Minitrue is a game about speech control on social media I designed and constructed  in Unity engineer and C#. The game is called Minitrue after the Ministry of True in George Orwell’s 1984. Similar to the Minitrue in the novel, my game focuses on the rise of social media, the changes it makes in how information spreads and how propaganda works in a modern context. People may fail to realize that when they are communicating on social media, their voice may only be an echo into void since social media is controlled by capital or the government.

In the game, the player will become a click farmer, writing and uprooting faked comment on social media. The game has three different levels, representing different kind of click farmers. As the player’s account becomes more and more influential, he will gain more money, but at the same time be losing control over his own account. In the end, he will have to have used his account to create propaganda for the government, or otherwise he will be thrown into the jail. I came up with this idea by researching and reflecting on the situation of the Chinese popular social media platform, Weibo. There are a lot of accounts that are used to create a fake atmosphere of favorable support for speech by a particular group or individual.  And peopled go to jail because what they say on Weibo. By representing the true situation in an exaggerated and hilarious way, I aim to satirize the illusion of free speech and the individual’s actual isolation on what seems to be a platform of  social connection. Through the process of making this game, I learned how to make a statement in a creative way based on an everyday encounter. By digging deeply into this seemingly commonplace phenomenon, I came up with a story line and game system that successfully carries out my intention of critique.