Our insatiable craving for drama and violence is beautifully depicted in a five minute browser-based game that provides an eye towards the news cycle feedback loop and forces us to reflect on our role in the way the media portrays our eyes.
We Become What We Behold is an in-depth look into our violent, combative society where conflict is the focus of news coverage and inspires our reactions to it, and all of this is reported via social media outrage. The stories are woven across the media cycle in endless loops, increasing in intensity as violence as well as conflict and confrontation take on each other and feed the viewers that demands more of the similar.
The objective of this game is function as a photographer, who points and clicks to take a picture of interesting things for the current news cycle. The photo will then be displayed at the top of the screen at the center of the screen in an article from the news. The image is displayed with a social media ticker which indicates if the subject you have captured is worthy of being featured in the news. If so, what depicted will affect the people in the scene in the news cycle, and the local culture will begin to change in line with. If not, then the public are likely to ignore the issue and nothing will change.
However, you soon realize that it is the conflict that captivates the people around you and you must find and capture more of these stories and causes the tension to get more intense as its recording can affect the people who watch the TV show for the community.
It’s a five-minute game but I’d advise having it played several times since there are things you can take pictures of (usually not appropriate for the appetite of the news media) which you might not consider capturing or be able to miss. After playing through, you should go back for a second run to take a moment to think about the role media and its viewers have in creating the current culture in the present.
The final chapter of We Become What We Behold is filled with optimism, however. I would suggest reading Nicky Case’s post-mortem about the game once you’ve played it . It will allow you to think more positively manner about the issues we’ll encounter this year globally.
