Thinking beyond your own responsibilities and actions.
Social Forces: the people behind the scenes.
Established as a social experiment, the Social Forces project pins people against each other in social and entertaining contexts without giving the full set of information to any of them. The concept stems from the use of two smaller projects, one containing a virtual reality system (D425) and the other a multiplayer maze game (Maze Master). Each concept is shown in isolation, with the participants of each not knowing of the existence of the other side.
The person with the virtual reality headset will be told that they are controlling a simulation of a droid in a virtual reality environment. Their actions will move the droid in this VR world. However, they will be controlling a real droid that is placed in the Maze Master board. The players using the maze board will be told that the droid is programmed to be self-driving, unaware that there is a droid controller. The maze players will either attempt to stop the droid from escaping the maze or help it do so.
The set up of the project is getting people to interact with each other with the aim of achieveing different goals, and having a limited set of information available to them. Behind every action that we engage in, there are effects,consequences, and people that are often out of our scope of control. With the concept, we want to get users to reflect on the control they have over their actions and those factors that are outside of our control. Adding to this, the concept also explores the use of cheats and rule breaking that users may engage in when it comes to time sensitive and high pressure situations against a human player or a robot.
