Artist's Statement
A few
days ago, I started ranting about all of the ways that Facebook has the
potential to make life weird. I
continued to think about it in a broader sense and became very impassioned
about the way that the internet as a whole is abused in ways that affect
people's lives and I decided that misuse of the internet was the topic I wanted
to address in my Game for Change.
The
Half the Sky Movement takes a literal approach, which I think is a very
effective way of communicating its themes.
I decided to be more metaphorical.
Different monsters, robots, and pests represent the various perils that
many people inevitably encounter on the internet on a regular basis. The protagonist of the game has to defeat
these monsters that the internet is attacking him with.
Other
games address serious topics like racism and hate crime violence by giving the player
a choice. In Bioshock Infinite, the
player is handed a rock and must decide whether or not to help stone an
interracial couple for entertainment. It
is heavy stuff, and if works very well to get the point across. However, I think that the internet often does
not work that way. It is thrown at us
and we have to deal with it. How we deal
with it determines whether or not it destroys us. That may seem melodramatic, but I have had
too many experiences in my life and in the lives of those I am closest to that
have taught me the depth of that danger to down play it.
The
first level of my Game for Change is about the way that Facebook is misused. It seems comical, but I find the way that
people inappropriately broadcast the intimate details of their lives on public
social media more than just annoying. I
find it deeply troubling.
The
second level is about cyber bullying.
The vampire bats are symbolic of the hurt and the assaultiveness of that
experience. The ninja at the end of the
level represents the cyber bully himself.
The third
level deals with memes, reddit, YouTube, and that whole, massive, collection of
random pieces of media to be browsed through.
In my experience, those feeds are frequently mostly ignorant, disgusting, unkind, overtly
sexual, or otherwise inappropriate, with a few funny or interesting gems
interspersed. All of the rubble you have
to sort through to find those gems crowds your mind and desensitize you. I do not hate memes, gifs, or YouTube. I think they are potentially fantastic tools
that are all too easily and frequently misused in harmful ways.
The fourth
and final level of my game addresses pornography. I deliberately constructed that level so that
you would only see the "Not Safe for Work Sign," and not the gaping
hole in the ground. You just suddenly
fall through having followed that path of links, getting burned on the way down
to face a monster that is difficult, but very possible, to beat.
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