Social Media

Learning goal

Social media are not only a good thing, and they ask for a degree of respect. The lesson argues that from three seats at the same platform. The in-game rulebook sets the moderation brief directly ("Keep the chat safe, kind and fun for everyone! If the messages look suspicious or have malicious content, delete them") under four named categories: "Asking for or posting personal information (Doxxing)", "Fake Prizes & Contests", "Hoaxes (misinformation or lies)" and "Credit Card Scams". Peer pressure gets its own beat from the narrator ("Friends or followers can influence your choices. It's okay to say 'no' — you're looking out for yourself."), and the ending is a practical instruction, not a scolding: "If it starts making you feel uncomfortable, take a break. Go outside, stretch, or just turn your phone off for a while."

My role

• Logic, mechanics, transitions between scenes and balancing across all three acts were on me, with the writing and the visual work going to the others.
• Built the moderation loop: fifty messages, the rulebook pinned to the screen throughout, two buttons per message. I weighted the pool so ordinary chatter heavily outnumbers the threats, which makes deleting everything a loss, and used a five-icon rating as a soft fail state with a recoverable margin.
• Tuned the engagement curve across the five ClipMake uploads, from 1,573 views and 196 likes on the first clip to 7,777 and 1,222 on the last, and pushed the follower count out of the HUD and into world state: what grows is the crowd of NPCs behind the player.
• Made the doomscroll act out of level design: door portals into one biome after another, no exit visible until the player stops walking and looks for one, with the thought bubbles escalating alongside.
• Arranged the three acts so each puts the student in a different relationship to the same platform: moderator, then creator, then captive audience, closed by a practical instruction from the narrator.

Systems I designed

• A rule-driven classification loop in which the rulebook never leaves the screen, so every deletion is checkable against a stated category — the difficulty lives in judgement, not in reaction speed.
• A message pool weighted so that ordinary chatter ("hello guys", cat photos, "This chat is so chill compared to other sites") heavily outnumbers the threats, which makes deleting everything a losing strategy rather than a shortcut.
• Threat messages written one-to-one onto the four taught categories, with at least one deliberately borderline case so the student has to hold the line between friendliness and manipulation rather than pattern-match on tone.
• A forgiving scoring model: a five-icon rating that visibly drains across a 50-message run gives mistakes real weight while leaving a recoverable margin, instead of a binary pass/fail.
• An escalating engagement curve tuned across the five uploads, from roughly 1,573 views and 196 likes on the first clip to 7,777 and 1,222 on the last, so growth reads as a reward curve the student can feel building.
• Followers translated out of the HUD and into world state: an NPC crowd that multiplies in the scene, so an abstract metric becomes something the player physically stands in front of.
• The doomscroll act built as level design rather than a text warning — repeated portal-to-biome transitions and escalating thought bubbles that walk the player into the realisation instead of stating it.
• A three-act structure in which each segment teaches a different relationship to the same platform — moderator, creator, captive audience — closed by an explicit coping instruction from the narrator.

Core mechanics

• Chat moderation: each incoming message is judged against the persistent MODERATING RULES panel and resolved with two buttons, "Next message" (keep) and "Delete".
• A message counter sets the run length and pacing, advancing 10/50 → 24/50 → 35/50 → 47/50, so the shift has a fixed and readable end point.
• A five-icon rating meter sits above the log — five icons at 10/50, two by 47/50 — so misjudged messages appear to cost one icon each: a soft, visible fail state rather than an instant loss.
• Per-message feedback stamps resolve inline in the chat log — a green thumbs-up or a red thumbs-down attached to the message itself — so past calls stay visible as the feed scrolls on.
• Removed posts are not deleted from the log but replaced in place by "The message was removed by the moderator.", keeping the feed continuous.
• Creator loop inside a diegetic phone app, "ClipMake": browse a feed of candidate clips, "Choose" one and "Upload" it, with each post returning a views / likes / dislikes triple.
• Endless-scroll traversal: the player steps through glowing door portals into successive biomes — forest, logging camp, city, industrial desert, dunes — with a [BACKSPACE] back action available and no exit visible until the player stops and looks for one.
• A short closing free-paint scene with a colour inventory (999 per colour plus a single spray tool) and keybind hints — "RESET THE CANVAS [J]", "ADD COLOR [H]", "COLOR PICKER [G]" — whose purpose is not explained anywhere on screen.

Tracked values

• Moderation rating — five gold icons above the chat log
• Message progress counter (x/50)
• Views, likes and dislikes per uploaded clip (1573/196/8 rising to 7777/1222/53)
• Follower base, represented as the size of the NPC crowd in the scene rather than a number
• Paint colour stock in the closing canvas scene (999 per colour, plus a single spray tool)

Example events

• Chain-letter hoax from user CoolMAN-333: "If you don't send this to 5 people your account gets deleted" — a textbook case for the rulebook's Hoaxes category.
• Coercion attempt from XrocketX: "I'll protect you if you do something for me first" — the log shows the message carrying a red thumbs-down stamp.
• Plausible-sounding rumour from Carrot123: "Mods can read your private chats lol", likewise stamped red in the log.
• Benign traffic that has to survive the shift — "Look, this is my cat!" with an attached photo, "im drawing cartoon characters, anyone wanna see????" — sitting next to the deliberately borderline "hey, wanna be friends? this is my first time here."
• The ClipMake payoff ladder, from "Can I make it through the day without my phone?!" (1573 / 196 / 8) up to "Good Deeds Day - Helping Strangers" (7777 / 1222 / 53).
• Thought bubbles escalating through the endless-scroll act: "The city, hmm... It feels sad here." → "And again... is there even a way out?" → "I need to look around, otherwise this will go on forever."