
Playtesting They Are, a local multiplayer audio game about temptation by Yoctobit. Photo: Fernando Colode Rivera — en Medialab-Prado.

Playtesting They Are, a local multiplayer audio game about temptation by Yoctobit. Photo: Fernando Colode Rivera — en Medialab-Prado.

Playtesting They Are, a local multiplayer audio game about temptation by Yoctobit. Photo: Fernando Colode Rivera — en Medialab-Prado.
In a world of shades, do you dare to open your eyes? Tiny creatures are trying to exhort you with right and wrong advices. Will you follow their hints, or listen to your inner voice?
They Are is a local multiplayer audio game of intuition and reflexes, about temptation, inspired on Hieronymus Bosch’s fancies and imagery.
Although on his time Bosch’s paintings were well accepted as expressions of devotion, later on, the spanish Inquisition ticked them as heretic works.
From an ucronic (1) contextual starting point in which Bosch and spanish Inqusition clashed to each other, we will set up an experience in which players must find the balance between yielding to temptation and chasing other player’s weaknesses.
Through audio landscapes and spoken-voice characters the game provides enough sources to the player to create some enigmatically beautiful imagery and enjoy some sort of arcane experience. The action is driven by audio cues that come up from the mobile to each player’s headphones, but the game actually happens in the physical space out of the devices, and mainly in the players’ minds.
Although each player plays against everyone else, every decision the player takes could affect himself positively or negatively in the long term, because in THEY ARE fate is reversible.
(1) Alternate history. Logical reconstruction, applied to history, taking for granted events that did not happen, but that would have happened.