The project evolved into an immersive, exploratory digital environment, hesitantly termed a “video game” due to its intentional lack of conventional objectives. It encourages open-ended navigation and experimentation while making visible the limits built into any coded system. At times, control is stripped away entirely: the avatar gains agency, distorts its body, triggers unexpected dialogue, and even seizes camera control to look back at the player. Only after confronting the player with their own ASCII-rendered image is control returned, highlighting tensions between player authority and scripted autonomy.

This exploration builds on experiences with games like The Sims 3, where characters often misbehaved, walking into walls, refusing tasks, or altering routines unexpectedly. In Text Textures, such disruptions are intentional, emphasizing how avatars function as both puppet and puppeteer. The game’s customization interface, inspired by “Create-a-Sim” mechanics, complicates these dynamics further: players interact with mirrors to modify avatars, stretching and reshaping digital bodies. Yet, avatars may reject these new forms, declaring, “I’m not your toy to twist and stretch,” before walking off a ledge and killing themself, a scripted refusal written directly into the code.

Even this apparent “agency” is pre-scripted. It is important to delve into source code, since code itself reveals the ideological, biases and political assumptions of the developer. This is why I added the dome feature: to expose the underlying scripts, to show the biases inscribed by the developer, and to complicate the authority of the game’s surface aesthetics. Players who enter the dome can view the code driving behavior, including agency overrides and forced-suicide sequences:

The game is not confined to a screen. Instead, it is projected onto found, real-life objects in the exhibition space, deliberately distorting the physical world’s own textures. The projection wraps around uneven surfaces, merging the ASCII-coded digital imagery with the analog details of the objects it illuminates.