For our final project, my partner Megan and I decided to create an interactive video game project called “Are You Going to be a Criminal?/Check your Assumptions” to highlight the importance of not to judge a book by its cover and educating the masses about justice system statistics.
Project Statement of Purpose
In this project, we strive to educate our audience about common perceptions and judgment towards justice issues like who will most likely become a criminal. We want to create this game to allow people to grasp more knowledge about common perceptions toward criminals and incarcerated people and to hopefully alleviate some of those preconceived notions by creating a game that has quizzes about what is a paradigm of a criminal or about to commit a crime based on family history, personalities and physical attributes. Then, commenting on how people should not judge a book by its cover, and to hopefully diminish some of those negative attitudes towards people of certain communities.
Project Plan
We plan on using Arduino and Processing to create an interactive game that allows user input through Arduino’s sensors and buttons and then displaying output on the computer using processing animations and graphics. We want to combine physical input from users to connect it with a processing game to make the project more interactive. Also, users can also use the keyboard and mouse functions to play with functions on the screen through processing and code. We will also use laser cutting as our digital fabrication method to decorate our Arduino and add it to the interactive project. The colors in this project will be simple, as we will use mostly black and white colors to create a sleek style.
Project Context & Significance
We were inspired by The Marshall Project‘s online journalisms about criminal justice, as the website creates stories about incarcerated people and tries to educate people about the on-going issues in hopes of changing the system and inspiring people to go out and vote, to change public policies. We were inspired by the efforts made by this non-profit online journalism company and wanted to create a project that will be A. educational and spark interest for people to learn more about the U.S criminal justice system; and B, be a fun and interactive way for people to know about social issues that need to be discussed. At the end of our project, we will also attach links to websites and news sources for people to read more about these social issues if they wish to learn more about it. This way, we hope to educate our audience (NYU Shanghai students and faculty) to learn more about how our perceptions and biases could influence our judgment. This could be especially critical in the case of the futures of the younger generation exercising misdemeanors and how assumptions could critically and negatively affect their hearings and cases, in times of trial. Because no matter how hard we try, sometimes our biases get in the way of understanding each other.
One of our readings from Tom Igoe’s article “Making Interactive Art: Set the Stage, Then Shut Up and Listen” is especially inspiration. In particular, the author states, “Think of it [interactive artwork] more as a performance…Figure out how to suggest to them what their course of action could be, and how they might uncover their story, and their own emotional interpretation of the work.” This quote was inspirational in framing how we should set the stage for this interactive project. We want this performance to work and allow our audiences to include their honest and raw input, whether it be a biased assumption or not. We want to make the project simple, intuitive and entertaining, so the audience finds joy in it and hopefully wants to learn more about it in the future, in our case, criminal justice issues and how our psychological biases influence our judgment in the case of criminology. We also want this to influence our audiences, to inspire them and hear their story as well.
Additional Info: one article that raises awareness about perceptions can turn innocent people into criminals. https://theintercept.com/2019/01/13/misdemeanor-justice-system-alexandra-natapoff/
The Marshall Project: https://www.themarshallproject.org/