Stop & Think: Teaching Players About Media Manipulation in Headliner

[Music] hi welcome to the digital version of my talk stop and think teaching players about media manipulation and headliner my name is Erika Starsky and I'm the founder and creative director behind headliner and headliner avenues which will be a case study for this talk so jumping into it water games games at the core are about interaction I think that's their most unique feature while books can tell you something movies can show you something and appointments can make me feel something games are the only art form that can make you do something however when we talk about games and game design usually focus on things like engagement fun staying in the zone staying in a state of flow and the core most games have a simple goal keep players playing however here at unbound creations we have a slightly different goal water players to stop and introspect and really think about what the game is telling them and what their experiences can teach them of course

there's a lot of other games that achieved it very well aspect of the line is a great example that makes players comment turns with the atrocities of war gun home is also a bit of a narrative puzzle that just gives you enough information to get a glimpse of the story but ultimately it's up to you to be surfing together and the Walking Dead is one of my favorite examples it's one of those few games where I would literally spend five minutes tank my controller unable to make a decision because I was conflicted by the choices given but I wanted to give you another example that's made me appreciate the value of games interactivity some of you might have heard of a little game called vampire the masquerade bloodlines it's a first-person role-playing immersive sim kind of like Deus Ex or thief but you're a vampire in Los Angeles and you sneak around at night you do requests and sad side quests you uncover you know a grand scheme conspiracy and you bite people along the way when I started playing it

the game has to you what kind of entire clannish you want to be and I and willingly chose a mal kayvyun without realizing that in the methyls of them party masquerade that clan is basically insane I didn't realize that the game was actually rewritten and custom-designed for that to the Empire type with all the dialogue being slightly different random things happening like little whispers or a stop sign would talk at you there was one point where I was my virtual home watching television which kind of gives you a recap of the recent events somebody based on your actions in the game and at one point the anchor just looked straight at me and told me that the police is looking for a suspect and they know it was me and I just couldn't looked around and I realized oh my god I'm insane that was a very powerful realization for me that could only come from a game because all this time I thought I was excusing in my head rationalizing all those weird things happening and without realizing that I

basically hate have a mental endless in this game and all those things that I thought were normal actually were not it was a very shocking epiphany and taught me that games have a great power to make players come to organic realizations so with that let me talk about our game headliner and its sequel headliner avenues in headliner you play as a news editor every day you get a stack of articles you decide which ones get published which don't and then you work for the city you see how the city changes you learn about the characters and how their life is impacted by the media and you also see how it affects your own life and your own family someone described it once as the most realistic simulation of American mainstream media I've ever seen which is very flattering and kind of what we're going for some of you know how the game plays but what is the game about what was our goal we wanted to make a game that makes players understand how and why media is manipulated and questioned their own biases and more importantly we wanted to do it organically we didn't want to tell

the player what they should think we wanted the player to come to their own conclusions and kind of steer them into the right direction and spoiler this answer is much more complicated than just evil journalists trying to manipulate us for clicks and I think it's topic that's very relevant today where sometimes just by switching with channel you're watching it feels like we're living in two parallel the universe's and I strongly believe that if history is written by the victors then the present is written by the media and at the core the game is also a bit of a moral and ethical dilemma asking you what are you willing to do to get what you want because you can always get what you want but it always comes at a price this point I want to give you a bit of an example of how I feel we were able to deliver on the premise on that goal of making players stop and introspect I was watching a streamer Canadian streamer playing the game and I think about half an hour into the game there was a one of her co-workers was

having some health issues so she end up in a hospital and she was complaining about the system and that made the streamer reflect on her own experiences with nationalized health care in Canada and that made people in the audience also pitchin of their experiences from different countries from Europe and the US and basically the game was paused for good ten minutes as the streamer chatted with the audience and Owens chatted back just sharing experiences and introspecting about the pros and cons of various healthcare policies and decisions and their impressions which is exactly what we hope to evoke with this game we wanted to make players to stop and think and I think it was a very good moment - that illustrates that besides that we've also had some world impact likely our class our game has actually been used to teach a class and media literacy at the Pacific buddhist academy in hawaii and we've also talked to several other institutions about using it as a teaching tool we got a mention and Enki choir l a-- x philip defranco show which is a big news

