Bellum
World Game | Fall 2020
Bellum is a story based strategy/puzzle game I designed during my undergraduate study. The game highlights the societal problem of fake news and how misinformation spreads and polarizes different groups, obliterating the very fabric of society.
Group Project Game Design
Yutao Huang, Indrashish Dutta Roy
Deliverables
A story based strategy/puzzle game with a core mechanism of planting fake news and misleading the public
Time Span
2 Months
Team
Yutao Huang
Indrashish Dutta Roy
My Impact
01
Researched over the impact of fake news and mechanisms that are efficient in communicating social dilemmas.
02
Created the concept of the game and mapped out the Interface.
03
Created art and cutscenes for the game.
04
Designed the narrative of the game with my teammate.
Inspiration
A 29-year-old North Carolina man who fired a military-style assault rifle inside a popular Washington pizzeria in December 2016, wrongly believing he was saving children trapped in a sex-slave ring.
Fake News and the Social Dilemma
The Democracy Dilemma
The Mental Health Dilemma
The Discrimination Dilemma
The # of countries with political disinformation campaigns on social media doubled in the past 2 years
A 5,000 person study found that higher social media use correlated with self-reported declines in mental and physical health and life satisfaction.
64% of the people who joined extremist groups on Facebook did so because the algorithms steered them there.
NEW YORK TIMES, 2019
AMERICAN JOURNAL OF EPIDEMIOLOGY 2017
INTERNAL FACEBOOK REPORT, 2018
Mood Board
Project Goals
Showing how innocent group chats can be turned into extremist groups with just a bombardment of information
1
Should tackle information sharing and its effects in a personal level not just over world information
2
Demonstrate real life consequences of the said issues and how something harmless online can be catastrophic in Real life
3
Most importantly, it has to be a story driven game.
Concept Sketching
UI Mapping
Stage requirements
Some References
Game Development
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Final Outcome
