Sounds, Sensors and Surveillance
Sound, Sensors and Surveillance is a browser-based narrative game developed in Bitsy by Louis Cook (game design, build, and sound), and Angela YT Chan (narrative and game design). The game is a speculative artistic response to Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS), taking players through scenarios that explore the potential impact of its unregulated deployment on marginalised groups.
The game is about the surveillance state and its use of emerging technologies. Specifically, how might they be used to disproportionately monitor marginalised communities in our neighbourhoods and worsen existing social injustices?
Surveillance in public spaces is known to be discriminatory and limiting to the freedom and dignity of certain groups. This includes carrying out predictive policing: assuming some are more likely to commit crime based on discriminatory stereotypes.
The game introduces the emerging technology Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS), which can monitor vibrations in the environment using fibre optic cables and with AI-assistance. The game narrative then brings the player into a speculative ‘DAS Smart City’ in which this sensing technology is deployed in urban and populated areas. Through 7 chapters that draw on current, UK-specific social injustices, the player experiences being a subject under this new layer of surveillance, and moves through the city from the perspectives of:
- Racialised people facing police stop and search drills
- Unhoused people facing property perimeter surveillance
- Transgender people facing discrimination over the use of public bathrooms
- Disabled people facing inaccessible infrastructure
- Asylum seekers facing street harassment and stricter access to welfare benefits
- Gig economy workers facing penalisation of late deliveries
- Student activists facing the risk of having their identities revealed for arrest
Built with Bitsy by game designer and composer Louis Cook and artist-researcher Angela YT Chan, the game brings together social justice, critical technology research and low-tech, digital narrative game building to reframe emerging technologies in the context of human rights. ‘Sound, Sensors and Surveillance’ aims to be a playful and inclusive approach to empower more community conversations and resilience against how technology is often deployed without transparency or full consent, least not by the most marginalised groups of society.