youtuber kind of breaking the barrier of just being mentioned in gaming press we also recently got a feature in the Scottish Sun this game also been a case study for several other talks I've given at IG da events non-return Seattle Indies and Seattle attack commands it currently has a 95 percent positive user reviews on Steam its won a silver award at Ceres play conference best in a game of turkey game show we've been to indicate within two mini mega booth a few other events we actually also made a game more affordable and countries that have struggled really badly with misinformation and on social media and the news cycles such as the Philippines so we just bumped the price down as low as we could to make it really accessible pretty soon the game will also be featured at the Australian Centre for moving images and their exhibit about journalism and I'm mentioning that not just to brag about it but also to bring the fact that it's an example of how a game can preach non-gaming press and non gaming audience and it can really be something more than just pure

entertainment it can really go out there in the world and make other people reflect and question their own beliefs so how do we achieve that you kind of know our goal now you know the premise of the game but this talk is about creating those kind of experiences so let's jump into the development process we basically had eight pillars and constraints that I will now go through in order to give you an idea of why we did them and how we implemented them and what did is a desired outcome was and whether or not we achieved it so jumping straight in the first one picking important and relevant issues I think it's important to focus on things that are relevant to people's lives not only to draw them in but also to send messages that are relevant to today's life so how I did it is basically a lot of data mining there's been a lot of talk about using Facebook and Google to mine data and that's basically what I did and I didn't have to spend a dime or do anything that's illegal I just used

the ad planning tools to kind of put different issues to put in information for my target demographic and various criteria like hey people are interested in video games and maybe activism and then cross-reference that with different issues like LGBTQ rights or homelessness or immigration issues or healthcare and kind of gouge what which would be of those cards to get a rough rough estimate of how many people interested in those social issues are also using a lot of different synonyms or different qualifiers and of course it's not hard for some scientific it's nuts making out basis study on but it's a useful data point to go off of and was also interesting to see different trends locally versus nationally versus globally for example in Seattle there was a big push for homelessness but Global young us as a whole it wasn't as much of an issue and there were also different trends between Europe versus the u.s. at the time it

was also big refugee Syrian refugee crisis was a big talking point in Europe which was not as big of an issue in the US for example so it was definitely a very eye-opening experience even if ultimately just a data point not to put that it also collected some in-person interviews and that was me literally going to a coffee shop and going to run on people and asking them hey can I take a few minutes of your time to ask you a few questions and again those are very local so they're not broadly applicable but they were a bit more in-depth allowing to ask some follow-ups and get a bit more reasoning behind those choices after putting all that together and also taking this idea that I know I myself wanted to focus on I kind of pulled them into four main themes or categories that will be running out for the game and you didn't need the divisive nature of a lot of narrative and media in these days it was pretty easy to divide them into two sides of the same coin so for instance globalization and nationalism could be divided into closed versus open borders war versus diplomacy

healthcare it could be public versus private regulation versus free market and that lends itself really well to representing those issues and game proof news articles it was also important to make all those issues and all those stories believable so that involved looking at a lot of act existing news channels anywhere from CNN to MSNBC to yes even Fox News cannot to pick up on what it she's our being talked about how are they being talked about how are the headlines structured what is the first paragraph like since all the endgame articles are deliberately a little short so we kind of wanted to mimic that first i grabbing summary that most articles have so to give you an example there's one of the recurring themes is immigration and there's a lot of worries about you know immigrants coming in and being a threat to this society and a lot of those ideas and rhetoric is based on the things that we've seen in press and again it was an issue that's both important in the US with you know the caravan crisis and things like that as well as Europe with

