Posted September 22, 2023 by Lucy Coates
During the past two weeks, I was tasked with addressing a design challenge through a research report. The topic I had chosen to research was the dangers of misinformation from social media. From my findings I learned that social media is an excellent platform in order to distribute information across the world however this also causes misinformation to spread just as quickly. A lot of misinformation also gets generated during big events some events I looked at was the 2016 election where the use of misinformation by one of the candidates in order to cause mistrust for the opposing candidate as well as during the COVID-19 pandemic where misinformation about treatments like vaccines was widespread.
From this research, I will be going forward with a game proposal with the basic idea is the player will be playing as a king's advisor in a modern fantasy world. They will use social media in order to inform the king about the happenings in the kingdom and be able to help make informal decisions on new laws and choices for the kingdom. However, there are traps of misinformation possibly conflicting info that could spread maybe even people saying the king is actually evil. It will be the player's duty to confirm whether the information they are reading is correct or maybe they don't use social media and just become the puppeteer of the king and make whatever decisions they want.
Within the game, the player will have to worry about managing the food, money, and morale of the kingdom. Most likely with the less morale the more misinformation will pop up and could get bad as bad propaganda about the king. I am unsure of the full scope but these are the basic ideas I will be working off of.