The Making of Dystocity: Job Hunt: An Interactive Meditation on Hyperconnectivity and its Discontents

Bao, Fangtai

Etd

The Making of Dystocity: Job Hunt: An Interactive Meditation on Hyperconnectivity and its Discontents

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Dystocity: Job Hunt is an interactive, choice-driven serious game that delves into the potential impact of social media applications used in everyday life, and in particular, their potential harms when going through job interviews in an age of hyperconnectivity. It was initially created as a teaching tool for Professor Yunus Telliel's Technology Ethics classes, and later developed for use by all STEM-related graduate students. Doubling as a learning tool and an interactive experience, the game encourages players to not only make their own choices in order to reach diverse possible endings, but also to gain insight into topics such as the fear of missing out (FOMO) in social media and social media screening resulting from third-party platforms sharing private information using users’ digital footprints. The primary goal of Dystocity: Job Hunt is to highlight the ethical challenges posed by social media in a digital hyperconnected world. It does so by introducing numerous moral dilemmas through the gameplay and permits the choices made to result in distinct endings, providing players with a broader perspective on relevant digital ethics concerns. The development of this interactive fiction involved a cycle of iterative prototyping and playtesting. Evaluation of test data and user survey results indicated opportunities to improve game narrative progression and design aesthetics.

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