain.
Most anti-addiction work casts the user as a victim. This does not. The mechanism works because you feed it, swipe by swipe. It is built to put you in a Sartrean position: I could have not scrolled.
No horror vocabulary. The language is evacuation — desaturated colour, decaying feedback, muffled sound.
B — THE SIX STAGES
Stage Metaphor Mechanic
01Primal desire The origin of primal pleasure A first-person hand reaches for a banana — immediate, frictionless grasp and release. The first voluntary reach toward a stimulus.
02Blind faith Nietzsche’s death of God — the passive erosion of spiritual foundations In a prayer scene, the sacred object at the centre of devotion deforms and melts through a Dalí-like vertex deformation.
03Sisyphus loop Nietzschean eternal recurrence, Camusian absurdity A stone pushed along a closed path. Withdrawal from interaction is designed as one of the ways out of the loop.
04Burnout society Han’s self-exploitation and excessive positivity Mechanised keystrokes pile up office text. Under self-imposed pressure the participant accelerates until the environment physically collapses.
05Algorithmic feed Han’s hyperattention — deep attention eroded by information overload A corridor. As the addiction parameter climbs, wall imagery distorts and colour drains toward monochrome; audio degrades into ambient noise, then cuts to silence at a narrative threshold.
06Data reckoning The awakening of Sartrean accomplice consciousness The system aggregates the participant’s authentic behavioural trace from the first five stages, normalises it, and hangs it in the scene as spatialised data.
C — DATA RECKONING
Stage 6 shows you the residue of your own behaviour. That only works if the data is real.
The first implementation — built in an MCP-linked workflow between a language model and the Unity editor — looked finished and was fed by a random number generator with no connection to anything the participant had done. Placebo data, at the climax of a work whose whole argument is confronting an authentic trace of yourself.
I rejected it and redirected the pipeline to read the actual interaction frequencies from the preceding stages. In human–AI co-creation the designer’s job is not accepting generated code; it is staying the final arbiter of what the work means.
D — SEE IT IN ACTION
The full walkthrough, all six stages end to end.