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!
Fake Project For Devlogs
| Status | Released |
| Author | KalenH_Sheridan |
More posts
- Devlog - 1 | Pre-ProductionJan 17, 2024
Comments
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I find the discoveries you mentioned very intriguing. It seems that social media is, in fact, a double-edged sword, capable of influencing people's psychology and behavior for better or worse. I'm really looking forward to seeing how you explore this in your game, which seems like it would require players to make moral decisions. Thanks for sharing your ideas, and I look forward to seeing further content of your game!
Hi Kalen! I must say your key points are quite convincing. Your careful selection of data and research papers shows a strong attention to detail. The idea of game mechanics intertwined with psychology and sociology sounds pretty intriguing. I'm really excited to see how the differences in data between "work" and "one's true inner self" will enhance the gaming experience for players. It'll be interesting to see how you represent the varied in-game reactions stemming from players' different choices.
Social media is so defined in our daily lives, it's great to research the negative aspects as well as the positive ones you mentioned. The last finding especially stood out to me since this is a time where any company, and individual person, and promote their products to essentially anyone (and can even target ads to people that fit their target audience). Modern Marketing is all about hooking people instantly with a product/ service, else they will skip the ad or scroll to the next video. Going off of that, it's great to see that your design idea will also focus on that aspect of social media and seeing it from the opposite side of a consumer (which is most of us).
I think it's interesting to mention how social media can actually be beneficial to a person's mental well-being. Including that would probably help highlight the importance of the negatives in comparison, as the project itself would come across as less preachy and more unbiased to players. The choice between being honest or keeping your job also seems very compelling!