KEAPON

Final Project for SM6327

Title: Keapon

Artist Name: Tolo ZHANG

Paragraphs:

The Internet world is like a mirror, reflecting the lives of each of us. We are watching this world on the Internet, and everyone else in this world is watching us. All actions and things exist digitally in social media. The connections between people are both unusually close and alienated. Tight because we can easily communicate with people in various places, and alienation is because the bond between us may be cut off by just talking.

This subtle relationship has triggered various phenomena in social media, such as the Internet Troll (Keyboard Warrior) phenomenon. Due to the virtual nature of network identities and the low cost of making speeches online, some people’s speeches are thoughtless, irresponsible, and even offensive. They use social media as an outlet for emotional outbursts, target other users, and identify and attack vulnerabilities in their speech and behavior. Whether the attack was intentional or unintentional, it caused substantial harm to the attacked.

Therefore, I hope to explore this phenomenon of keyboard man through this project. The project is expressed in the form of a shooting game. The player replenishes ammunition by hitting the keyboard or pressing keyboard buttons, and controls the arrow of the mouse shape to attack randomly appearing users, that is, targets. When the targets are shot, they will explode into a series of numbers. Typing the keyboard represents speech, controlling the mouse to disseminate the speech, and the explosion of numbers represents the harm to Internet users. When the user is happy with this shooting game, he is inadvertently acting as a keyboard man. After attacking more than five users, the game ends and the player is prompted to be a keyboard murderer. But if the social media account played by the player is not offensive and talks calmly, that is, if the keyboard is pressed ten times in the game without shooting, the game ends, prompting the player not to go online to attack others.

Screenshots:



Process:

  1. Extracted the image and role of keyboard man tools such as mouse and keyboard;
  2. Designed the representation, interaction and feasibility of the game;
  3. Programmed with p5js. Compiled three classes of targets, arrows, and scattered letters. Wrote several functions such as the function about mechanics, the function of falling particles, the function of firing, the function of ammunition replenishment, the function of interface prompt, etc.
  4. Tested and improved.

Work:

Click HERE.

Citation:

  1. Matrix Type by Karutt;
  2. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/keyboard_warrior
  3. Shin, J. (2008, March). Morality and Internet Behavior: A study of the Internet Troll and its relation with morality on the Internet. In Society for information technology & teacher education international conference (pp. 2834-2840). Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE).