Devlog - 1 | Research

Hi everyone!

For my research, I mainly focused on how social media can affect someone’s psychology and behaviour. I was primarily looking for articles and papers that had observations rather than raw data, that way I could better empathize with the participants of the studies looked at. It wasn't easy to find articles that mostly talked about observations, since a lot of social media research can be simplified down to numbers and statistics. So most of what I looked at was phycology journals, marketing, and papers related to how people interact with technology. From my results, I was able to find a few key points: 

— Social media can better an individual’s mental well-being. 

— Excessive use of social media can have a strong negative impact on one’s behaviour and psychological well-being. 

— Social Media has the power to directly influence a person’s behaviour and empower them. 

— Using social media as a tool to aid in building relationships allows for people to have an improved quality of life. 

— Social media brands and corporations can have unique control over their consumers through engagement on social media. 

Overall, there are definitely a few things that can be brought up in a game, both in narrative and through mechanics. The main idea I will be going forward with for the game pitch is a game where you are a social media manager at a big corporate company. In short, the player would have to balance being honest about a product and keeping their job. The game would absolutely lean into consumerism, corporatism, and overall dystopia similar to IP's like Cyberpunk and Fallout.

Thanks for reading!