aforementioned Syrian refugee crisis another example is minority discrimination especially the first game and some of the topics raised were whether that minorities certain minority group should have marriage rights which is kind of mimicking what has been going on the u.s. with LGBTQ and gay rights so that's an example of taking to have real-world issues and retrofitting them into the game and maybe of risk getting them a little bit which I will get to in a second so moving on to the next point which i think is also really important is that even though we're representing all those familiar issues I believe it's important to represent both sides fairly and accurately in a way that everyone can relate to because ultimately the bigger point is teaching about the media and not the specific issues if your game has a very clear agenda it's a pro or against immigration then people who do not agree with that will immediately be turned off those are the people who are in your target audience those are the

people who you want to help questions around beliefs we kind of wanted to lure players into following their own belief their own biases and seeing their far-reaching consequences as I previously mentioned that involved a lot of reading existing media and kind of getting an idea of what arguments for and against how are they being talked about I also looked at a lot of historical photograph from values protests so a lot of slogans a lot of catchy phrases we've kind of retrofitted into the game as well I've also looked at more direct sources where people are actually discussing those issues such as reddit Facebook groups kind of looking for the comments and seeing how are actual people not just news channels but how are actual people talking about those issues amongst each other what are they arguing for what are you arguing against and to give you an example the nationalized health care is I would look for what are the arguments for this issue what are their arguments against this issue and not just what I felt the arguments were but who the actual arguments are because it's very easy to build kind of like a straw man idea what

the opposition is but if you actually dig and you also see that there might be a lot of different concerns out there that you might have not considered and it's also part of the reason why there's a lot of communication between two sides I would also look fingers maybe scientific journals or maybe stats that back up either want to give it a little bit more legitimacy and maybe also replicate the kind of reporting that's being done on statistics which I will give you an example of later and that overall helps it make it more believable and genuine it allows us to show those effects more directly which I think it's critical to not just talk about those issues but have those be part of the gaming experience so for example with health care if you push for it and it gets accepted and there's a national program then your brother can now get therapy and he starts talking about a cognitive behavioral therapy terms so if anybody ever has gone through that it'll immediately find it relatable and he will find it more believable and genuine conversely your coworker is stuck maybe reading in hospital maybe they have a

long wait time maybe they can the treatment they want in time which is probably the number one complaint I've heard about national health care systems so again it's something that's people on that side will find immediately relatable and they'll be able to just roll with it and fall into the experience and kind of get that bigger message over time rather than being pushed away because they feel the games talking at them so again to give you an example I was watching another streamer this one from Brazil talking about the elections of polsa narrow and it was again talking about healthcare issues and if policies that the country was taking on so the chats started chatting about being neither pro or against some super supporters of the president some were against them and the game just provided that background for the discussion and it was nice is that it was a very civil discussion where people weren't jumping to each other's throats where people weren't being defensive because the game wasn't necessarily attacking them and I think not having that agenda just

created that ground where both sides fell they could equally relate to it and share their thoughts and feelings and experiences rather than one side feeling like they have to be on the defensive or no offensive so moving on I think it's also important to have a fictional setting rather than just copying the real world directly and if fictional setting acts as a little bit of a buffer that lets people distance themselves a little bit and also lets people fall into their own biases a little bit more easily versus if it's an actual issue they in real life they're gonna be much more guarded and it's gonna be harder for them to buy into the fantasy of pushing clickbait articles and pushing an agenda to give you an example the first game is set in a world where people are genetically modified to the point where the non-modified have become a marginalized minority there's only like 10% of them so there's this new narrative kind of similar today movie Gattaca

where people who are not genetically modified are seen as an inferior and being discriminated it's just a broader allegory for any kind of minority group rights and I mentioned earlier some parallels to LGBTQ movement so if we did use something like immigrant rides or LGBTQ I think people would immediately come strong feeling towards that and I think having this kind of a buffer helps people to fall down the rabbit hole more easily it just makes it easier for our game to encourage you to push little big articles because you know we're not advertising hey we should demonize this group in real life that you know it's just some fictional group that you know so yes go ahead demonize them you know we needed clique so we need the ratings just don't don't think about it just it's the part to do it for the number do it for the gram getting more and more extreme and ridiculous until hopefully they reach a point where they realized hey wait a minute this is just like this real life issue and I've been pushing all this horrible agenda that's basically inhuman oh crap maybe this is what's happening in real world and maybe

