Social Media Daring Game
A live, two-player experience
Project Details
Tools: HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, Socket.io, Node.js, Express
Overview
This Daring Game is a 2 player experience that challenges users to complete dares of increasing difficulty in their social media accounts. This experience invites people to reconsider their attachment to their online personas (such as their Instagram and Facebook profiles) and also have a sense of how these have the potential to unconsciously frame their own identities. This game exists as an online website that 2 players can access at a time.
*if you play the game, please close the session as soon as you're done to allow other people to also enjoy the experience
How the Game Works
- The challenge:
1. Players are tasked with the challenge of completing 3 rounds of dares, all which have to
be done through their social media accounts.
2. For each round, players are given different dares. These dares start with a relatively low-
risk that then increases every round.
3. Players must complete the dares before the timer runs out. Initially, players have 1 minute
to finish the round, but the time also increases along with the dare’s difficulty after each
round.
- Each round, players have the following options:
1. Complete the dare
2. Not complete the dare
3. Swap dares with each other (can only be done once per round)
- After each round, players can also decide whether they want to continue with the game or if they would like to give up. Giving up requires the consent of both players, as the game requires 2 players in order to be finished.
- At the end of the game, both players are able to win a reward depending on how many dares they completed.
- If a player does not use any of the social media platforms listed, they cannot participate in the game and are instead prompted to read this documentation to have a sense of how the experience is like.
The first part of the game consists of inputting your name, selecting which social media platforms you use (in order to properly allocate dares) and finally reading the game instructions (click on the images to zoom in)
The Dares
At the beginning of the game, players are asked to submit which social media platforms they use. The options available are Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter, these being among the most popular. Each platform also contains 3 categories of dares: easy, medium, and hard, which correspond to the round the players are in. To allow for an interesting and varied experience per player, the game contains 3 possible dares per platform and per difficulty. Simply, there are 9 possible dares per platform, with 36 dares in total.
For example, these are some of the possible dares a player who only has Instagram could be challenged to do throughout the game:
Round 1 (Low-risk dares):
1. Unfollow 3 Instagram accounts and follow 3 new ones
2. Like your 5 most recent posts on Instagram.
3. Write a compliment in the comments section of the first person that appears on your
Instagram feed.
Round 2 (Medium-risk dares):
1. Like the 3 most recent posts of the first person that appears on your Instagram feed
2. Make a new Instagram post right now and advertise it in your story
3. Take 3 photos. Post them to your Instagram story (can't be to Close Friends).
Round 3 (High-risk dares):
1. Take a selfie and post it on Instagram with no context
2. Share the 3 most recent photos of yourself from your camera roll in your Instagram public
story
3. Reply to the first 3 stories on your Instagram
As can be seen, the lower risk challenges are quite trivial and can be easily completed, while the higher risk dares require some sort of spontaneity from the user, such as taking a selfie or photo and posting it instantly online. This increase in difficulty not only makes the game mechanics more interesting, but it also strives to subconsciously invite players to wonder why they are willing to do certain actions online over others and to think about how the different platforms invite different forms of risk and spontaneity as well.
The Rewards
This game’s reward is one of the main factors meant to prompt people to finish the 3 rounds. Initially, this reward was meant to be a series of stickers with the phrase “I share, therefore I am”, which for me encompasses the ethos of our society’s dependence and heavy use of social media. Due to complications with the sticker printing and along with social distancing guidelines, the medium of the reward shifted from being a sticker to it being a desktop background. Players are able to win this reward if they complete at least one of the dares. The number of dares they complete then determines how much of they can read of the phrase “I share, therefore I am”, as the words will be glitched otherwise. These are the possible rewards:
Additional Game Features
1. Dare swapping: the server keeps track of the dares each player gets and allows for players to swap dares once each round.
2. Giving up: in between each round, players can choose to give up and not complete the game. Once one player selects the “give up” option, the second player is given an alert asking that if they consent, they can also select “give up”. Once this is done, the game is completed and the players receive no rewards.
3. Idle period restart: if any session is inactive for more than 10 minutes, the player is given an alert to please close the tab. (Having more than 2 sessions at the same time would interfere with how the game works)
4. Player disconnect alert: if one player somehow disconnects (they accidentally close the tab or refresh) the second player will be given an alert stating that they should refresh the game and wait until the first player reconnects.
Additional Photographs:
