Week 6: Midnight Shenanigans
Special thanks to Sarah Liriano, Yiting Liu and Helen Zegarra!! I mean, I’m truly not surprised; these ladies never fail to come up with the greatest ideas (can’t wait for your amazing thesis ideas to come to life!)
I finally got an idea that I actually don’t hate and the feedback I got from my girls improved it even more! The idea is to create a website to raise awareness on the freedom of the press, or lack thereof, in the form of mini games that will cover hard news.
For now, I’m thinking my website would consist of 3 things.
Mini games,
A “why” page,
An AR experience that I’ll elaborate on, later in this post.
Mini Games
I was thinking of making 4 mini games and they will include:
“Guess who published this article” quiz type of thing where I’ll get 3 different articles of the same news and let the user guess which country published it. I’ll also include statistics from https://rsf.org/en/ranking as a cheat sheet.
A ‘Put a finger down’ game to measure where your country stands on the freedom of the press spectrum: This is to mainly check each region’s privileges when it comes to having the freedom to express the truth in the news or the media. For example, one of the questions could be: put a finger down if the newspapers in your country can mention any negative or immoral things your leader has done and so on. This will be done using ml5 to detect the user’s hands through their webcams to actually have them interact and play the game the way we normally would if we were to meet in-person
(Or rather 2.0) Another cool version of the game above, is to have levers that the user can move to answer each of my questions for something to happen (tba), but the user wouldn’t know if it’s good or bad until the end. This will create suspense for the user and basically make them realize how much is at risk during this game. I hope that this mini-game makes the user feel more grateful for having the privilege of knowing what is going on around them and living in a place where the press could freely express the truth. My questions will be designed specifically to the things that are prohibited by law in different countries, and this will create the awareness i want to shed light on as to what liberties people have or don’t have when it comes to publishing news.
A prompt for the user to write an article, but it’ll have restraints and the user won’t be able to write specific words. This will give the user the experience of going through the same frustration most journalists feel whenever they write about scandalous topics in their countries.
‘Spot the real article’. There will be 2 articles presented to the user; one that was published in a less oppressed country with real facts, and the other would be from an oppressed publication where it contains fake facts to make their version of the story more believable, and this will measure how far a government can go by lying to cover their butts.
The Why Page
A “why” page to elaborate on this cause and wrap up this whole site to make sense of the games and the actual webpages. It’ll also explain why publishing political strategies is important.
Access to an AR Experience
An AR experience where you get to be an oppressed journalist looking for clues, BUT BEWARE, you might get killed for digging in too deep.
This experience would be available via scanning something on the website, OR basic physical items every household already has (like a spoon for example).
I think the features I’m planning to include on this website kinda answers most of the questions I had in one of my posts, which are:
Why is ‘freedom of the press’ important?
How to grab people’s attention to political news?
How to make news more relatable?
How to make news more interesting?
Why should I care about other countries?
Or rather, why should I care PERIOD
Any feedback is appreciated, especially the brutally honest ones