now I have to rethink that but even so even though we have everything fictional and kind of buffered a little bit we still had a lot of players who would say oh it's too soon or oh I don't want to think about those things when I play a game and frankly I don't know how to resolve that I don't know if maybe doing more of the buffer will be effective or maybe that would risk being too distant and players not being in that connection maybe it's an unsolvable problem and there will always be players who just want to turn your brain off when they play a game which is totally fine and you know I enjoy my team fortress to shooting people in the face as well it's something to be aware of that you won't be able to convince everyone that plays the game moving on now that we have our issues we have no agenda we have a nice buffered setting we still have to show the effect of the all those issues we have to humanize them and I like to do that through the characters in the narrative I don't think it's effectively game simply tells you more lessons it's better if a character in the game you care about tells you about them and it's even more effective what happens to them or to you directly and I

think one of my favorite examples is I was chatting with someone during an interview who was talking about heading an article that was basically a sponsored piece that they were contemplating whether they wants to publish or not they didn't agree with it but it would give them at a potentially a raise it's after contemplating for a few minutes they decided I am going to publish this because I need to feed my dog and I think it's a perfect example of why having kind of a human relatable things in the game helps you question your judgment a little bit more because it introduces the element of that personal bias that I think is often overlooked a lot in reporting and journalism and online conversations that you know we all come from different backgrounds we all have different things we care about and those influence our choices no matter how objective we try to be we always have people in our life who are affected by those issues and that'll affect our judgment as well so a good example is your brother who was an aspiring comedian but also struggling some mental issues and also struggling

with impostor syndrome and a lot of the policies you push for will affect him directly we wanted the player to really care about the brother and we try to make him be a part of your event game life he asks you about your job he asks you about your dating life if you end up dating one of that occurs he comes over to your place he played plays with your dog he cooks eat dinner so we do a lot to kind of read first of connection between you and the brother and there's a few times where he may open up to you about his issues and kind of have a very hard to heart conversation one a little trick I used early on is I've read psychological studies that for instance we do someone a small favor that actually makes you feel more favorable towards the person because your mind is rationalizing that hey if I did something nice to them this means I have to like them or they have to be a good person because I did them a favor so one of the first things redwood asks you is hey can you run to the store and get me some house.they acid because my anxiety is acting up and my stomach is feeling funky that kind of creates a little bit of a connection you have with the character but what was also

important is that the very next day when we meet the brother again he actually pays you back and a lot of players where she very surprised that he paid you back but in a pleasant way because it reinforces the idea that oh my brother is not going to rip me off he's reliable I can give him money and he's gonna give it back to me so they mainly established a level of trust as well another example is also your coworker she's also an immigrant and how you push the news will affect her directly if you push for a lot of xenophobia and her work status may be affected because she's still on just a work visa and she's also a character that is dateable so it creates another conflict of interest that hey maybe you want to pursue a relationship with her but you also have beliefs in your news that hurt her directly so again it creates that's a very real human conflict inside you that hopefully makes you realize that some policies may be hurtful to the people you care about and that a character is Rudy he's your local shopkeeper and a single father just

trying to provide for his little daughter and unlike your coworker he worries that all the foreign mega-corporation are going to come in and going to destroy his little business so he's again adults with the outer character and creating another layer of conflict and your actions will also affect his store which is also where you go to buy things for your house so if you basically destroy his little business then you can no longer buy the things you want for your house so that's also a way that affects you directly as a player even your boss who plays kind of a hardball and for external view because a few moments where he shows a little bit of a wicked weakness or personal character and as he keep playing you even she start to realize that he is such a hardball because it is genuinely a difficult business to be in and at the end of the day he just wants everybody have a job he wants everybody to get their checks paid so if you badmouth one of the sponsors and they pull out then suddenly everybody uses they lose their yearly bonuses and him because he can't provide for his team and I think it's important to have

