The Leaderboard (Why are you doing this?) is a participatory artwork/game that asks questions of its participants about competitiveness, networking activities, and the gamification of basic human interactions. Participants who opt-in enter a networking competition, with a publicly displayed leaderboard of who has made the most connections. As the game progresses, the leaderboard begins to ask questions of those in the lead, about their motivations that have driven them to succeed, and how real the connections they have made feel to them.

I created this game out of feelings of isolation and my difficulty in forming deeper social bonds in this era of shallow hyper-connectivity. Social media has created a world where you can instantly form connections with other people across the entire world, but has reduced the number of actual,  meaningful friendships and social bonds that hold real communities together. Influencers compete for greater numbers of followers, and parasocial relationships are becoming more and more common. Within industries, social contact has given way to the efficiency of "networking" and personal branding, and an individualism that erodes the strength of collective action. This game wants participants to question why these shallow connections have become the default, and what it means for wider society that they have become so.