A Straw Man Argument

The title screen

Inspiration

Global warming is killing us and we seem more interested in the (comparatively) meaningless individual consumption of plastic straws than the more meaningful large institutional actions involving fossil fuels. This is a game that tries to get people to understand why Pitt should divest from fossil fuels by comparing it to the emissions of plastic straws.

What it does

It's a short VR experience where the player encounters a persuasive speech through voice-over and then gets to play in a kind of "sandbox" of wasting plastic straws and noticing its quantitative impact on carbon emissions when compared to Pitt's fossil fuel investments.

How I built it

I built it in Unity, heavily relying on the Oculus sdk and its documentation.

Challenges I ran into

The Oculus SDK was not the easiest to navigate and led to a whole lot of time staring at code I was sure should have been working.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

It's an undeniably fun experience. Especially with the addition of the plastic straw rocket boosters, if you can stomach the VR sickness, it's a novel experience. I'm not sure if it will energize people to be upset at Pitt for their investments in fossil fuels yet, but if it does that will be my grand accomplishment of this game.