a variety of characters so that wide variety of players can always find someone that can relate to your better Justin is something that I think a lot of indie devs or even YouTube creators or influencers can relate to as someone who's probably struggling with impostor syndrome and trying to be in the public eye then there's TV you know she's also an immigrant the chisels always struggling with some discrimination again that's something that probably a lot of people can relate to a rooted your shopkeeper he's a father figure so that's something a lot of parents could probably find themselves in so gives a lot of people someone to connect with and someone who they can really care and the root for for the game moving on to the next point having no good or bad outcomes only trade-offs is important for reinforcing the overall message I mentioned about not stoking at the players but helping players come to organic realizations for their own actions and by that I don't mean that it doesn't mean that that things won't happen it just that there isn't like if win or

lose condition it's not about being right or wrong it's about paying the price for what you want and always facing those trade-offs so in the first game that was actually very simple we have three main objectives your career your family or the society at large choose to one of them you can do really well in second will be kind of okay and the third one will just burn to the ground so it always force you into considering the trade-offs the new game headliner Nova news it's bigger and more complex so there's a lot more room for new ones so I would have a simple rule for every action there's an equal and opposite reaction aka no good deed goes unpunished so if one choice effects a character positively it would affect another character negatively and because we had three main issues and three main characters it was easy to create a little a very simple kind of a cascading matrix of alternating effects where every character was intertwined with another one and opposite ways it was just very simple and clean but also lends itself well to creating a lot of

friction and a player decision-making and that's what it helps us create a scenario where the players would have to that yes you can get what you want but how far you willing to go to get it what are you going to sacrifice in the process who are you going to throw under the bus and what other unintended consequences your choice might have however there's a word of caution here that I've learned psychologically we tend to perceive negative X much more strongly in positive effects so initially when everything was really balanced people still felt like they're lost they got what they wanted but because they felt the negative fix more strongly they still felt like they were losing we had to rebalance things and kind of ease things a little bit and exaggerate the positives downplay the negatives because I think there is a difference between feeling like you can't win or you always lose and it's a very fine line that we tried not to cross moving on to the next point and this is something that's now a little bit more specific to our game but it may be something useful to consider as you

design something similar or in this space replayability the game is about effective media and society so the best way to experience that is to see all the different ways the game could play out and all the different influences you could have as a news channel so played multiple times see all the different endings see all the different meanings so how do we achieve that first of all the game is deliberately short the first headliner was actually only 45 minutes long for a single playthrough which is also by the way a perfect length for like a class there's a lot of multiple parallel branchings each character has actually three to five different endings and they're not all necessarily mutually exclusive so you can kind of get a mix of different endings we also introduce new content on subsequent playthrough and have a little bit of four full braking similar to what the doki-doki literature club or near automata do it was definitely big inspiration during development for example when you start a game the whole intro sequence is different and it kind of alludes to a lady of parallel timelines when you start playing the

first day all the character conversations are completely rewritten they show a different side of the character and they all allude to this former previous headliner that maybe has done some bad things some communicates to the player that hey the game knows that I'm replaying it so I should expect something new I should expect there to be new experiences we also add a new character and make some minor gameplay changes and some different events to make that spin experience feel fresh we also play on the insider knowledge where now that the player kind of knows how roughly the story plays out he can prepare better for certain bad events that might come an example of this at one point your brother may end up in prison and I had a player who said the day before that happened they put a big couch and a bunch of furniture for their home so they didn't have the bail money anymore and they were just distraught that he couldn't get her brother out but now that her replaying it they notice this might happen so they're gonna be smart about saving up which leads us right to

the next point kill your NPCs because the game is meant to be replayed multiple times then we can just kill an NPC halfway through the game and it's okay we're missing for the rest of the game because the player is probably going to replay it now they can save it and uncover a whole new storyline maybe they miss the first time around and last it's a very unique feature we did is called a share your ending feature as I mentioned the each character has several different endings so when you beat the game you get a little five sentence summary of all your major outcomes and you have a chance to share that with the community and before you start the game you see the previous players ending so again it encourages you to replay game by seeing all the different potential outcomes there are and we've actually done this through Twitter so if you go to Twitter and search for the hashtag I am headliner - you're going to see all the different player endings and all different combinations we also kept this summaries a little bit vague so that they give you the sense of the possibilities without spoiling it away

