Systemic Lives

Conversation in the United States is currently dominated by the subject of police brutality. However, hidden beneath the issue of police brutality lies a larger web of racial disparities and systematic racism that affects black lives every day.

This game attempts to illustrate some of these disparities by simulating a series of lives according to the player's choices. Using real data, the game will determine the outcome of chosen events for groups of white people and groups of black people - side by side.  As more and more lives are simulated, imbalances that may be hidden at first begin to come forth.

Systemic Lives will evolve as you play. There is an ending and I hope that you stick around to see it through!

Team Name: Digital Daydream

Team Members:

• Justin Ray - [email protected]
• Josh Altman - [email protected]
• John Poe - [email protected]
• Matthew Glenn - [email protected]

Game Name: Systemic Lives

Research

• https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dNqt2xpo_gTNl2XWMZIyZgAZPl4ZIIG6BxaCUN8AwvI/edit#

Non-Original Assets used:

• VideroBoy https://opengameart.org/content/low-poly-human-male

If you want to help solve these problems, Please considering donating to Black Lives Matter

https://blacklivesmatter.com/

What’s up with the Black sounding names in your game?

We did that intentionally.  The names selected came from a study on callback rates for resumes based on black sounding names (The National Bureau of Economic Research).  It found that people with black sounding names had a callback rate of 50% of people with similar resumes but with white sounding names.  We used their list so we could use their stats when building the choice for, “Find a Job.”

Some of the results for different lives seem unlikely, how are you building your results?

We are running these stats individually and not taking into account previous choice responses.  For example, finishing high school may make it more likely for someone to find a job after college.  But our algorithm doesn’t try to create a true probability out of two choices, the chances for future accounts do change based on previous ones.  This is partially a limitation of the data but also the limitation of time limit for the Game Jam (A short marathon development session, we finished this entire game in less than a week).  However, as the number of lives grow, it starts to represent the larger societal reality.

Why did you make this political, games are supposed to be fun?

Because all art is political.  When a system is racist, not saying something about it and opposing it supports that system.  It is not enough to simply not be racist,one must be anti-racist.