I feel like this is a first step on the road to something that might be quite powerful at communicating chicken/hen welfare.
The thing that was missing for me was that when I was “playing” at being a chicken in the different environments, I didn’t see the point. I did various things, but found them boring.
The easiest way to better gamify this is to explain upfront that the user will be asked to guess what sort of environment the chicken is in, so the user can better orient themselves to what they are trying to achieve.
A better way to gamify is to add a welfare score. It would probably need some careful thought, because you want the scoring system to capture the idea that the chicken wants to do various different things (ie sitting on the perch, coming off, going back on again ad nauseam shouldn’t get you a good score). It should also capture the idea that being pecked or harmed by other chickens hurts you, which teaches you not to get too close. And perhaps the scoring system might incentivise you to hurt other chickens (eg pecking them might make you feel less bad—again, need this to align with how the animals actually feel and our best motivations of what motivates them to peck other chickens).
The idea should be that no matter how well you play the game, your welfare will be terrible in the factory farmed condition, and less bad in the others.
Another more minor point: the instructions said I could use arrow keys or WASD. I couldn’t get arrow keys to work, which was a shame because I prefer them to WASD
I feel like this is a first step on the road to something that might be quite powerful at communicating chicken/hen welfare.
The thing that was missing for me was that when I was “playing” at being a chicken in the different environments, I didn’t see the point. I did various things, but found them boring.
The easiest way to better gamify this is to explain upfront that the user will be asked to guess what sort of environment the chicken is in, so the user can better orient themselves to what they are trying to achieve.
A better way to gamify is to add a welfare score. It would probably need some careful thought, because you want the scoring system to capture the idea that the chicken wants to do various different things (ie sitting on the perch, coming off, going back on again ad nauseam shouldn’t get you a good score). It should also capture the idea that being pecked or harmed by other chickens hurts you, which teaches you not to get too close. And perhaps the scoring system might incentivise you to hurt other chickens (eg pecking them might make you feel less bad—again, need this to align with how the animals actually feel and our best motivations of what motivates them to peck other chickens).
The idea should be that no matter how well you play the game, your welfare will be terrible in the factory farmed condition, and less bad in the others.
Another more minor point: the instructions said I could use arrow keys or WASD. I couldn’t get arrow keys to work, which was a shame because I prefer them to WASD