San José State students gathered in the middle of Seventh Street Plaza dressed in all black to promote the upcoming production of the play “1984” with a scavenger hunt.The scavenger hunt took place with the theme of “Big Brother is watching”. Big Brother refers to the totalitarian government in the book that the play is based on “1984” according to Study.com.
Author George Orwell released the book in 1949. The book is about a dystopian society where the masses live in a totalitarian state and live under constant surveillance, according to the same website.Advertising Assistant Professor Belén Moreno said the advertising department helped the Hammer Theatre promote the play through the Introduction to Branded Content course.
The 1984 Scavenger Hunt is taking place from April 23-24 with the prize being a Fujifilm Instax Mini 11, according to SJSU's events website.
Moreno said the scavenger hunt her students put together also inserted some themes from the book into the hunt.
“The students created an Instagram account that is playing the role of the Big Brother and the claim is that they are seeing everything,” Moreno said.
She said the language used in the Google Forms and Instagram account was related to the play and book by using terms like “Comrades” which is how some characters would refer to each other in the book.
“The hunt starts off on the Google Form and each form has each location, there is a guard at each location with a QR code and each QR code would lead to the next location,” said advertising junior Nicole Cailles.
“We’ve been working on this all semester with the goal of bringing the story to the person,” Moreno said.
Cailles was one of the students tabling and sending students on their way to the scavenger hunt.
She said the locations and hints are based on the book and the play.
“I found quotes that inspired me to create the clues at each location,” Cailles said.
Cailles said she had the opportunity to see the play already and since she took an acting class last semester it was easier for her to go up to people and try to get them to sign up for the scavenger hunt.
She also said that she had to do a lot of research on the book “1984" because she hasn’t read it before.
Cailles said the last location was to come back to the Seventh Street Plaza and wait for the winner.
She said many of the students who approached their table were already curious because many have already read the book in high school.
Advertising freshman Kamille Bernardino also helped set up the scavenger hunt.
“We wanted to share the theme of uncovering secrets because Big Brother has control over the media and they monitor everything,” Bernardino said.
Bernardino said it was Cailles' plan to come up with the theme of the scavenger hunt to promote the themes of 1984.
She said that their aim was to show how the media can be controlled by people in very high power and make people question certain realities.
Bernardino said using sayings from the book like “225” and “Ignorance is strength” was a big part of the advertisements used to promote the scavenger hunt.
In the book, “225” refers to the government being able to manipulate its people by saying two and two makes five and no one would be able to tell the government otherwise, according to goodreads.
Computer science graduate Rachel Tsai was one of the scavenger hunt participants.
She said she hasn’t read the book since high school and didn’t remember the book but she had the free time and decided to participate.
“One of the themes I do remember was the theme of Big Brother and how you are being watched at all times,” Tsai said. “I remembered the theme from the advertisements.”
Tsai said there were five locations total and two of the places she went to were the police department building and the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library on campus.
After everyone came back from their hunt, Cailles announced the winner and called Tsai’s name to come and collect the prize.
Tsai said at each location there was a student dressed in all black with a QR code for the participants to scan before moving on.
The second and final day of this event is scheduled to take place on Wednesday with the same themes and locations in mind.
Bernardino said that aside from scanning the QR codes, participants will also be encouraged at each stop to contemplate themes discussed in the play including expressions and terms displayed in the Google Forms and QR codes.
“They need to uncover secrets,” Bernardino said. “What secrets are these big corporations hiding? Who is the media controlled by? Usually everything is corrupt because everything is about money and power.”