honestly all this was difficult we probably rewrote the whole story maybe three times over and it was a lot of testing adjusting all throughout the process a lot of rewriting which is also part of the reason why I don't want to do voiceovers because the dialogue kept changing constantly a framework that kind of worked best for this is instead of having a single branching narrative what I did is I said each character is sort of having their own independence to realize that were interconnected through various issues in a dimension and kind of that's cascading matrix and also maybe at some points that would interact with one another for instance your date may come to your brother's comedy event if you invite her or Rudy may talk about your mother coming into your store drunk but mostly they were just separates tiny little small branching narratives which was much more manageable than like a giant massive tree and it also allowed us to create that effect of having different mix-and-match endings for the characters

which a lot of players that we've seen enjoyed kind of trying to game the system and trying to find sort of like the best combination of outcomes and because it's not entirely deterministic either and there's some wiggle room there's also a few cases we've got endings that I frankly didn't know was possible for instance in the first game there's a case where basically the whole city gets torn to the ground your daughter disappears into riots and then your wife says that she's content and happy with how things turned out and I didn't even know how the combination was possible I thought it wasn't but apparently somehow they did it and they sure they're ending of the comment saying like yep I married you sociopath so it was a fun little element of kind of an emergent gameplay that wasn't even unintended and again this system lent itself well to giving that possibility of that happening and now to share some funds that over half of the players that beat the game at least once beat it again

seven percent played it five times twenty percent share their ending and 85 percent of players adopted Dugger so moving on to the next pillar teaching by doing if we want the players to learn about media manipulation we have to make them manipulate some media so this is based on a number of techniques that I've either seen or read about being commonly used in media to kind of distort reality or push an agenda one of the most basic examples that we were all probably familiar with a statistical manipulation so using data to prove a point that maybe doesn't really prove that point if you under further scrutiny so one mechanic we have in the game is where you get two articles they are stapled together and you have to choose one the other will be rejected automatically so this way the game basically forces you into picking a side so at one point we use that to show how statistical manipulation works we had two articles that both cite the same study with the same number but they presented differently and draw a different conclusion one uses a fraction one is a percentage one talks about it

being really low the other talks about being too big and too impactful and I've seen a defense where people get to the point it will just nod their head and be like oh I see what's going on there hopefully that makes them but be a little bit more skeptical next time they see a number in paper and maybe they'll think twice about checking on hey what's the sample size or what's the inverse so the percentage mean is that really as bad as it sounds maybe it's just framed this way and that example is profiling every few days they'll get an article about a crime being committed and it'll either describe is being done by someone who's foreign-looking or maybe someone who look like a native and depending on which articles you publish will shape the opinion of people for example if you only publish articles talking about crimes committed by the foreigners then suddenly everybody on the street will think that only it's it's only foreigners committing crimes and we already see that so much especially around racial lines in the US and it's a

me that I really wanted to also showcase in the game and it's a little bit more subtle where it's not quite spelled out as much as the previous issue because we wanted to players again to organically notice that hey everyone is starting commenting about the media only talked about those kind of crimes being committed by these people oh crap maybe it's because of the articles I've been publishing but actually the number of articles for either side is equal so it really depends on how you frame it and which ones you decide to publish another common technique is repetition and lies of omission some of your boss constantly pushes you to you know stick to your same viewpoints keep pushing it further because merely being as exposed to the same idea over and over and over you start to believe it even subconsciously and if you think you don't so again that's a very powerful technique in media where just you just get steamrolled with certain information another example is escape which is something we see in media all the time whenever something bad or tragic happens there's always this need to pin the blame on something as the

