WEEK 3: A hundred ideas to one

Hi everyone! I’m Chris, the other programmer in the team. I like penguins. Now, for this week’s blog post!

Finally a post, and our poster!

The very nature of the topic of racism is amorphous.  There exist so many different perspectives and subtleties that vary depending on the society and context. As a result, we came up with many ideas that were each strong in a certain aspect. Sifting through them is akin to splitting hairs,  every idea has the potential to be great. After braving through arduous days of brainstorming and merging of ideas, we narrowed them down to four:

1. POV #1 – Interactive first-person video experience. Character gets to click on hovering icons when interacting with a person to read his or her thoughts.
2. POV #2 – You play as a journalist and are assigned to conduct interviews. In the interviews, you are able to select questions to ask the interviewee. Selecting certain questions will trigger an emotional response.
3. Mini games – A simple platform that serves multiple mini-games. These mini-games play on the racial stereotypes with aim of provoking the player’s thoughts.
4. Race changing – A game in which you have to overcome certain obstacles by changing your race.

We presented these ideas to our other teammates at the main CMU Campus, and under the direction of Professor Mike Christel, they gave us their opinions, listing down strengths and weaknesses of each idea. Towards the end, they rated the four ideas according to the following metrics:

1. Would undergraduates do it?
2. Does it meet the clients’ requirements?
3. Would you be able to contribute?
4. How well does it evoke empathy?

After collecting the responses, we went through another difficult round of discussion and distilled all the ideas and feedback into one single awesome idea:

The player will go through normal school events and interact with students from different races. As the player interacts, icons will appear that the player can click on. Clicking on them lets the player know what the other person’s thinking about. Based on this information, the player has to guess the other person’s emotions in a mini-game. Succeeding in this task will reward the player with an emotional flashback of the other person. This process repeats and the number of successes determine the ending.