Fakestagram HQ
A Gamified Experience to Highlight Worst Practices of Social Media Platform Design Background
Background
Over the past decade, social media platforms have become mainstream. Globally, an average person spends 2 hours and 22 minutes on social media every day (Buchholz and Richter 2020). Most social media platforms use an ad-based revenue model. That is, they display advertisements alongside the content on the website. When users interact with these ads, it generates leads, and revenue for the platform. As a consequence, the platforms are incentivized to have its users spend as much time scrolling through their feeds as possible to maximize user engagement. This often comes at a significant cost to the users’ productivity and mental health. In order to capture more of the users’ attention, platforms use a bunch of tricks to make you stay on for longer than what you initially would have intended. These techniques are called dark patterns. Persuasive design is a longstanding practice and platforms are now using it to exploit its users’ cognitive biases and human tendencies. Some examples of this include endless, uninterrupted feeds of content, push notifications asking you to check new posts, and making it difficult to delete your account.
Fakestagram HQ
Fakestagram HQ (view on Figma!) is a mobile game designed to teach players about dark patterns and their impact on data privacy, security, and time usage of social media platforms in an interactive manner. Fakestagram HQ charts a heroic journey through various levels of a quest to destabilize the headquarters of Fakestagram. In each level, the player has to navigate their way around dark patterns commonly used on social media platforms with the help of a bad robot turned good, Instabot. At the end of each level, Instabot teaches the player about what dark pattern they defeated and how they can identify and avoid such design tricks in real life. The game also has strong social components such as shareable end screens and a leaderboard.
Why Play Fakestagram HQ?
Through its compelling narrative and use of principles of embedded design, we believe Fakestagram HQ can initiate prosocial behavior change in people’s relationships with the social media platforms they frequent in an engaging manner. The game draws on concepts from inoculation theory and cognitive dissonance theory to make people better at spotting and avoiding dark patterns and makes them less likely to incorporate them in the products they make. We hope as more people play our game, it will make social media platforms a better place.
Sayan Chaudhry, Carnegie Mellon University, sayanc@andrew.cmu.edu
Ipsita Mallick, Carnegie Mellon University, imallick@andrew.cmu.edu
Onyekachi Nwabueze, Carnegie Mellon University, onwabuez@andrew.cmu.edu
