Doki Doki Battling Club - Halloween 2023 Event Feedback & Discussion

[ragnarokio]

take care greymon!

 

[Blackjack Gabbiani]

I thought Nemona was supposed to only show up on a specific theme. I don't HAVE that theme so I don't want her taking up so much of the screen. Why is she here?

 

[Storm Aurora]

There have been...developments. Someone else can explain better, but everything should go back to normal soon

 

[Salmancer]

I thought Nemona was supposed to only show up on a specific theme. I don't HAVE that theme so I don't want her taking up so much of the screen. Why is she here?

Things have indeed returned to normal, but as the Certified Nemona Scholar (tm), I can answer the question.

So, at the beginning, Nemona was indeed only supposed to show up in the Just Nemona style. However, it quickly became apparent that, as part of a seemingly glitchy behavior, the sidebar Nemona appeared on all styles. (Funnily enough, at the very start, you had to be on the default style. Changing to Just Nemona didn't allow Nemona to show up.) Ultimately, a later change that gave sidebar Nemona a Just Nemona colored textbox in all styles seemed to indicate that this was an intentional change.

For that matter, certain elements of Nemona's design suggest that the intent was always to have her appear on the sidebar. Namely, the fact sidebar Nemona switches to angry art and more negatively connotated statements when the Disable Nemona checkbox was active on the account. Obviously the idea was to gulit trip anyone who so much as dared to use Disable Nemona. If this is the case, then allowing said users to switch to a second style to avoid Nemona's wrath is counterintuitive. (As a side note, making options that do not have the effect their names imply was mean, Bulbagarden staff.)

After Nemona was shut down for the first time, the sidebar Nemona went away for all users, regardless of style. However, when Nemona made a surprise return for Halloween night, the sidebar Nemona reappeared for all users. For dramatic effect, the Disable Nemona checkbox was automattically flipped for all users so as to ensure sidebar Nemona used her angry mode. This better fit the tone of the event, with a vengeful Nemona returned from the dead out to force her order onto the forum.

Of course, with the whole thing having run it's course, the question remains: How much of Nemona was real, and how much was just a cruel joke played on everyone? Yes, I know of all people, I'm the one who was on Nemona the AI being real. Writing all this up has indicated that Nemona was programmed in some extremely counterintutitve ways, which only make sense in the context of Nemona being a short term "feature". Time will tell, as the official summary and post-mortem should be posted by Archaic in... lets say 12 hours. (I'm not part of staff, do not hold me to this.)

 

[Blackjack Gabbiani]

Look all I'm saying is that there are more suitable characters than Nemona to use for an event like this.

 

[Salmancer]

Hey, that makes three people! Maybe we can start a club.

Also, while we're at it, I think there's a certain other Nemona thread that needs locking. Unless we are going to use it as the Nemona memorial now that this thread is functionally unreadable, I see no value in having an introduction thread for a dead feature. That's like having an intro thread for a perma-banned user, except even sillier because Nemona can't read that thread anymore whereas a banned user can always browse without their account.

EDIT: Well that was fast.

 

[Herbizarre]

So... The AI stuff was fake this whole time.

I wasn't nearly as invested as everyone else on this event due to my other interests, so I didn't follow everything and only came in to check how things are going. Yesterday, I had seen people freaking out about Nemona being turned back on on her own, and I thought THIS was the whole prank all along. However, I had read a few posts from Maniacal Engineer (I hope they've gotten well) about how exhausted they were with the whole AI thing after Nemona was turned off, and due to my own interpretation, I was thinking whoever turned the AI back on did a mean-spirited joke towards the tired developers of Nemona, and I was actually going to post about it now until I found out everything was faked all along.

So here I am, wondering how I should feel about the whole event. I can't really say I truly had fun due to not having nearly enough interactions here and playing along, but I can't say I disliked it either, other than me believing what I thought the joke was was mean-spirited to the devs. I guess me having excessive amount of empathy towards others at times made me believe it was all real even when it wasn't. It would be like witnessing a social experiment and I'd be so invested that depending of said experiment, it could either end up in a heartwarming manner... Or in a disaster. But I digress.

