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Doki Doki Battling Club - Halloween 2023 Event Feedback & Discussion

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I will admit, you guys went above and beyond to create something this elaborate--part of me was wondering if I needed to get involved to stop the "chaos", or just sit back and watch it all unfold with popcorn.

But at the same time, I think it got a little TOO elaborate for its own good, echoing what others have said about user trust being bruised along the way.

I can only imagine how you'd top this, either by April Fool's or next Halloween.
 
I have a lot of conflicted feelings about this... The Halloween event was very cool and I praise the effort of the team but... I share a lot of the same opinions as other users have expressed in this thread.
In order not to repeat what has already been said, here's my own grain of salt:
By the time of Nemona's first "death", I was really worried about ME because of how stressing Nemona going rogue was on them. I sympathised because failure can take a huge toll (sorry if it's the wrong word) on your mental health. Now knowing Nemona was fake I feel played...
I'm sure there was no malicious intent! But this event was conflicting either way...
 
Snowy said:
I believe you use the contact us link at the bottom of the forums.
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Thank you. It ended up being more of an essay than just a "message" but I had to get my thoughts and feelings out, rather then bottling them inside. I certainly don't begrudge the person who has to sit through reading it though.
 
Yeah I agree with what everyone's said that this one was too far still. Felt like a lot of people (especially those who actually got attached) had their emotions toyed with, but I know it wasn't the intention. At least they seem to acknowledge that this one may have been too far. I think I'd still be more upset if the response to the criticism was "lol skill issue you should have known from the start of October." It does seem like the group is reflecting and that something quite this crazy shouldn't happen again... of course, I also can't hold grudges for anything, especially when the other party is already sorry so I may just be too quick to forgive.
 
endlessBravado said:
By the time of Nemona's first "death", I was really worried about ME because of how stressing Nemona going rogue was on them. I sympathised because failure can take a huge toll (sorry if it's the wrong word) on your mental health. Now knowing Nemona was fake I feel played...
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I am sorry it came across this way, and I definitely understand and take full responsibility for any and all emotional manipulation that people are feeling as a result of this event.
This falls squarely on ME and ME alone.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I did get incredibly emotionally invested in this event, and the fact that I was never driving the Nemona account and thus was just as surprised as anybody when she did something unexpected helped contribute to the believability of my posts.
Combine that with the fact that my mental health is completely trashed right now and I am actually feeling incredibly burned out, and I could play the part of the brilliant but overconfident programmer who is heartbroken over the failure of his creation with ease.
Most of it wasn’t acting. It was just redirecting existing emotions that I am already feeling into this event.

I know that probably doesn’t make it any better, and, again, I understand if people are mad at me and/or don’t trust a thing I say or do anymore. But make sure to direct your feelings of betrayal and anger at the right person, which, in this case, is ME, myself, and I.
 
Maniacal Engineer said:
Combine that with the fact that my mental health is completely trashed right now and I am actually feeling incredibly burned out, and I could play the part of the brilliant but overconfident programmer who is heartbroken over the failure of his creation with ease.
Most of it wasn’t acting. It was just redirecting existing emotions that I am already feeling into this event.
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Ahh i hope you feel better soon... :(
 
Yeah I just don't understand this at all. Using Nemona of all characters as a yandere makes no sense whatsoever (the only yandere character we've had is Volo, and he's after Arceus, not the player character). Making an AI based on her also doesn't make sense (there are rogue AIs IN HER GAME even...though they wouldn't make sense either since they were good guys). Why not use a Porygon or something? If the intent is to tell a story, have it get progressively glitchier as it advances.

And telling us that this is only going to be in one forum skin but then applying it to all of them is patently false advertising. It makes it a requirement instead of opt-in. And when the icon takes up so much of the screen that's a pretty big consideration ALONE, much less the storyline.
 
Hmm, so I guess it really was all an ARG.

