Gamifying data on teen internet’s dark side

The dark side of internet data

The internet has transformed our relationships, bringing people closer and, at the same time, pushing them apart.

Internet Festival in Pisa explores how the web affects society, including its darker sides. BlurM3Not was designed to give young participants a real opportunity to reflect on three phenomena: online challenges, cyberbullying and hikikomori.

QR codes from the dark

To reach a younger audience, we imagined a dim, cosy space with nine glowing QR codes flickering unpredictably in the dark.

Why QR codes? Smartphones are the main way teenagers explore the world around them, and they offer a discreet way to take part in a shared experience.

A survey on steroids

Each QR code leads to an online questionnaire, but not a standard multiple-choice one. Answers are given through behaviours that echo the phenomenon being discussed.

Challenge questions are answered with facial expressions captured by the front camera, a metaphor for the performative side of the internet. Cyberbullying questions are answered in a chat with a bot that replies with memes and emojis, recalling the experience of bullying on messaging apps. Hikikomori questions are answered through a dark interface, like the rooms where hikikomori isolate themselves.

At the end, participants receive a set of stickers with blurred emojis.

Why blur?

Answers appear in real time on two large vertical visualizations made of circles: a participatory data visualization where every participant becomes a data point.

The size of each circle depends on the data, and the dots around it are the participants' answers, colour-coded by gender. Sharpness measures how close perception is to reality: the more participants overestimate or underestimate a figure, the blurrier the circle becomes.

Blur works as both a memory and a verification tool, showing how well young people know the data that describes them. After the festival, the format becomes a survey tool for schools, to be validated scientifically and from a citizen science perspective.

One answer in three

3,104 responses from more than 600 participants, who discovered how far their perceptions of cyberbullying, online challenges and hikikomori were from reality.

Only 1 answer in 3 was correct: awareness of these issues still needs to grow. Interviews and conversations during the event also showed that BlurM3Not was an engaging way to detect and raise awareness of complex phenomena.

We see data gamification as an approach to carry into new areas, towards new social uses of data.

Have a topic people think they already know?

Data gamification works wherever perception and data drift apart. Do you need to visualize your data too? We're here.