One thing I know for sure though : this felt more like an April's Fool joke event than a Halloween one to me. I know there are people who are creeped out by how fast AI is learning to behave like humans, and that could have been enough to qualify as a Halloween joke. But to me, the whole prank felt too self-contained in its own thread to really warrant the horror factor, not to mention the lack of actual creepy things Nemona could have said to make me say "hol' up, this ain't right". As for the "Just Nemona" theme, I think more could have been done with it, but I don't know if there was enough development time to put in more ideas. I could have seen the theme becoming progressively glitchy, to the point where on the day of Halloween, Nemona would have eventually become Skynet incarnated.

Overall... I'd say it was an okay event. Efforts were clearly put into the prank to make it believable (oh boy did I actually believe it), but my own empathy towards the exhausted devs kinda ruined the immersion, so it's my own fault on that one. Sorry for the long post, and I know my opinion might not align with most others, but know that I appreciate what the devs have done as well as the users playing along with the prank, despite the fact it didn't hit the Halloween mark for me.

(Seriously though, is Maniacal Engineer okay ? I only looked through a few pages and I mist have missed them)

 

[Salmancer]

I am getting grumpier by the minute...

Check the old new style switcher for a new development. The Just Nemona Styles have new names. You'll find light mode as "Just Nemona! (Halloween 2023 - Phase 1)" and dark mode as "Just Nemona... (Halloween 2023 - Phase 2)" Thus officially confirming the "event" concept.


A) Shouldn't this have waited until after the official write up?
B) Oh, expect a novel length response...

 

[Archaic]

A bit less than 12 hours Salmancer, I was already starting to type things up when you posted earlier. But yes.... Bulbagarden's worst kept secret for the past month is finally out. As many of you had already guessed, our Halloween event for 2023 was Just Nemona. In some respects, this is perhaps the most successful event we've had in at least a decade. I can't remember the last time we saw a thread grow so large so quickly, and create such a large volume of user interaction. On the other hand, this event could've easily been a disaster if a few things had gone just a little differently, and there's certainly been some huge learning experiences for all the staff team involved in it, so I figure it's important that we all have a bit of a discussion and debrief, to let you all know what was going on, and to let you ask any questions you may have about what happened.


Just Nemona ended up being a surprising experiment of sorts, but not of an AI. Despite having not been part of our initial plans for this event at all, this turned into something of an experiment an immersive roleplaying event, the kind of which we've not really ever run on Bulba. Sure, we've had things like the Team Takeover events, which have involved Bulba staff roleplaying as various characters and interacting with users. Heck, the very first Team Rocket Takeover event, where I played Giovanni, is where I got this avatar that I've been associated with for the last 19 years or so now. But every time we've done one of those events, we've always been playing characters that were clearly fictional to everyone. This time, we were instead building a whole fictional world of sorts for users to interact in, in a manner more similar to an alternative reality game.

The original idea for this event came from none other than @Maniacal Engineer. Your observation wasn't far from the mark Herbizarre, since ME had actually originally suggested a Scarlet/Violet x Doki Doki Literature Club event back for April Fools, showing us the image you can see on the right that helped inspired the idea (I've put info about the artist in the alt text but I won't link their profiles here, since they've done some art that's not appropriate for our younger users). We'd all agreed that it seemed to better fit Halloween though, and no other ideas for a Halloween event really had any strong backing this year. A bunch of the ideas mentioned in ME's initial idea didn't really come about just due to time limitations, and the overlap with the Tech working on our Bulbapedia upgrade (which almost ended up getting incorporated into the event, hence certain posts by @BulbaTech earlier in the thread), but two of the core ideas did get fully implemented:

• A forum takeover featuring a forum skin
• The Livin' La Vida Nemona song that we released on the final day of the event, and huge props to everyone involved in creating that, including @Maniacal Engineer, @KelsiDavis, @DapperCody, @SuperSiriusXIII, and retired staff member @Rantaro - seriously, give this a watch people!

