littlePuck

Summary:  A multi-platform approach to combating over-texting and sexting for mobile and social network platforms.

Year Completed: 2010
Game Genre: Educational Social Network Game 
Design Role(s): Mechanics Design, Creative Writer
Software Used:   Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft Word, Adobe Illustrator

Game Overview: littlePuck was designed in response to MTV’s 2010 “Redraw the Line Challenge”, a contest to find the best designs for fighting digital abuse amongst teenagers in the United States.  The core concept behind littlePuck is to collect the users’ data and then reflect their behaviors, based on that data, back to them using parody and analogy of their real life habits.  The end goal of this was to encourage more responsible and less addictive behavior from the users upon seeing the an avatar’s actions based on themselves.

The original concept evolved from a mixture of brainstormed ideas, one of which was my idea for a social network game that reflected users’ behavior based on data collected via their cell phones.  By downloading the application onto their phones and signing up for the game via Facebook, or a similar social network, the user would have an avatar of themselves existing within an isometric 3D High School world.  The behavior of their avatar would be based purely off the information collected from their phones.  An example of this behavior would be any user who used sexual terminology extensively in their texts would have their behavior reflected in their avatar who would act like an enthusiastic ‘horn dog’ to other “students” in their school, i.e. walking up to other students and making pelvic thrusts and disgusting the other students.

The idea of the high school was changed in the final product for a parody of the Facebook UI. This change was due to the design team’s hope to avoid seeming ‘preachy’ or so cartoony that a personal connection with the user was lost. By using the Facebook UI the user would feel a more personal connection to their avatar, as it would resemble their own personal social world.  The users would then associate the avatar’s behavior on its social network with their own preexisting social network and harness peer pressure to encourage more responsible behavior from them.