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Writer's pictureTrey Carlson

We Become What We Behold: How Design Creates Story

We Become What We Behold is a game made by Nicky Case to teach the player how the media is both impacts, and is impacted by, the people who consume it. When you click play on the main menu, a quote misattributed to famous media philosopher Marshall Mcluhan pops up, then the game begins. At first the player only sees that their cursor has become a camera, the various uniform looking characters hopping around an open area and a screen in the center. But as the game continues more unique looking characters appear, followed by animals, fighting, and violence. If the player takes pictures of some of the uniform characters, nothing happens. But as they continue to take pictures of the unique events happening in the world, the characters become more effected by the pictures and proceed to behave more abnormally.

We Become What We Behold essentially takes the "embedded approach" to implementing educational concepts into games. By putting the player in the shoes of the media, rewarding them for producing inflammatory media, and then witnessing the population grow increasingly violent after witnessing the media, the player comes to understand the impact that the media has. And not only that, they also experience firsthand that more provocative media is more valuable. Therefore as the player continues to destroy this world and reap the benefits, they are secretly learning why the media is sensational in the real world. It is evident that the educational aim of the game was created first and that the design was created in order to compliment the main theme. We Become What We Behold is able to simply and effectively involve the player in the discussion about the media by providing them with an example of how it works rather than explaining it through text. In doing so, the player is left with strong evidence and can be very easily engaged in the material. I believe Nicky Case used the "embedded approach" masterfully to design this game.


Bibliography:

Kaufman, Geoff and Mary Flanagan. "A psychologically “embedded” approach to designing games for prosocial causes". 2015.

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ingramjk
Nov 17, 2019

I certainly hadn’t noticed the wrongly attributed quote at the beginning of the game. And if you are correct, it is appropriate that they decided to attribute it to a media philosopher due to the media related topic of the game. The concept of fake news within media has blown up recently and this (what I assume to be an intentional error) is a good way to characterize what we take for granted in the media. And if it were an unintentional error, it might even be a better way to characterize this. The pictures we see and the words we are told are taken as truth and we can characterize people such as the crazed square to be any…

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