Qaramon

Tackling corruption through game

Concept: Qaramon, which means "Champion" in Farsi, is a browser-based game aimed at future leaders of Afghanistan to increase awareness of corruption by enhancing player knowledge in a fun, interactive environment. For thesis, I built Level One which was a Q&A incorporating a character that gets fat or skinny depending on whether the player answers a question right or wrong. The player builds their knowledge base in the first level to use in subsequent levels, which would tackle other corruption-related issues (transparency, ethics etc).

The intention was to tie it all together through social media. An element of competition using a national scoreboard would encourage volume and virality.

Created with: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Jquery, Illustrator, Photoshop, Facebook API.

Skills: Strategy, UX design, Programming, Research, APIs, Illustrator.

Video Demonstration

Creative Process

Creating Qaramon was a 4 month project that required a lot of research, trial and error and revisions, kicked off by a moodboard, the topics were then refined, narrowed down, and finally wireframed.

Topic stacking - to identify the issues I was passionate about.

Developing some wireframe sketches for game concept.

High level concept

A vision of each level and what issue it intends to tackle. All tied together through social media to increase unity, transparency and competition. The ultimate goal is to decrease apathy and inspire mid-long term action.

Question and Answer Structure

The questions and answers were designed to get harder the better the player did, and easier the more they got wrong. The intention of this level was to ease the player into the game and educate them on the topics at hand. The learnings would be used in subsequent levels.

Character iterations

Character sketches were developed by a local artist in Dubai to ensure that aesthetics were in line with local tastes. They were fine tuned based on my feedback and user testing. For example, as we found more people were amused by the negative character, the hero character was exaggerated to encourage players to win. Either way, there was "failure through iteration" - in other words, learning even as a player gets it wrong and repeats the process.