Over the break I gained some experience programming in Unity, and spent some time designing a new project. I decided that with this new assignment, I would put those extra skills to use saving me time implementing the project, and instead start with a lengthy design and research process. I want this project to better reflect the polish I am capable of as a designer and programmer, and my love for designing simple mechanics from real world systems, aesthetics, and concepts.
My initial instinct as someone who closely accompanies American politics, was to attempt to create a game that reflects the recent perceived shift in conversation towards more conservative and far right talking points, as well as draw upon my own experience falling a short way down the online “Alt Right Rabbit Hole” as a young teen (1).
While I don’t believe I ever “Took The Red Pill”, in early to mid teens I began to fall into a vortex of crypto-conservative channels. Initially, I was introduced to this community through Anti-Theist channels; mainly ones who debunked or ridiculed theist claims and beliefs that science proves the existence of god, thought experiments that proved the existence of god, and by far the most common evolution sceptics. These were a fun pastime for me as they aligned with my beliefs and had the aesthetic of a calm and reasonable personality, ridiculing and demolishing arguments from, I would still say, relatively harmful Christian creators like Kent Hovind, and Josh Feuerstein, who spread hateful and/or misleading information.
Unfortunately, these channels were either caught in, or “Front Men” for the GamerGate movement, and began to produce a wave of Anti-feminist content. I believe that both a genuine inability to grapple with the distinction between “pop feminism” from channels like Buzzfeed (2) and feminist theory as well as the YouTube algorithm at the time heavily recommending this type of content led a group of my favourite creators to start pumping out this content, and at the time I loved it.
While some of these channels, in my eyes at least, are produced by well meaning people, who later abandoned the trend to return to their usual style of content, others tended further and further right (at least in my eyes, but others were just not expressing their true views) and while I like to believe I was incapable of being truly radicalised, I still felt like part of a community with these channels.
To cut a long story short, from what I remember I began to crawl out of this rabbit hole through left wing creators, now collectively known as “Bread Tube” though some might not like the label. Their content was persuasive, and some was very similar to the content I was used to with Debunking and Response videos, this time aimed at the channels I was watching at the time.
I say all this to better define why I wanted to address this topic, as many of the channels I used to watch are still creating their content, have radicalised further, and the “Alt Right Rabbit Hole” went far deeper than I imagined.
Instead of the usual long ideation period I have when approaching a new project, I already knew the topic I wanted to address and had an idea of the style and presentation I wanted to go for.
Concept
I wanted to make a game that could address a political topic, and I knew that my favourite approach for this was to utilise the oft misused concept of LudoNarrative Dissonance to create a game where the objective presented to the player, diverged from the “common sense” correct or morally preferable choices.
I began by designing the game from the perspective of someone already in the Alt Right community, but felt uncomfortable humanising the views that they commonly express by forcing a player to inhabit that headspace, so instead decided to set the game from the perspective of A Content Creator with generally liberal views.
The core parts of the game I wanted to include were:
- Internet Comments
- Options for managing these internet comments: Like, Reply, Delete…
- “Discussions” emerging from replies
- An option to leave the game at any time (disable comments button)
I also wanted to have a fairly light-hearted tone for the game, to contrast with the potentially heavy subject matter. Part of what makes comments from Alt Right channels easier to design around, in my opinion, is that reading them under creator’s videos that they flock to harass, they seem repetitive and cartoonish at times, and tend to have similar “Slogans” and talking points when attempting to respond to more thoughtful content.
I’m now doing more extensive research, hoping to better understand my younger self as well as the sphere of information and communities that I am attempting to emulate.
References
1. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/08/technology/youtube-radical.html
2. 36 Questions Women Have For Men – Buzzfeed