saying goes there's nothing to fear but fear itself and there's nothing scarier than the unknown so we often jump to conclusions even when we don't have the full information an example of that in real world is the Cavanaugh kids thing which exploded overnight and a lot of people kept flip-flopping on who are they blaming and every day there was new information coming out there was a lot of online rage that even now hasn't gone away there's people who still haven't changed her mind even though there's contradictory information that came out because they made those initial impression because there was such a need to you know have a villain that people could just pin older hate on and that's something that happens in the game where there's some bad events that happen and your pressure to you know just choose someone as a culprit you know here's all the potential things we can blame just choose something we need to give people an answer there's also a third option that's not spelled out where you can actually not publish any of the articles and not blame anything and the game actually acknowledges that and your

brother if it makes comments that he's glad that for once we were taking the time to think rationally through this and gather information before we jump to conclusions another example is packaging bundling and hidden agendas where you're trying to push a story about something but maybe embedded in there's some kind of a hidden message that you haven't really noticed but it can kind of get subconsciously lodged in your head a real-world example we're seeing right now is when talking about carnivores I've seen some reporters referred to as the Chinese coin a virus just kind of a sneaky way of pinning the blame on China and spinning a little bit of us you know for big rhetorical another thing that you'll see in the game is government and financial pressures so whether it's government officials announcing his fake news or loading use the voice of the people or maybe your company struggling to stay afloat needing to sell out a little bit to get extra funding it's something that's very real and when I visited the Boston Globe at a journalism conference several months ago financing was one of the biggest concerns because

unfortunately ads on online articles don't pay the bills anymore which is why you're seeing a rise of things like BuzzFeed and clickbait articles because you have to draw their viewers in somehow and lastly now that you have all your issues we have them cleanly laid out in a fictional setting with no agendas he have relatable characters you have balanced trade offs you have reliability teaching clear system literacy don't forget to put the game in your game at the other day it's still a game and has to be engaging and fun to the player you want the players to stop and think but you still wanted to go back and keep playing afterwards and I think that's something that's still a little bit missing from social impact or educational games which focus a little bit too much on the teaching and not enough about enjoyment of the player and I feel that's finally changing a little bit in the recent years but it's something to keep in mind when you're trying to spread a message of awareness so how do we achieved it in our game well first of all you start with an

attractive art style and compelling story just to immediately draw a player in create a sense of mood and kind of stand out a little bit from other indie games I love the effects are accelerated or exaggerated because again it's a video game and not everybody wants to spend 50 hours and because it's also a game it's a little bit assumed that hey things are probably going to move a little bit unrealistic pace and also even though some people said the game moves too fast personally I like it is also not a layer of commentary about the pace of media these days how one day a tweet goes viral the next day everyone's retweeting it then the next day it's already in CNN and NBC and Fox News and the pace of information and internet outrage is just unprecedented nowadays so I do like how the game kind of mirrors that even though it's is even more extreme we added little nuggets of joy in the games things like you have your apartment you can decorate it or you can add up the dog and you can feed it treats you can play play with it and

every day digital nuggets of wisdom and it's not something that even really has an effect of the gameplay but it's a cool little something there that people can kind of feel relaxed and after all the stress and watching all those things on fall there's a little bit of a preview and something just nice to have and enjoy that's maybe not even real to the main game so the last thing is adding a bit of unintended consequences we don't we didn't want the game to be entirely predictable and deterministic every now and then you want to throw the player a little bit of a curveball a little bit of a plot twist just to keep it more engaging kind of keep them on their toes and make it more fun also for replaying when you know there's maybe different things could happen so that wraps up all the pillars and our constraints but before I finish this talk let me talk about a few things that we tried that didn't quite work maybe is a cautionary tale or maybe is something that you could try to make work in your game so first of all the spouse you hate and the original headliner you go for the sequence of choosing news articles

you walk and watching city change and at the end of the day you sit down with your family your spouse and your daughter and you have a dinner you chat you talk about the day and what's going on your life some of the original design your spouse was basically kind of the devil's advocate whatever you published she would always share opposite viewpoints to try to change your mind but the effect what a lot of players came out feeling like yeah my spouse's really mean they're never supportive of anything I do it always disagreeing with me and that was really clashing with the purpose of having the sequence and you caring about his characters when he always felt like they were attacking you so we in the end we ended up rewriting the spouse so that she has a firmer stance they have their own idea issues that they always stick to no matter what do you choose but also they are a bit more understanding and supportive so they may disagree with you but they're still gonna be there for you and be like well I trust you another example of the

