We believe that Filter Face-off will help players open new avenues for how they present themselves online and nudge them towards greater self-expression. Repeatedly playing this game with a group of friends may reframe people’s reason for posting pictures on Instagram from trying to meet unrealistic and idealized beauty standards that perpetuate low self-esteem in users to more positive reasons like creative self-expression. Filter Face-off encourages people to be more authentic while taking selfies and also encourages them to experiment with how they present themselves to other people.

We theorized that filters perpetuate unrealistic and unhealthy beauty standards that negatively affect how users present themselves online. This hypothesis guided the phase of primary and secondary reserch to guage experts’ and users’ opinions about Instagram filters.

Enter the Self-discrepancy Theory. This posits that every individual holds several points of views towards oneself including an actual self, an ideal self, and an ought self. We found that users have preconceived notions about their actual and ideal selves.

Relevant literature shows that users who have a higher mismatch in their actual self and their ought-to self are more likely to participate in social comparison, which is the leading cause for self-esteem issues. This mismatch is created and increased through online social comparison and the need to adhere to a certain beauty standard.

With this in mind, we aimed to nudge users towards a more positive approach to filters, byt shifting motivation away from adherance to beauty standards to more positive reasons like creativity and self expression.

We tested this game with a group of 5 friends situated in the same room. While the players appreciated the general idea of the game and what its trying to achieve, there were some glaring issues with the gameplay.

One of the biggest takeaways for us from round 2 of prototyping was that the in-person game created a sense of camaraderie that was missing in a digital version. A lot of jokes, helping each other pick filters and actively engaging with each other increased the fun quotient. On the other hand, players weren’t fond of setting up timers or the cards and would rather have an application keep track of all this for them.

This version of the game was liked by our participants because it did not require a lot of effort to se tup and allowed players to immediately start playing the game.

Currently, the prototyped filter is built for one person to use on Instagram. To facilitate group play, this filter will need to be integrated into Instagram group calls where multiple people can play the game simultaneously. The functionality and technical infrastructure for multiplayer games is in the ealy stages of development in Spark AR, with group voting already available. Future versions of Filter Face-off will allow users to take selfies in response to the same prompt, then allow each user to rank the other participants based on the best selfie.

Looking at our goal, we were happy to notice greater inclination in players to post creative selfies online. However, we are aware that this is likely a short-term change. To study the effects of this game long-term, we will need to conduct a longer study over many months to observe a change in user behavior on Instagram after subsequent rounds of the game being played.

Working on this project has been an incredibly gratifying experience for me personally. The project space is personal to me and being able to generate ideas that could bring about a change in people’s behaviors was a lot of fun. Over the course of just 4 months, we successfullt built, validates, and leared multiple times and refined our idea with concrete insights. It was exciting to see the final prototype take shape!