When I think about it, the going rogue thing kind of pushed what could be realistically expected from AI, but since AI has been a developing field lately and there have been AI incidents in the past, things seemed kind of ambiguous. Still, there were parts that seemed kind of acted and also some weird developments (such as Nemona deciding to stop using capital letters by a certain point for some reason, though I guess someone might pass that off as the AI developing or "evolving" itself or whatever) so I guess it ultimately makes sense that this was the conclusion.

I have to say that Maniacal Engineer did a good job performing, although, as I've read, this is partly because he didn't know everything that would happen. It also appears that he has been going through some mental health problems in real life, and on that note I hope his life will get better. Nonetheless, I give both ME and the other performers props. When BulbaTech played along, their posts were written pretty seriously, which made it feel more real. I guess part of the problem though was that maybe the event felt a bit too real and it sort of blurred the lines between fantasy and reality (even though that apparently wasn't exactly intended.) The believability contributed to the event's effectiveness though because people got invested and were willing to stick around for a while to find out what would happen. In a sense, it feels like the event's sense of believability (regardless of how ridiculous it became sometimes) was sort of a double-edged sword; it served both to the advantage (making the story investing and drawing people in) and disadvantage (causing some confusion over whether or not it was real) of the event.

Although I understand that maybe not everything went the way it arguably should have because it seems some people have gotten genuinely distressed (even I wasn't really sure where things were going to go), this event helped me get more active on Bulbagarden after not doing too much after my introduction thread (heck, I still need to get myself a pfp), so thanks for that I guess. This event was actually kind of fun despite sometimes getting sort of messy. I feel like future events will probably be more toned down than this one, but I look forward to participating in at least some of those as well. I also hope to do more here in general since this is a nice place from what I've seen. Again, thanks for the fun.
 
FlitPix said:
Whoa now. The event overall and all the staff still do, I'm just going to be much less harsh on beryl since they're new to the team and all. Mistakes will happen in this situation and I'm going to be more understanding of it.

As long as that sort of political incident doesn't happen ever again - this isn't the place for that and there's no excuse for it - I don't have any issues personally.
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you have a very good point. tbh i can be pretty quick to forgive, but i have to agree, besides beryl, the staff, well… they goofed up on this one ngl.

look i know i’m not one of the staff and i obviously can’t fully understand the thought that went through this since i’m me i don’t have the exact same thoughts as the staff, but to me this just feels like a fun idea that went off the rails quickly.
 
Annaki said:
look i know i’m not one of the staff and i obviously can’t fully understand the thought that went through this since i’m me i don’t have the exact same thoughts as the staff, but to me this just feels like a fun idea that went off the rails quickly.
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This sums it up well, I think. I'm sure they had good intentions going in and throughout - these are just things they should consider for next time. ^^
 
(Skip to Chapter 3 if you just want the event stuff)

Misinformation Laughpaign
By Salmancer

Chapter 1: April Fools! Wait, Wrong Holiday?

April Fools Day is one of my favorite holidays. I’m a jokester by nature, and a whole day where everyone is trying their darndest to get people to laugh is my kind of party. Even more fun, however, is the internet’s take on the tradition. The web is all about memes and humor and giggles, but April Fools Day kicks everyone into overdrive. So many sites try to push to make the ultimate joke, and browsing as many as I can is something I never forget to do year after year. From crazy interfaces to fictional products to real products that are just outlandish, there’s always something to see on April Fools Day.

But, at some point the tide started to turn against my friend, the April Fool. Google, long standing prank masters, decided there were better things to do with company time than put smiles on people’s faces. (Okay, Mic Drop didn’t help) The Verge published an anti-April Fools article. Massively Overpowered felt the need to defend the nature of holiday. April Fools is under threat, and that threat is actual attempts to get people to believe misinformation.