thing that didn't quite work out is having little influence indicators on some articles we wanted to show how those articles would affect certain issues such as nationalism health care and show you how the public would react to it the problem with that was that in the corn headliner is a narrative experience it's about a story it's about the characters it's about making the world feel real it's not about numbers it's not min/max seeing resource-management so having those kind of indicators kind of gave me fighting the game a little bit more than we wanted to and ultimately we end up removing that however it's something that we she brought back in subsequent playthroughs as I mentioned about adding content when you replay the game because at that point players sort of experience the story they've experienced the characters so I thought it was kind of a nice treat to give them a little bit of a glimpse behind the scenes and maybe let them game the system a little bit at this point if they wanted to and I still think that's maybe an interesting idea for a different kind of a game that is

more nopperz to it then and there is a whole different commentary you could make about hey the content of the article doesn't matter as long as we get the numbers which is sort of what we're seeing with a lot of mobile game ads nowadays that don't look like the actual games that they are leading to you but that's another whole topic moving on to randomization initially we wanted the game to be much more procedural a little bit like a TDS around the world or rains where the storyline is more dynamic it's different every time the problem with that is when you have random events happening it's really hard to create a sense of a story arc so when players played the early alpha they felt like they just kind of jumped in the middle of things random things would happen and in the game would end and there was no star that was no really beginning it was no real sense of progression and it was harder for us to spend that message without having a clear story arc so we ended up scrapping a lot of that

randomization in favor of just traditional Star you but we still left some elements of randomization so maybe there's some events that may happen may not happen on a much smaller scale that aren't plot critical or maybe there's stuff that'll happen on 60 when play first that hasn't happened on the first playthrough now again adding to the replay value I still love that idea of creating something more procedural but just something that we didn't have time or funding to keep iterating over and it was just a safer bet to go back to linear storytelling for achieving our goal of teaching player about all this media manipulation stuff and lastly it's honestly been hard to keep a pro reality at times there's been a few cases where we would write a cenar or a plotline or an event and then a few months later we would basically watch a player in real life and we were initially criticized when the game released that oh this game is too dark it's and realistics would never happen in the real life and then it happened in real life and several months later and we're like well this was not meant to be

a guide that was really weird and ultimately whenever you're trying to make a commentary about real-world events or make a satire it may be difficult to do it properly when the world is getting crazier and crazier by the day and some of the things you thought were extreme are no longer extreme so in summary I think games can be a powerful medium for sharing ideas and organically brought any horizons simple balanced trade-offs can force players into difficult moral decisions that maybe make them question drawn beliefs I think it's important to make players Chaudron conclusions or turn talking at them and let just players follow their own biases let them do horrible things and let them see the repercussions because video games being interactive are the only medium that can make someone go oh my god what have I done myself what have my actions caused and I think that's a very powerful feeling to make you stop and introspect and that's something that only games can

truly achieve and I think this model can be applied to so many more issues that are relevant today Amazon warehouse working conditions we've actually made a short little game about that called fulfillment look it up on Steam you could talk about the first station pollution and environmentalism we could talk about automation effects on jobs in the coming years health care costs anti-government protests riots trade wars the ongoing pandemic online privacy propagation of misinformation on social networks which is something that I'm sort of prototyping right now addictiveness of games addictiveness social media online harassment trolling dog seeing there's so many topics that I think we can help people get a better understanding of and maybe be less toxic and less aggressive towards one another and all in discussion if we can help them organically see the other side and get a bigger picture and that about wraps up all my talk I hope the points were useful I hope you feel a

little bit inspired and normally I would ask if you have any questions but since this is a digital version then just feel free to tweet at me either at unbound creation which is our studio or directly at me at KU bazaar all the information is here right now and let's connect if you just want to bounce ideas or maybe you're working on something like this or maybe you have some comment to hear about how we could have done something better just ping me let's chat you know next time we're at an event let's meet up again thank you for listening to my talk and I hope you got something out of it bye