The Prototype Barter

As an extension of the prototyping activities last week, we engaged in this bartering of the ‘designerly’ question with a classmate. It was an interesting opportunity for us to have a completely new set of opinions and a completely different prototype from someone who is not attached with our topic like we are. So, I too, bartered on my question and traded it with my classmate, Jackson.

Social Experiments — two very heavy concepts and I’d say systems in themselves. Firstly, (for my own understanding as much as yours) I want to briefly explain what social experiments really are in my own words with help of an example.

You play a prank; firstly on one or two people. You realize that it was a good prank and people who experienced it had something to gain from it (say laughter). So then, you decide to take this further and test with more and more people until you can find a pattern or the prank gets old. This is a social experiment. Now replace pranks with the the 1960s Stanley Milgram experiment or a scientific research or say, in our case, a game.

In the prototype Jackson himself made for his question, he’d designed the interface of a virtual reality game wherein people experience the real world and are placed with situations that they have to face (maybe wars or climate challenge or end of the world lalala). The action they take in that situation is judged by the artificially intelligent creature called the computer (or the game server) and they are then presented with insights about their actions. For eg., you ruin a whole forest to win against a country in the war and you are presented with alerts like “your own land will not survive because you ruined the forest.”

I decided to have a new take on this game while still continuing with the idea of battling climate change and this ‘insight’ giving feature of the game. What if a game itself could become the social experiment?

Parting with a virtual reality game, my prototype focused on creating this board game with a concept of Climate monopoly where the trees are the property and water is the money. Players go out on a conquest to win the most green or blue areas and effects of capitalism on climate were to be explored. The game itself can be designed in detail but here’s how the technology would work.

The board will be a digital tab having microchips/location bugs for every coordinate on the earth. The map displayed on it can be zoomed in to high resolution to view the real situation of that area on the board screen. The players can decide what action they want to take in that particular region and put a corresponding prop on the location bubble. The board collects this data for a server which then prompts the makers of this game to take the action (that the player took) in real life.For eg., plant a tree.

This enables the players to interact with the game in traditional methods while also utilizing technology to make this happen in real time rather than just on the virtual platform. Ofcourse there are many questions that would arise like who is going to be responsible to execute these actions or what sort of actions in the game can actually be executed, etc. This prototype just aims to give a new direction to the question not in terms of its concept building or role but towards the implementation and look and feel of it; in a way that would probably be more interactive, insightful and experiential for people.

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