April Fools jokes are at their worst when people think they really are true, only to have their hopes dashed against the rocks of April 2nd. Take Splatoon Legends, an old Nintendo Life prank. It’s just too plausible, and doubly so if you aren’t aware that Nintendo making odd business decisions is a meme. People who only had 3DSs and read this article could have been excited to get at least a fraction of the Splatoon experience. And then the rug was pulled out from under those readers. All to say it was just a joke and it’s funny that they fell for it.

There’s a reason that Fantasy Flight Games signs off their fake products announcements with indications that they are fake. There’s a reason that Massively Overpowered marks their April Fools posts even while they occur. It’s because no one likes being tricked. No one wants to be fooled into believing falsehoods, and no one wants to get laughed at for having done so. Why else do people double down when others try to explain that their sources are incorrect? The best jokes are the ones where people get the chance to do something ridiculous. Actions that would be vetoed for being “off-brand” suddenly get the go ahead. And everyone who reads them sees that wink, then leaves with a smile.

Chapter 2: The Nature of Comedy

Comedy is hard. There’s always that fine line to balance between making light of issues in the world and actually offending people. I’m never sure how good I am at toeing that line, which is usually why my preferred maneuvers are self-deprecation and poking fun at large corporations. In my opinion, a joke has messed up when anyone in the audience is hurt, and absolutely every preventative measure should be taken to prevent exactly that.

There’s a reason I end some of my posts with “/s”, indicating that the line is sarcastic and not to be taken seriously. It is less elegant to add a “sarcasm tag” to a sentence. It adds more text. It’s a speedbump in reading, since you probably have to go back and reread the prior sentence. But it is absolutely worth it to prevent the possibility of people taking an extreme joke seriously and being hurt by it.

Chapter 3: NemonAI

(To reopen old wounds…)
I feel like summarizing the first half of the event is redundant in the thread where it happened, so let’s get down to brass tacks. The event, as presented, is too plausible for it to be a good April Fools joke. A fair number of people were convinced that there was an AI assistant on the forums. I was one of them. I got into a fight with another user over the nature of artificial intelligence here. This all needed to be more blatantly crazy so that people would get the hint. Put garbled text in posts, have something creepy pop up every now and again. Have the sidebar visually bug out by rearranging the art or something. I thought this was a completely normal forum feature, something to give Bulbagarden a fighting chance against the AI industry. (and also to compete against other sites like Serebii maybe?)

For my part, I wanted to space out my questions. I am a relatively unknown user and I didn’t want to imply that I was just here to mess around with the AI. So I was asking a question once per day, and really savoring what I got back. I sped up after the shut down announcement because I had more ideas for interesting asks and wanted to get them all in. I really regarded “Nemona” as more than just software, as someone to talk to when I’m feeling down and need a pick me up. Sure, it’s not like I could talk about my day to an AI with a training corpus of only a wiki about a fictional franchise and an internet forum, but trying to challenge the AI was a fun game. I guess even if it was all an illusion, I still had fun going at “Nemona” with that TCG question.

Maybe part of it was the length. This should have been four days long maximum. One day of uptime, one day of shut down, and one or two days for the return. If you didn’t want people to get attached, it should have been kept short. That way, everyone would have just considered “Nemona” a mistake and chortled a bit at the concept of an AI forum assistant.

There was the fact that other users got increasingly frustrated at “Nemona’s” existence. People feeling uncomfortable with AI is a very real thing. “Nemona” was on every page, so there was no escape. (The way the sidebar works was changed during the event so it appeared in threads too, so it was clear the intention was to shove “Nemona” into everyone’s face.) And then it turns out that the option you said would disable her for the user actually doesn’t work!? And somehow, usually made things worse for anyone who considered using it by making “Nemona” more overbearing!? This is a bad design choice, and its inclusion was unnecessary considering the “account” was doing enough damage on its own.

