Facebowl

Carl, a major jerk
Alex, an impressionable kid
Evil Detective, a mysterious entity
Susan, a prickly conservative
Kat, a half-fledged adult

Inspiration

Our inspiration was the way Facebook often enacted quietly made decisions that allowed users' information to become less private. We were also inspired by a large variety of anecdotal examples of the power of surveillance capitalism; for example, when a teenage girl received pregnancy ads before she knew she was pregnant herself. As well as the time GameStation changed their Terms & Conditions so that the shopper gave away their soul.

What it does

It's a game! A social game. The players can search for good privacy measures, or be beaten by the dark pattern powers of Facebowl.

How we built it

Screens were built in Figma, then animated in After Effects in place of a prototype for demonstration.

Challenges we ran into

Narrowing our focus was difficult, since the idea of a social game could mean a number of different things and different methods of gameplay. Also, making sure the criteria that led to a win state was equal for both sides of the game was difficult, since it always seemed skewed to one side.

What we learned

Watching the introductory talks introduced us to dark patterns and defining the prevalence of them in our day-to-day lives. The ethics in privacy workshop was particularly enlightening in taking considerations of our users, and the messages, both implicit and explicit, we send with our work.

What's next for Facebowl

Like real-life social media, we would want to develop the advertisements more so that it would pertain to a very specific faucet of a user’s identity. Developing a variety of posts that might enter the news feed would lengthen the time period of each round and give further insight into each character.

The main select screen UI, a gamebook-like onboarding, and having informative losing and winning screens would be the next components to work on as well.