Algo
A short game to introduce students to social media algorithms and feeds and how they are shaped.
Move with the arrow keys ( ↑ Up , ← Left , ↓ Down and → Right ).
Created with Bitsy, a game engine by Adam LeDoux.
Created by André Almo.
A short game to introduce students to social media algorithms and feeds and how they are shaped.
Move with the arrow keys ( ↑ Up , ← Left , ↓ Down and → Right ).
Created with Bitsy, a game engine by Adam LeDoux.
Created by André Almo.
Comments
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I love the screen/scroll as a densely-packed woods that's a bit hard to navigate. Also felt very accurate to the concept for the player to start interacting with objects only to learn, too late, that early choices were already impacting the results!
as always, thank you so much for your kind comments! you've hit the nail in the head with them; both were very intentional choices!
I wanted the map to look like dense digital woods as a metaphor for how online life currently feels; ads, sponsored content, paywalls, low-quality content, AI slop, etc. I wanted to make all of this more obvious, but I didn't have much time available to wrap this up! I found comfort in the fact that making it implicit made the game more "poetic", hahaha.
and regarding the 'feed results', yes, I wanted to show that every interaction had consequences, and that the feed would quickly decide what you liked. but at the same time, I would have liked it to be 'infinite', as the algorithm will perpetually analyse user inputs (see the discussion with yo252yo). I couldn't quite do this in Bitsy, so I settled for suggesting this through Algo's dialogue.
its a pretty interesting idea :) i dont know if you're looking for feedback or suggestions but one thing that strikes me above all is that the algorithm isnt ever "done learning", god knows its always siphoning data. Instead mb its more like if you select the cat then it sends you to a level with only cats, etc... and you could extend the reflection to filter bubbles in general.
thank you so much for your comment! I agree, you are absolutely right. I'll be honest, I struggled with variable control in Bitsy. I did originally intend to make this an infinite environment, but ended up turning it into a simpler creation (also due to time constraints). I have now included some extra dialogue to imply the algorithm's ever-changing, ever-data-consuming nature!
yeah i imagine it would be hard thats why i was thinking of teleporting to filter bubble levels, admittedly im only vaguely familiar with bitsy ^^ it is very accessible but i think im doomed to think in HTML/js ^^
YES, to be honest, I actually exported the game to HTML and then tried to fiddle with it using JavaScript. my plan was to create a JS function to override Bitsy's variable control and have total power over it. of course, my function failed spectacularly...