​

Initially, that forum skin was only going to involve the Nemona in the sidebar gradually becoming creepier and more insistent on battling with users, with a series of different artworks for Nemona as the event went on. Then, as a random throwaway line when ME asked if he should be changing his account over to pretend to be Nemona, I suggested that we should use a fresh account so I could present her as an AI helper instead. And... we just kind of ran with it. Less than 15 minutes later, I'd posted the announcement at the start of this thread, and things just spiraled out from there. And really, describing it as spiraling is quite appropriate, as things did quickly spiral out of even our control.

To be clear, Nemona was never an actual AI. At the beginning, when Nemona was only on the sidebar, that was just a cute image accompanied by a randomised bit of text from a list of canned quotes, with that list expanding every day or two as I added additional quotes to the list to make it seem like she was growing. Once we had an actual account for Nemona, the account was controlled by a rotating group of Bulba staff, who each brought their own crazy energy to the character. We had a few stumbles along the way with that (most notably the North Korean Propaganda incident), but with a bit of quick talking from yours truly about "spam influencing Nemona" (the true cause being more along the lines of an overenthusastic staff member on a probable sugar high), we were able to recover and move on.

What did surprise us was how many people did truly believe Nemona was real, and how deep of an attachment people seemed to form with Nemona. Between the Doki Doki Literature Club references and some of the claims we'd made about things Nemona seemed to do, we thought it'd be clearer all along that the Nemona AI was made up. For that matter, I kind of thought "launching a cutesy character in October" was already a pretty big giveaway. ^^; Of course, Nemona did actually do a few surprising things, which I can only put down to various staff members probably trolling each other in the context of the event. One time I even caught the sidebar Nemona turning up in an area I was 100% certain I hadn't enabled for her, even though the logs said I had. That certainly creeped me out, let me tell you! On a related note - Salmancer, I was the one who flipped your disable Nemona switch manually from the admin panel. You said something which I thought would've annoyed Nemona, so I wanted to flip things so you'd see the dark top banner and the Angy sidebar. This same trick was probably pulled on a few users over the past couple of days.

In the end though, I think our problem here was that Nemona was perhaps too believable. After the event had already started, I started trying out a few LLM models on my own computer, to get an idea of what they were actually capable of, and I was quite shocked at how well they could carry on a conversation. If I could do that on my own computer with consumer grade hardware, I could easily see why people might believe we could do something a bit more sophisticated with the sheer power of Bulba's servers behind it. (As a side note, I even found a Nemona character model that could be applied to any common LLM to turn it into a Nemona chatbot!) Perhaps we should've tried to push more of the horror elements earlier on, and tried to make things spookier (or perhaps campier, Scooby Doo style?), that might've made things better. But then that would've also posed its own problems, particularly in terms of staff availability to run the account. I think we were possibly also a little too reliant on the Doki Doki Literature Club references to carry things. We had a few people posting who'd clearly caught on to the idea (a couple of whom found their posts mysteriously vanishing because we felt they'd given away too much of the game too early - those posts will be restored soon so you can brag about how you knew all along!), but it seemed like those voices largely got drowned out until very late in the piece. I think we were also very hesitant to delve too deeply into the horror side of things at the end, simply because we'd seen how much of an emotional connection people had made to Nemona, and we were afraid that going full creepy could badly backfire.

But anyway... rather than just rambling on for hours, I think it's probably best if I cede the floor to any questions you might have. We'd love to hear all your feedback on this event, what you think worked well, what didn't, and what you'd like to see us do differently if we ever did something similar in the future.

 

[Greninjaman]

@Archaic
Several people (like beryllium) said they had their accounts hacked. Did that actually happen or was that part of the prank?

