Outfoxed

ucl bartlett design award immersive

role: creator

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 organized protest. The project seeks to highlight the dangers of unregulated surveillance technologies and offer a playful narrative of data reclamation and resistance.

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, food, and live performance as they join together in cooperative resistance.

At the start of the experience players are welcomed into the space by a representative of the game dev company Vulpez Immersive Studios. Players are told they are here for an exlusive branded immersive experience promoting Vulpez’s new VR game Foxy Foods.

Players begin the game as Vulpez intended: One player brings to the table boxes with cupcakes decorated with tracking markers printed in edible ink. The player in VR looks at the VR cupcakes and claps their hands, spawning foods in the game. These foods are merged together through hand tracking, echoing the merging mechanics of many cozy addictive games.

After a few rounds the game crashes and a rebel fox named Reynard explains the nefarious intentions of the game studio, enlisting the players in his fight against tech surveillance.

level 1

After a tutorial round at Reynard’s secret lair Maleperduys and tricking the game rep that the experience is still on correct course, the players and Reynard hack into the game’s code.

Working together with one player in VR and the other using a controller, the players navigate the 2.5D blueprint puzzle to destroy three primary nodes to break the code. The VR player acts as the navigator, looking down onto the exposed blueprint and leading Reynard, manipulated by the second player using a game controller, to the required nodes.

Upon sucecssful destruction of the three nodes, the game crashes, breaking the VR headset, and stopping the data collection.

level 2

In the final level, after the VR headset has been broken, the players must hack into the server and delete the captured data.

One player uses a game controller to traverse the digital maze of the server’s Firewall Castle, collecting scrolls. The scrolls reveal hidden coordinate codes which a second player records.

After all scrolls are collected players work together using the coordinate codes to decode the Privacy Policy that all players signed at the top of the experience. Decoding the Policy reveals a riddle, the solution to which guides the players to a microphone. Players scream into the microphone, crashing the server and erasing the collected data.

level 3

Echoing the project’s broader investigation into multi-sensory and mixed reality immersion, I created hand drawn pixel artwork and animations to explore digital immersion outside of conventional 3D, hyper-realistic aesthetics.

The 2.5D design adds an additional layer of spatial disorientation, creates co-op gameplay opportunities using restricted player POVs, and activates audience emotional endearment, evoking the nostalgia of retro videogames and the coziness of contemporary games such as Stardew Valley. This juxtaposition of surveillance and charming design brings attention the insidious aesthetic veil over the cozy game industry.

game level & character design

Within the space players encounter:

branded merchandise for the fictional game dev company Vulpez Immersive Studios,
a cozy magical forest made of soft and childlike materials such as pipe cleaner flowers mirroring the forest setting of the Foxy Foods game,
edible food altered to communicate with game technologies,
a trove of hidden-in-plain-sight high tech equipment including 360 cameras, security camers, VR headsets, microphones, speakers, and TVs.