Brain Chip Scheme 芯片计划
This project is a speculative narrative game that explores the impact of fake news on human cognition. The story is set in a future where every person has a chip implanted in their brain, and information has become a symbol of wealth and power.
The core gameplay positions the player as a journalist who publishes daily news based on emails received in their inbox. Each news decision directly influences the trajectory of the world. Hidden throughout the room are five clue-based artifacts that trace over 2,000 years of information transmission history, from the emergence of graffiti in ancient Athens to contemporary media systems. Through specific information-exchange interactions, these clues unlock narrative fragments, allowing players to gradually uncover a conspiracy behind information manipulation while completing routine journalistic tasks.
The game is inspired by my prior quantitative research on public discourse in the digital era. This project translates those insights into a game-based speculative framework, using gameplay as a medium to prompt reflection on information control and cognitive influence.
本项目是一款思辨性叙事游戏，探讨假新闻与信息操控对人类认知与判断的影响。故事设定在一个未来社会：每个人的大脑中都植入了芯片，信息成为一种象征财富与权力的资源。
游戏的核心玩法将玩家置于记者的角色之中，玩家需要根据信箱中收到的邮件内容发布每日新闻。每一次新闻发布都会对世界的走向产生直接影响。房间中隐藏着五个线索型道具，这些道具串联起从古希腊雅典涂鸦的出现至今、跨越两千多年的信息传播历史。通过特定的信息交换与互动机制，玩家可以逐步解锁叙事碎片，在完成日常新闻任务的同时，逐渐察觉隐藏在信息操控背后的阴谋结构。
游戏的创作灵感来源于我此前对数字时代公众讨论的量化研究。我收集了 2024 年 7 月同一时间段内，政治与非政治两个社会媒体平台的热门公共讨论数据，包括 5,581 条微博帖子、14,003 条小红书帖子以及 6,177 条评论，并对发布内容与评论区结构的多项特征进行了分析。
研究结果显示，不同平台之间呈现出相反的内容情感一致性特征，同时在评论区中，随着讨论层级的递进，情绪表达呈现出逐渐极化的趋势。这一对新闻传播与情绪演化机制的观察，引发了我对数字社会中信息可信性、观点选择性表达以及信息操控机制的持续兴趣。本项目尝试将这些研究洞察转化为游戏化的思辨框架，通过互动叙事引导玩家反思信息如何塑造认知与现实
Poster Exhibition
12/23/2024 Digital Humanities Symposium
Tsinghua University Beijing, China
01| Idea
An immersive decryption game that deconstructs"News is truth"
In a digital society, the proliferaton of misinformaton desensitizes people, algorithmic manipulation leaves us hepless, and public discourse becomes unfocused, leading to emotional polarization. Are we rejecting thought and moving towards a illusory world where laughter replaces thinking?
The game aims to reflect on the cognitive impact of the flood of fragmented information onsocial media in the digital age. Based on the Unreal Engine environment, the game creates adystopian future media city, where the player, as a journalist, constantly carries out newstypeset tasks in the interface according to the instructions of NASDAQ, and influences thedevelopment of the city. Players can unlock characters in the story by interacting with the itemsin the room, making independent distinctions in information comparison, and choosing sides toachieve their goals.
02| Method
Media Crawler
LDA Topic Model / Jaccard Index/Sentiment Analysis
LDA Topic Model / Jaccard Index/Sentiment Analysis
I crawled two simultaneous top public discussion topics in July 2024. One political and one non-political, across multiple platforms. The dataset includes 5,581 Weibo posts, 14,003 Xiaohongshu (Little Red Book) posts, and 6,177 comments. I analyzed multiple features of both posts and comment threads.
The analysis revealed opposing patterns of emotional consistency across platforms, as well as a tendency toward increasing emotional polarization as discussion depth increased within comment threads. These observations on news dissemination and emotional dynamics sparked my interest in skepticism toward information and selective expression of viewpoints in digital society. This project translates those insights into a game-based speculative framework, using gameplay as a medium to prompt reflection on information control and cognitive influence.