Social Media Tycoon

Social Media Tycoon is a serious game made to highlight the importance of data privacy. You play as a budding social media company entrepreneur as you deliver advertisements, upgrade your company, and check in on news stories relevant to your company’s activities. The game is presented like a typical social media app with tabs for each of the aforementioned features. This game was made in Unity by a combined team of 5 artists and programmers.

Notification System

To communicate story progression, we use a notification system that we place in the left application tab. I set up the tab so that when a new notification is added it is placed at the bottom of a vertical list of notifications, a sound is played, and the tab icon shows the number of unread headlines. When there are more notifications than can fit on the screen, users can scroll up to see the older ones. Each notification also has a close button to permanently clear it.

Before being added to the tab itself, new notifications are first sent to a queue. Using a coroutine with a variable delay, those new notifications are then removed from the front of the queue and added to the actual tab. This is needed to pace out the rate at which the player received notifications and story updates.

Skill Tree Progression

I worked with another programmer on the project to set up the skill tree tab. The skills are typically changes to the company in terms of how it gathers and uses data, and the legislation surrounding it. For each skill, players can see the cost to unlock it, the skill’s name, description, and any prerequisite skills. Invisible to the player is a list of notifications that become available once that skill is unlocked. As mentioned in the previous section, these notifications are sent to a queue before being sent to the player after a delay. By tying notifications to the skills, players can see how certain changes to the company’s treatment of user data have specific downstream consequences.

Stronger upgrades increase the rate of revenue and data collection but also require exponentially more resources to acquire. At the start of the game, players have to manually curate advertisements and collect data. Over time this get increasingly automated, and by the end of the experience the money, data and news notifications are coming in so fast that it can be hard to keep up with how much is changing.

Narrative Design & Writing

The narrative of the game is primarily told through two sources: news notifications, and skill tree upgrades. Some additional flavour text is used to populate information about the procedurally generated users. I wrote the most of skill upgrades with the goal of trying to make it seem like it was coming from the perspective of the entrepreneur. The titles of the upgrades are fairly clear about what they represent, but the descriptions are written to contain a lot of bias reflecting the rationalizations behind change. For instance, a description might take an upgrade that extracts non-consensual data from users and justify it by saying that it will provide users with better advertisements.

The news notifications are similarly given voices depending no the perspective of the source. Headlines from the company or government are fairly sanitized and official. These contrast with articles written by more grassroots outlets that interview regular people who have been positively or negatively effected by the company. At the start of the game the public sentiment is one that is positive: people have found your tool to be useful in connecting with friends and may even appreciate getting useful ads. This aligns with the early upgrades you have access to which tend to be mutually beneficial to the company and its users. As the upgrades become more exploitative, notifications that highlight the mounting negative consequences begin to overtake your feed.

One other small narrative addition that I added was an expectedly inscrutable terms and conditions.

Some elements of the game, such as the advertisement delivery window probably could have done with a bit more work if we’d had more time to put into it. At the moment, the player doesn’t need to put much thought into which ads to send, and we had originally intended that part to operate as a bit more of a puzzle. On the other hand, it’s possible that such an involved mechanic might have distracted from the message of the game.

Additionally, the balancing pass on the game was fairly last minute and as a result there are a few periods of dead time waiting to get enough resources to upgrade that probably could have been avoided. As a whole though, I think the game succeeds in getting it’s message across and I’m quite happy with the end product.