It's Our Duty

Our home page on "It's Our Duty"
The Issue page of our website

Inspiration

Being gamers (especially girls in high school) has exposed us to a really dark side of gaming. Though the community can be accepting and super friendly at times, the community is plagued by racism, sexism, and in general bullying. With the BLM movements, we've seen many gaming companies speak up about racism and injustices within their platforms, yet very little action has been taken. It is important to spread awareness about it, not just to those within the community, but everyone so that change can happen on a larger scale. We also provided resources to educate yourselves and tips on what to do when these problems arise. Inspired by AOC's recent response to harassment from a fellow Congressperson, we realize that gamers no longer have to feel the need to just brush these things away. It is our duty to stand up to these perpetrators, whether it be sticking up for a teammate on Overwatch or reporting them through the system provided by the platform.

What it does

Our website introduces people to the issue and goes into detail about the main two types of harassment gamers often face: racism and sexism. We provided tips and resources on how to deal with these kinds of events and made comments on the types of actions that should be taken by game developers to stop this type of harassment. We also provided many statistics and YouTube videos that depict the problem in its true colors. We also made sure to provide resources for people to educate themselves through books and articles, and ways to get involved with the Black Lives Matter movement. Though we mentioned a lot of bad, our goal of this website is not to discourage gamers from continuing to play, but rather come together to make the community better. We also listed reasons the community can be great.

How we built it

As far as languages, we used html, CSS, and Javascript to build our website. For content, we looked to various YouTube videos, articles, and personal experiences to ensure our users would get the most out of this website as possible.

Challenges we ran into

There were a lot of bugs and limitations we ran into while creating this project. Sometimes one line of code would change the entire project and it was hard to work around, but we came out successful. We also struggled with attempting to make the website more interactive and pleasing to look for users. We had issues with resizing the navigation bar, and it was a challenge to create the random fact generator as we had never done something like that before. Changing the layout on the resources page was also difficult as we had to make sure the resources lined up with their headers.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're definitely proud of being able to create a finished product we're proud of in such a short amount of time. This project required a lot of research, watching videos, reading articles, and making sure we had the statistics to back up everything we said. We're also pretty proud of our fact generator, that gives a random fact every time the button is pressed. We are very proud of our how detailed our issue page is. We are also proud of our backgrounds on our website.

What we learned

We learned more about the types of harassment people really face within a gaming community, and how widespread this issue is. We also learned that game developers don't do much to halt this type of behavior, even though recently they have spoke out about these issues, very little is actually being done. Aside from that, we were able to expand our knowledge of CSS and Javascript. We definitely learned a lot more about styling, color combinations, and how to create a response Javascript code. This was also a learning experience because we were collaborating with other people across the country (and the world), people we've never met before, to create one final project. We learned more JS while creating the fact generator, as well as strengthened our understanding of HTML and CSS, especially when creating the navigation bar. We also refreshed our knowledge of using flexbox on the resources page.

What's next for It's Our Duty

In the future, we plan to expand the resources provided to users on our website. We also intend to make the website more interactive by implementing simple games created with JavaScript that allow users to get more involved with this cause.