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Outfoxed is an interactive immersive gaming experience, exploring VR as a tool of biometric technological surveillance and the political opportunity of games as sites of organised protest.
The project seeks to highlight the dangers of unregulated surveillance technologies and offer a playful narrative of data reclamation and resistance. The goal is to encourage a critical evaluation of tech’s stated intentions, provoke an interrogation of the issues of privacy within the tech industry, and model a kind of gamer solidarity and political activation.
The piece requires two players who work with a rebel fox named Reynard to undermine a fictional VR gameFoxy Foods, created by Vulpez Immersive Studios. Together they reveal the developers’ agenda of widespread social surveillance via VR data collection, hack into and break the game, and destroy the game server, deleting their data from the exploitative technological system. The levels of the game span multiple gameplay genres including co-op VR games, 2.5D platformers, top-down ARPGs, and analogue cipher puzzles. Players experience interactive lights, sounds, props, and live performance as they join together in cooperative resistance.
One player brings to the table boxes with cupcakes decorated with tracking markers printed in edible ink. The VR player claps their hands to spawn foods in the digital world and merges them together. This is the gameplay Vulpez intended.
Reynard hacks into the game. Working together one in VR and the other using a controller, the players navigate the 2.5D puzzle to help him destroy three primary nodes to break the blueprint, stop the biometric data collection and crash the game.
One player traverses a maze, collecting scrolls, while the other uses the Privacy Policy to record the scrolls' coordinate codes. Decoding it tells the players to say a password to a microphone, crashing the server and erasing the collected data.
Composed of majority hand-drawn 2D pixel-art assets, my design engages a 2.5D architectural approach, mixing flat animated sprites and tile maps with 3D digital space. The pixel art also drops in resolution as the game and server are destroyed.
The room in which the game table is placed contains a mix of whimsical hand-crafted flower decorations and sleek surveillance technologies, illuminated by colourful light from instruments that respond to gameplay.