2019 Winners & Shortlists

Background.

More than 1 in 2 online gamers are bullied. The bullying often takes place in the chat boxes of massive multiplayer online games, where players are anonymous, and perpetrators are less likely to feel accountable or sense the consequences of their actions. What’s worse is that many online games are free to use, which means anyone could join the game and become a victim. Players are harassed, cursed at, called names, ganged up on, excluded from games and even openly threatened. Research has shown that victims experience the same kind of emotional, psychological and physiological effects as targets of other forms of cyberbullying. With more than 60% of the online population in Lebanon playing games, our objective as a leading ISP provider was to use a digital film to shed light on the unique harm that cyberbullying poses given the inability to know who’s on the receiving end.

Describe the creative idea.

We set up a scenario which is very unusual in day-to-day life—a teenager picking on a sick, older man—to stress the extent to which in-game bullying can go wrong, just because people aren’t faced with their victims and don’t know who they’re hurting. The idea is that if our viewers could never stomach attacking an old patient in person and telling him to die, or even tolerate seeing that in a film, then they should have the same reaction to online bullying, which could randomly victimize an old man like the one portrayed in the film. We purposefully chose an “extreme case”, to show gamers that the damage is much worse than they think, so they should never take bullying lightly. This was meant to serve as a wakeup call for gamers to rethink before they act, because they don’t know the struggles their opponents are faced with.

Describe the strategy.

Our audience of gamers is digitally savvy and spends at least 2 hours online a day, so we decided the best place to reach them would be our social media pages. Additionally, research has shown that gamers tend to take bullying lightly and are actually not sympathetic towards victims who openly protest being bullied or complain. Victims are, in fact, mocked even more for not being able to “take it”. Most players are under the impression that their competitors are young and therefore should be tough. So, we chose the last “victim” anyone would ever suspect: a defenseless, old patient, in order to strike an emotional chord with gamers and raise awareness of the harm they could be causing.

Describe the execution.

First, over two weeks, the script was developed with gamers to reflect the kind of language and bullying that is typical within the community. Then, the cast, location, and aesthetic style were chosen over the span of a week. The elderly man in the film is an actual cancer patient who took the role because he wanted to shed light on a topic that is important to him and his children who are gamers A full-day shoot was held, where the production team on-hand took extensive shots of the venue and closely coached our cast on how to best portray their characters. The footage was edited over a week, with special lighting effects to mimic the glow emitted by electronic devices. Finally, the video was shared with our Facebook community of almost 12,000 people.

List the results.

-10,000 organic views online, within 4 days of being uploaded -Our Facebook page has almost 12,000 followers in total, over 80% of them viewed the video.