Zark Muckerberg: A Reptile's Tale

Inspiration

The Cambridge Analytica scandal ripped apart the world and exposed to Western audiences that they weren't exempt from the misuse of personal data by large corporations. It was covered by every journalist on the internet and even has its own documentary yet... no one thinks twice before logging into Facebook to share a cute dog photo. It seems like it's impact was powerful but not lasting so we wanted to remind society about this shocking reality.

What it does

'Zark Muckerberg' is an text-based strategic game which encourages the player to think critically in an adversarial manner, playing the role of a reptilian CEO who is hungry for money obtained through the sales of his customers' data.

How we built it

We used a Figma board to prototype our game, utilising the vector drawing tools to hand draw our original art and the prototype animation tools to move between frames.

Challenges we ran into

Half our team is across the world so time zones were something we had to get used to. We had to constantly improve our communication methods to convey progress and updates as to not leave any member in the dark - get it? Because it's dark at night when they're sleeping? Haha.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We really like the design! The addition of pink was a happy accident when our user cursor casted a pink stroke over the box which happened to fit the colour palette perfectly. We also believe in the shock factor of this game and how though some of events may sound ridiculous and too far a stretch, reading the newspaper after may remind our users that these possibilities are too close to reality for comfort.

What we learned

Gamification is more powerful a tool than we thought going into the Hackathon. Even amongst the ideas we discarded, we were surprised by how these elements were able to influence humans and make chores like learning more enjoyable and exciting. It's definitely a concept which we will take into the future as programmers and software developers.

What's next for 'Zark Muckerberg'

Given more time, we would have liked to implement a wider branch of events and outcomes in a fully programmed language like Java. + We hope to participate in the next Showcode hackathon as well!