Stephanie Mrugala
Mara Christensen
There were three original ideas that went into why we wanted to do this simulation. The first, was more for class room purposes. Being that the class was "Protest and Reform", we thought that creating our own protest would be quite interesting, because we could show how people react when put into certain situations. The second purpose of this protest was to use the actual technology that is involved in making the protest simulation, namely Agentsheets, and relating it to real life events. The third reason we did this protest with this particular topic is because we wanted to try to get a point across, voice our opinion, and form our own little protest supporting something we believe in.
In this particular protest, people are there to express how they feel about legalizing marijuana. There are people who want marijuana to be legalized. They were specifically programmed to be non- violent for the most part but some will randomly act out in violence. There are also people there who do not want marijuana to be legal. They were programmed to be somewhat violent in certain situations. They act violently by throwing rocks at the other protesters and the police.
Of course in every protest there is some form of authority. In this case we made
police officers. The police officers have a responsibility to keep things under control,
but when things start to get out of hand they have been programmed to act in certain
ways. One of their reactions is to get violent when trying to control the demonstration,
by hitting others with their Billy clubs. They also change colors as the amount of
aggravation or anger that they feel goes up. For example say some anti protesters
were throwing rocks and hits one of the police officers, their color would go from
dark blue to a bright red depending on how angry they get. This is a good way to
show how situations can escalate and get out of hand.