We become what we behold is a simple game to grasp. Things happen on the screen, and the player must take pictures to immortalize what is the most interesting thing to happen. This starts out peacefully enough, with showing the fashion trend of hats coming into fruition. Then it leads towards more racist trends to cause conflicts between the circles and the squares. The story will not progress if the news is about peace, as the audience wants to learn more about the violent side of people and their tendencies.
As a society, laws dictate that everyone should be peaceful and live in harmony with each other. That is why laws against robbery and murder are the most obvious ones to exist. However, each person is then intrigued by violence due to it being foreign to their everyday lives. For a real life example, when there is an accident on the freeway, everyone slows down. This can be rationalized as 'for safety reasons,' but I believe this is just a convenient lie people tell themselves. People are inherently curious to see what happened. Was it a crash? Are the people OK, or are they brutally injured? This curiosity causes people to examine the scene. People seem almost excited by the idea that it could be a crash, even though it is a terrible thing to happen. However, the idea is so out of place for our everyday lives that we can not help but want to know that breaks the tediousness of everyday life.
This is the message We Become What We Behold. In the beginning, everyone lives in peace. Then someone with a hat appears. This breaks the status quo, and it becomes newsworthy. Then, there is a couple. In a land where everyone appears to be by themselves, this also breaks the status quo and becomes newsworthy. However, these happy feelings then become the status quo, and as such they are no longer newsworthy. The people do not want to hear about the status quo, they want something that breaks it. This leads to an exaggeration of the hateful treatment the circles and squares have towards each other. As this escalates, it breaks the status quo more and more, leading to more and more people becoming curious and accepting of these ideas. These ideas then make the audience feel attacked by the opposite side. This ends in violence.
Obviously, this is parodying modern news where it seems to incite hate against the people of Caucasian descent and of African descent. The news for the Caucasians tend to paint the people of African descent as being violent thugs. Meanwhile, the news for the people of African descent tend to paint Caucasians as people that abuse their power and want to keep people of African descent in the lower class. While there are examples of both being true, they tend to not reflect the entire population ever. Most people on both sides treat the other with respect. However, this news breaks the status quo, and thus it is reported.
Overall, I think We Become What We Behold is a great short game that brings across the message that news is highly impactful of people's perception of everyday life, even if the news it brings is not entirely accurate or blown out of proportion.
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