Verdict
When Prof Grady first told us about this project and how we were going to base it off of a piece of media, I immediately turned to Patrick and said “Traitors.” The first part of this semester was at the same time as the reality TV show The Traitors, so it had been heavily on my mind.
Patrick and I started this with a lot of collaborating and a lot of note taking. We knew that it was a lot to take on, but we felt that as long as we could get organized, it would be an easy task. We started my plotting out the show. If you think the handwriting is messy, Patrick wrote it :)
We were really focused on the ideas of groupthink and how people make decisions with not a lot of information. How can we push these ideas?
We knew that we wanted to put people from studio into a simulator. Last semester, we used a Hunger Games Simulator with people in our class, and it was really funny. This was a huge inspiration for us, and so we decided to look into a Traitors Simulator. Somehow, it existed. GREAT!
We ran everyone through a simulator just to see how it would play out, and then we got to ideating for the actual product. We went back and forth on names a lot, but ultimately decided that Verdict felt right.
The first round of prototyping was not that great. We felt kinda stuck, because we had a lot of information that we wanted to share with people and not a real understanding of how we wanted to do it. We had a lot of red, texture, and small text. Honestly, not that sure how we got there.
People kept bringing up murders and detectives and crime scenes, so we knew we had to change something. We also actually wanted people to engage with the work, not just walk by it. We decided to take a HUGE swing.
We went BLUE! This was part of our rough draft, where we presented an almost-ready copy of our installation. This was also when we had the idea to break down our work into three different modes: poster, pamphlet, dialogue book. Instead of cramming all three information groups onto one poster, we spread it out so that it was easier for people to engage with the information. They could either read it all, read some of it, read none of it, really whatever they preferred. This also helped us with the idea of groupthink, because someone people were just voting based off of quick vibes alone.
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The installation for this project on the first night took a long time. Patrick and I were really not sure how we wanted it all to look and feel together, so it was a pretty late night. However, the pain paid off.
Who knew that vinyl would be so frustrating to install? Not us! We hit the ground running and got the first day installed. And now, it was time to wait. Each day, we put up a new poster, new pamphlet book, and new dialogue book, based around the simulator and how people were voting to remove players. It was honestly a really fun end of the day to read through the votes and see what people were thinking.
At the end of the project, we created a results poster that shared how the game panned out. In the end, Yue and Kelly were two traitors left! While the studio had managed to vote out two traitors, they were unable to get rid of the final two. Oh well!
Overall, 10/10 project. Loved working with my bestie, and loved getting to see how people decided to vote when they did not have a lot of information.
