The Sound of Silence

The Sound of Silence ---///FOR A CLEANER INTERNET\\\---

 

 Controls KeyOperationA/DMove left/rightSMove downQ/ESpin blockSpaceFast landing Overview

The original motivation of designing this game is to express a complex meaning with a simple game.

The Sound of Silence is a metaphoric game about freedom of expression and our relationship with social media. It was inspired by 1984 by George Orwell and The City of Silence by Ma Boyong. In the two novels, people’s speech is being surveillance and censored by a higher authority, a 'Big Brother'.

The 'Big Brothers' limits what people can say and express.  This is the perfect dystopia scenario that comes to most people’s minds when we talk about censorship. But is that how the 'Big Brothers' really are?

For the interaction and visual part, I chose one of the most classic game ever - the Tetris. Tetris is a game with simple rules and a clear goal, yet it's possible to create a great impact on the game experience with only a few changes to the rule.  There are 7 types of tetrominoes in Tetris and the player play it by methodically structuring these blocks – just like how we arrange our speeches! In The City of Silence, more and more words are censored until there’s nothing left but silence. Such dramatic censorship was represented here by removing certain patterns from the block pool. 

For the most part of the game, the player will be dealing with a Big Brother who tries to prevent the player from expressing (reaching the goal score) by banning more and more blocks. However, the beauty of Tetris proves that simply removing blocks will indeed increase the difficulty of the game but it will not stop the player from winning. So in the final stage, when the player finally beats the ‘Big Brother’, they will play one more round, but the interface has changed to a typical social media style. This time, there’s no more limitation, all blocks are available. However, they will find the blocks secretly twisted away from their intention by the system, this will raise the difficulty to win to a ridiculous height, but without banning a single pattern! This is how the real ‘Big Brothers’ - the social media censor the message people express:

 

The real ‘Big Brothers’ might not ban your speech, but they twist how it's shown.