Conducting Research for Game Design

This week’s task was conducting research for the design challenge. My research topic was how the personalization algorithms on social network sites are capable of the same impact felt by propaganda. I wanted to shed light on how social media is essentially helping you decide what to think on polarizing topics, more alarmingly in politics. 

The specific topic of the wellness to far-right conspiracy pipeline surprised me with how extensively it seems to have been researched and written about. The issue I faced then is that I didn’t really see an opportunity for gamification if I were to just focus on this one specific route that people go down. I needed to conduct research on at least one other corner of the internet. Early on, I decided for this other corner to be related to virtue signalling and how people are quicker to do it on the internet because they can be detached from their own mistakes and receive a false sense of morality. Unfortunately and surprisingly, I wasn’t able to find an academic article that investigates “virtue signalling” in terms of average consumers instead of corporations looking to profit. 

I realized I have this bad habit when writing research reports where I write an introduction before I even read the articles I have selected. So now I’m looking for the article to say something specific that will suit my need for it without taking in all the other information it provides —information that could potentially help me come up with a better premise and I just wouldn’t know ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. In hindsight I should’ve written about what I learned from the articles about companies virtue signalling for profit because I probably would have been able to connect the overarching point of curated feeds being as powerful as propaganda but instead I was too set on looking for specific phrases.

Thankfully I think I have a solid, in-scope, game idea regardless. A worry I have for it though is that I don’t know if I will cross a line and portray a harmful stereotype. The premise of the game is that the player will act as the algorithm and feed a user information in a digestible order that will eventually convince them into purchasing a product or service. If I don’t use existing pipelines, I risk making an assumption about what narratives people are susceptible to believing. But a way to avoid that risk is to just conduct more research before I think of details.