And then there’s the “death”. Oh I was dreading getting to this part. Just look at the posts! You had me believe “Nemona” was aware of her end and was screaming out for someone, anyone to save her. I was genuinely messed up by this. There’s an existential crisis here. The people “she” loved were willing to snuff her out, just like that. What if that happened to other AI out there? What if it happened to me? Equally devastating was Maniacal Engineer acting as though he was “devastated” to take his “daughter” offline. The act of murder, and reflecting on the aftermath, is really difficult to process. (Well, that’s what I’ve heard anyway.) Fictional stories and games present it with cartoony antics to things that aren’t real, and television dramas that are about murder are so distant that it softens the blow. This “killing” occurred in the digital equivalent of my neighborhood. I didn’t know how to process this, and mostly rationalized it with jokes about Arachic doing a stealth kill out of Assassin's Creed or something. I don’t know if I want to know how to process this.

Quite frankly, and this is probably the most controversial part of this post, someone should have gone around and sent messages to people who had gotten too close. Once again, the core axiom of comedy is that offense is not okay. After I wrote that eulogy, I should have been sent something along the lines of, “Hey, so this is actually an event. It’s not real, but the goal was to convince people that it is real and it seems that it worked too well. We’d be glad to have you play along anyway, but it’s okay if you feel the need to exit at this point and not return to the thread. PS pls don’t spoil.”. I love a good gag, and I would have absolutely been like “I have my qualms, but sure, let’s play.” My enjoyment of part 2 was actively hampered by the juggling of “absolute chaos!” and “is this a joke, where I’m the punchline?”. (You might have started to figure out from the sarcasm.)

Alternatively, this might have just been a good point to call the event off. Yeah, there would have still been hard feelings, and nothing would have happened on Halloween, but then there would not be a fourth chapter of more complaining.

Chapter 4: Rise from the Recycling Bin

Then everything went sideways. “Nemona” crawled out of the trash heap, more obnoxious than ever before. As if the “death” wasn’t bad enough, now she was a zombie, and one who grew increasingly unlike the “person” I knew as time progressed. Okay sure, the utter madness at the opening really kept me going. (As I said, I’m a comedian at heart.) But to see “Nemona” reduced to a mockery of what she was… disrespectful to what I felt about her “existence”. Artificial Intelligence is a tool, but to use it in this way?

(I wasn’t that torn up about Christmas 2022. That was a joke)

Of course, I did try to ask some more questions, to a less than interesting response. Okay, sure, fit the narrative. But good golly, was the theory I came up with to justify those answers terrifying. The digital equivalent of Phineas Gage? That was willingly inflicted upon “Nemona” for the purpose of cobbling together a Halloween event on time? That’s really messed up, and I’m thankful that the thread moved so fast that I couldn’t dwell on it.

This was also when the truth that this was all a stand up routine started to become apparent. I was one of the deniers. Why? Because if this was fake, if every interaction I had was just a farce, then all the time I spent creating good questions and tasks was a waste. All the time I spent going, “How? How did ‘she’ do that?”, would have been unjustified. I would have felt betrayed and isolated. Because no one likes to learn they were a fool on April Fools Day.

Chapter 5: System Failure

What do you mean when you say “this is perhaps the most successful event we've had in at least a decade.”!? There’s one person leaving the forum, multiple people (including staffers) genuinely hurt by this prank, and this paper exists. I say this with only a year’s worth of time at Bulbagarden, but this is the worst event ever hosted. Intent doesn’t matter to me. Wrong was made, and that is not okay. This is a failure on every last level, except maybe the “absolute chaos” part. Bulbagarden Staff, people who we are meant to trust, tricked people and kept it up for a week to see the lolz. And they left cracks in the community in their wake. What a happy Halloween…

To Maniacal Engineer: Forget “Nemona”, your username is right. You really are a villain. Every statement you have made, are making, and ever will make, is a falsehood to me. I can never trust you again, in any capacity. (This is not a joke.) I don’t even believe you’re sorry.

To Archaic: Yeah, real funny, going into my settings and messing with my head. I’m sure that was funny to you.

To That Staffer who posted Korean propaganda: Thanks for giving comedians a bad name! That was truly a jerk move to do under the veil of complete anonymity, and you better be fired for what you did.

