Figure It Out: The Pop Culture Game

“Figure It Out: The Pop Culture Game” was created by Katie Patton, a sophomore at The Ohio State University. She created the game as an assignment in her Digital Media class. She only took the class because it was a requirement for her major but as it turns out, she really enjoys coding and digital media design. The assignment was to make a statement using a video game. She wanted to use the game to take a look at right vs wrong and who decides what makes an answer “correct” in life. The game features a wide range of questions. Some are serious and opinion based, like “would you slap 2 people you know or 3 you don’t?” while others are lighthearted and rely on facts, like who won “People’s Sexiest Man Alive” in 2010?

The game is designed so that if you select a “wrong” answer, you return to the beginning of the game. There are exceptions to the rule of course but it’s fairly straightforward in that sense. It starts out fun and hopefully a bit annoying to the player, it won’t accomplish that if the player gets every answer right but that is highly unlikely. The game is supposed to leave its players always wondering if they can do better and where the end is. The game seems endless and frustrating by design. Her use of logical and ethical questions seems random but is deliberate in a way that she makes her players really think about the questions and their answers. Players cannot really “lose” this game but sometimes it feels like they can. 

The game has no penalties other than sending the player back to the beginning but after a while, that penalty seems fairly harsh. After the player gets sent back to the beginning something inside them has to know what would happen if they had selected the other answer which keeps them coming back for more every time.