A Close Look at Cutthroat Capitalism

The player begins on the same map as the print article, staked with $50,000 from local tribal leaders and other investors. Their ship, represented by a token with a skull on it, starts off the coast of Somalia in the city of Eyl--a pirate haven quite unlike the Tortuga of Pirates of the Caribbean. When the player clicks on a part of the map, the pirate ship moves. Once in the Gulf of Aden, the player clicks on ships--depicted as colored dots representing different classes of ships--and moves their vessel toward the target. If they intersect with one of these dots, be they container ship, cargo ship, cruise ship, tugboat, or one of the five other classes, they have a chance of capturing the ship. If they fail, they're forced to return to Eyl and sail back up the coast. If they succeed, they move onto the negotiation phase.

The negotiation process consists of turns in which the player can choose a behavior toward the hostages aboard the ship (feed, threaten, beat, or kill), a stance to take with the negotiating party (be cordial, erratic, aggressive, or walk out), and set a ransom demand upward $30 million. The game rules reminds players that the highest ransom ever paid, however, was only $3 million. These decision affect the health of the hostages, the mood of the negotiators, and their counter-offer.

Like buying a car, great successes come from understanding the value of the ship and its hostages and carefully working toward that point. If you successfully negotiate a ransom, the reward (covered by insurance) is split between the local government, the tribal leaders and investors who staked the journey, and the crew. Failure comes when either your pirate crew abandons you or your forces are overrun. However, a smart player will never fail--and that is the strongest rhetorical point about the negotiation process.

At least in my playthroughs, I've never seen a negotiator offer less than a million dollars. The hostages and contents of the ship are always worth something, so failure is actually a result of being greedy. The smart player recognizes this, and just attempts to maximize the number of one and two million dollar bounties. A $5 million settlement provides perhaps a smug sense of satisfaction derived from succeeding in negotiation, but it's never worth the risk of being caught or the bounties lost during the time it takes to successfully deal with the other party. This is a point that gets lost between the print article and the game, in which there's a getaway risk after the ransom has been paid and hostages are released.

There are other elements missing from the game that would seem to factor into the process. Sid Meier's Pirates!, for example, takes into account the costs of travel like feeding the crew and maintaining the ship. One might also assume that the location of capture would play a part in the process--a ship taken near the cost might be harder to defend than a ship stranded in the middle of the gulf. The map screen is largely inconsequential, as its only real function is to let the player pick what kind of ship class they will pursue (which, for me, always coincided with whatever was closest). Unsuccessful attacks also have no cost associated with them, despite the article's fact that a mission costs around $25,000 a crew member, but normally only a quarter of missions are successful.

The function of "Cutthroat Capitalism" is to explain how even a modest effort by a pirating crew will produce significant results because the structure of the system allows for it. One of the print infographics explains that only 0.2% of ships were successfully highjacked during 2008, which means that the other 99.8% are easily covering the insurance costs of the ransoms. Most of the subtleties that make the article interesting are lost in the game--a problem that's likely attributable to the designer's desires to make the game manageable, learnable, and playable in short sessions.

However, the overall effect is the same. Both "Cutthroat Capitalism" pieces explain that Somali piracy is just a cost of doing business. The article explains that time and money are saved by going through the Suez Canal rather than around the Cape of Good Hope. Additionally, the cost of insurance is less than hiring private security to protect the ship. The game makes the case from the other side--once the player learns that the best value is to just take a series of small ransoms, the total cost to each individual ship is manageable. The economics of it all depicts how flawed the system is, and the written formulas of the print article and the programmed formulas of the game work hand-in-hand to achieve this end.

Cutthroat Capitalism fits (at least loosely) into five of the seven categories of promising uses we've identified in our upcoming book: infographics, editorial, documentary, puzzles, and platforms (while not being applicable to community or literacy). While it might not be the best possible examples of any of these individually, the amalgam shows how Wired attempted to integrate, not just supplement, their journalistic research with a game.

The connection to infographics is clear at first glance. The article uses infographics throughout, the game's map draws on the tradition of abstracted information set geographically, and the overall aesthetic of each is informed by a representative graphical style. While the aesthetics of the two pieces is the obvious link to infographics, the fundamental purpose of the article and game serves Edward Tufte's goals: inform the reader, reveal insights into information that would otherwise be obscured, and synthesize complicated information into a legible format. The infographic undergoes a transformation from raw data into visuals, while the game transforms data into mechanics.

Wired's approach to the issue of Somali piracy is quite different than the tact taken by the mainstream media. The story of the frequent piracy off the coast of Somalia only really gets covered in the United States when it directly effects our citizens and our commerce. The seizure and subsequent stand-off on the Maersk Alabama in April of 2009 was notable for its violent resolution--Navy SEAL snipers shot and killed three pirates. Coverage of this single instance--framed in the grand tradition of the narrative of captivity--brought the issue of piracy directly to the American public's attention. But rather than pursue the issue further, the three pirate deaths and the capture of the fourth pirate provided closure: the evil-doers got what was coming to them. Wired's article directly challenges this tale, examining the structures of global trade that builds-in pirate attacks as a part of doing business. Rather than cast the pirates as villain disruptors of the flow of commerce, while threatening the lives of the innocent, it comments on the system that seems to permit this behavior. Sure, nobody wants to be held hostage or pay ransoms, but a cost-benefit analysis of the likelihood of being captured versus taking alternate trade routes shows it's worth the risk.

Our framing of the documentarian instinct of journalism manifests itself in two ways in the Wired story. The article and game are both investigative and expose. While its investigative stance is not the traditional infiltration first-hand uncovering the injustices of the system, it is following data to a certain conclusion. It attempts to tell the story that nobody else has pursued. At a rudimentary level, it even tells a "day in the life" expose. By choosing the role of a pirate in the game, they ask the player to understand the logic by which the pirates operate. The game is about maximizing income and there's little incentive to take the WarGames route (where the only way to win is not to play). If the player so chooses, they can have their boat float aimlessly on the ocean indefinitely without encountering a game reset mechanic, but who wants to do that?

The puzzle nature of Cutthroat Capitalism is difficult to identify because puzzles, as they appear in the newspaper take very specific forms. The most commonly thought of puzzle is the crossword, which can either exist for its own sake or be imbued with content related to the news. So where might we draw a connection. The negotiation phase reminds us of a kind of rock, paper, scissors game. The player plays three cards, the computer plays three, and the outcome affects the system's dynamics. But it can also be assumed that the system has a pre-existing state, as if the player is playing their cards against a given (but hidden) hand. The question then becomes in what state is the game and how might the player respond. This has a connection to the chess or bridge columns often found alongside the crossword or Jumble. These differ from the negotiation phase in that their state is known and they have definite answers, but the negotiating phase still satisfies our desires to outwit the system by finding the optimal moves.

The content of the story is not the only significance of the two pieces, however. By creating a story tied directly to a game, in which each are based on the same factors, Wired has shown how a monthly news organization can integrate games into their workflow. This workflow can become a kind of platform that enables the regular production of these kinds of artifacts through organizational (not technical) advances. The print and digital versions tell the story in two different but complimentary ways, allowing the writers, artists, and designers to share more assets than just a topic. Most of the games we have looked at have either been supplemental to a text article or produced outside of a traditional component all-together. If Wired can repeat this effort, perhaps they can provide a model for the integration of newsgames into the newsroom in a similar manner to Alberto Cairo's integration of infographics in print and online. For the news media's uncertain future, proving that it's feasible to produce new and different media artifacts is perhaps more important than the media artifact itself.