 

[Lone_Garurumon]

Nemona, or more accurately, "Four Staff Members In A Trench Coat Pretending To Be An AI". Kudos to those staffers playing the part of Nemona, as well. Y'all were a major backbone of the event, and without your dedication this wouldn't have really been possible.
And yeah, there's definitely some lessons to be had going forward, but from what I've seen it looks like a decent number of you were having a good time, hopefully?
Also full-disclosure, I was Greymon. I saw one of the Nemonaposters mention bringing a Digimon here to make friends, completely of their own accord, and had a stroke of brilliance. I hope y'all enjoyed that as well.

@Archaic
Several people (like beryllium) said they had their accounts hacked. Did that actually happen or was that part of the prank?

Don't worry, absolutely nobody got hacked. That was just people playing along with the bit of Nemona going mad with power and taking over the forums. No real language model could possibly do something like that.

 

[Archaic]

@Archaic
Several people (like beryllium) said they had their accounts hacked. Did that actually happen or was that part of the prank?

100% part of the prank. Every staff member made their own changes to their own accounts, and many of those staff members were themselves one of the people posting on the Nemona account. (A lot of the time when Nemona double-posted, it was because two separate staff members were writing posts at the same time without realising someone else was already replying.) For cases like Salmancer's, where an option was selected that they hadn't done themselves, that was an Admin

 

[MC.Princess]

i’m kinda conflicted on the event tbh.

on one hand it was a fun little halloween event that actually made me think about the issues with ai and helped me grow a bit closer to my fellow bulbagarden members.

on the other hand, i was also really worried about other peoples accounts and about ME, and now i just… idk, feel kinda betrayed?

but on the third hand, the idea of nemona getting progressively creepier similar to monika in ddlc (it shall never leave my head) over time sounded really cool.

regardless, if ya’ll had fun, that makes me happy either way.

sorry if was a bit of a debbie downer with this post btw

 

[Greninjaman]

100% part of the prank. Every staff member made their own changes to their own accounts, and many of those staff members were themselves one of the people posting on the Nemona account. (A lot of the time when Nemona double-posted, it was because two separate staff members were writing posts at the same time without realising someone else was already replying.) For cases like Salmancer's, where an option was selected that they hadn't done themselves, that was an Admin

I kind of figured that. There was a fanfic one-shot that @beryllium posted, and I asked if that was really them or whoever hacked their account, since I recall them acting as if their account was hacked by Nemona. They replied and said that, yes, it was them who wrote it (meaning they were never actually hacked). I never said anything afterward in order to not ruin the prank (sure I made some observations about what was going on, in this thread...).

 

[ZekromMahDad]

Wait so bery was never hacked by nemona

 

[Greninjaman]

Wait so bery was never hacked by nemona

Nope. In fact, there was never an AI. It was a rotating group of Bulbastaff members that were in control of the account. MEANING, all those mean and rude things you said towards Nemona were basically aimed at those people. I'm surprised you didn't get banned at any point.

 

[ZekromMahDad]

damn so what about those angry posts on my profile from nemona?

 

[Emmy]

So...Nemona has finally gone eh? Speaking of which, how does one go about deactivating their account?

 

[ExLight]

so not even the freakouts and it liking 400 posts were real huh :thisisfine:

I guess this explains why nemona had to "sleep" at times

 

[ZinnLav]

I may make a proper post later...

The short of it, is that I'm disgusted with the behaviour of staff.

You think it's okay to gaslight people?
You're also telling us that a staff member is responsible for all that North Korea propaganda stuff? Anyone else who would post that stuff "as a joke" would instantly get banned without an appeal.

Nemona made me uncomfortable from the start, I've had bad experiences with controlling people and Nemona is the exact type of clingy personality that puts me in a bad place. So when staff directed me to an option where I could disable her only to get insults hurled at me by "Nemona" for doing so made me even more uncomfortable.