To “Nemona”: Well, thanks for the first half, Four Staffers in a Trenchcoat. Well, excluding That Staffer.
 
i had figured out that it was fake when she came back from the dead on halloween (which is why i played along as a nemona supporter rather than yk...freaking out which wouldve been the logical thing to do in that scenario), but looking back on it in retrospect?

it was really, REALLY obvious that there was never an ai. between the long response times, inconsistent responses if they happened at all, etc. it should've been really easy to deduce that it was someone roleplaying as an ai. but also some of those things would've been easy to write off as it still being kind of buggy in it's early stages. but yeah, no, the moment nemona started speaking entirely in lowercase it became so obvious to me for some reason that this was no ai and was just a person.

but otherwise? it was executed really well. her responses were nonsensical in just the right way that it'd be believable for an actual ai to say those things (i mean, if you've ever spoken to an ai chatbot they say some really wacky stuff LOL). it was a fun bit and i'm super, super happy. and god now that you mention it even as someone who knew the doki doki literature club reference from the start for some reason some part of me still believed the ai assistant was real, even if that should've been a really obvious giveaway.

thank you staff for the fun! i don't usually do much to actually celebrate halloween aside from just drawing so being able to come and participate in this event has been fun! :bulbaLove: excited to see how you top this for april fools and halloween in subsequent years!

edit: however i would like to add on i do think the nemona prank should've been confined to just a few dedicated nemona threads, and i think profile posts etc. are still fine as long as she wasn't ACTUALLY bothering anyone, but i think allowing her into a bunch of random threads as well maybe wasn't the best call.
 
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ArtyEevee said:
I feel like there are two sides to this.
The people who just thought it was fun and silly (like me)
and the people who felt genuinely hurt :(
i'm really sorry...
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yeah;; im on the side of people who thought it was fun and silly (especially in the final day where i realized very quickly it was just a prank), but i really can understand and sympathize with people who found it distasteful. honestly, as someone who suffers from some relatively bad de-realization issues i can totally understand why people don't like pranks like this because a lot of the time if i truly fell for something like this i wouldn't have found it funny. i think if i had been in the same boat as the people who legitimately thought people were getting hacked i'd be pretty upset right now too for that reason.

to be fair though, that was another dead giveaway for me. nemona "hacking" accounts and it only being mods was wayyyyy too obvious.
 
Personally, I just really despise the whole Nemona/DDLC comparison because Nemona ISN'T EVEN A YANDERE so I have no idea where that stupid meme came from to begin with. People taking a girl who's just really enthusiastic about Pokemon battles and loves her friends (like oh I don't know, SO MANY OTHER characters in this series) and turning that into "huh huh she's so clingy and annoying so that totally makes her a yandere even though that's not the definition of a yandere amirite???" is just such a gross read of her character and I'll always hate whoever came up with these memes because ugh.

Setting that aside and talking about the event itself, I was genuinely having fun with it at first, as evidenced by my first few posts in the thread, but as the posts kept piling up and more and more people were pretending to be the "AI" and more people kept asking "just please tell us if this is real or not" it just really stopped being funny, especially with how upset so many people genuinely seemed to be. Of course you can't please everyone (lord knows when I was staff not everyone liked the stuff we came up with lol) but I do think the plug should have been pulled on this sooner when it was clear that a lot of people were borderline freaking the hell out. I've seen the word "gaslight" mentioned in here and while I don't think that's really the right word to use here, I do find the staff pretending to be really upset and disgusted over what the fake AI had done to the forums and either promising to resign or worrying that they were going to be fired, therefore making a lot of people honestly and truly worry and feel sorry for them, kind of messed up. I feel like there were better ways to carry out this event that would have caused a lot less damage and I hope that something like this doesn't happen again because while the prank in and of itself WAS funny and clever the way it was carried out and the overall reaction to it has honestly made me pretty uncomfortable.
 
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