⛓ Accused
Would you confess to a crime you didn’t commit?
Developed with the Innocence Project, and supported by NYU Stern, 2013
The Innocence Project wanted to experiment with new media to create an immersive experience that would give their allies and supporters a glimpse of confessing to a crime while being innocent.
The Innocence Project is a nonprofit that exonerates the wrongly convicted through DNA testing and reforms the criminal justice system to prevent future injustices. One such injustice is convictions due to false confessions, a result of overzealous police interrogation, panic induced erratic judgement, and bigoted stereotyping.
Once a person confesses to a crime their conviction is guaranteed, making this cause hard to empathize with.
By immersing into the Innocence Project’s exhaustive database of interrogation footage from cases of false confession, we identified the invisible stresses at play. Designing an experience around feeling trapped, we built Accused.
Using commonly used interrogation methods, we built a model of the types of pressures put on innocent people to confess. Feeling trapped, left isolated and hungry, suspects often agree to anything offered as long as they can leave. It’s hard to make that leap without experiencing similar pressures.
The game eventually places players in the same kind of “Gotcha” scenarios they would face if accused in real life.
Players viscerally felt the exhaustion and claustrophobia, and felt changed by the experience.
Accused is a web-based experience that can be played on any device with access to the internet. It can be played endlessly, although it was designed to be played for around 10-20 minutes.