The Frightening, Real-World Strength of Channel 4's 'Sweatshop' Game

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By Simon Ferrari on July 28, 2011 12:43 PM | No TrackBacks
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Originally published on PBS's MediaShift Idea Lab on July 27, 2011.

Sweatshop is a new browser game, developed by Littleloud for Channel 4 Education, in which players fill the role of a factory floor manager in a developing nation. Taking design cues from the tower defense genre, the game tasks you with placing skilled workers and child laborers along a conveyor belt. It's also one of the most compelling and effective political games I've seen in recent years. 

Orders for different kinds of garments -- including hats, shirts, bags and shoes -- come down the line, and laborers assemble these products at varying speeds according to their specialty (or lack thereof, in the case of the children). For each completed garment, the player receives a small amount of cash that is then reinvested into hiring more workers or purchasing support items such as water coolers, fans and portable toilets. Some support items increase the speed or profitability of workers within their zone of effect, while others are required to prevent their inevitable exhaustion and (later in the game) bodily harm. 

Over the course of 30 stages, players are scored on the efficiency and, ultimately, character of their management decisions. This is reinforced by a trophy system, a karma meter, and a version of the classic shoulder angel/devil duo: a pitiable Child working in the factory and the comically inhumane Boss. 

The Child, who is always placed on the line for free at the beginning of each stage, explains how new support items can be used to help keep workers safe. In between stages, the Child presents brief factoids on sweatshop labor around the world. The Boss harangues players at the beginning and end of each work day, only taking a break from shouting and spewing his bad-taste humor to take phone calls from the pompous fashion industry moguls who send in orders.
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Spent's Exercise in Empathy

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By Simon Ferrari on June 12, 2011 5:40 PM | No TrackBacks
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In February, Urban Ministries of Durham (a faith-based, non-proselytizing aid organization) and McKinney (an ad agency reportedly working pro bono) launched a webgame called Spent about the hardships of poverty and unemployment. It puts players in the shoes of a single parent who has recently been put out of a job, has lost one's house to debts, and has only $1000 left in savings. The goal of the game is to make it through a month without going completely bankrupt. In many ways this game is similar to Positech's Kudos series, which tasks a player-character in his or her late teens to build a career and a social life without succumbing to bankruptcy, illness, or depression. Both games stack the odds of success heavily against their players in order to prove a point, yet neither is completely unfair, random, or reliant on the rhetoric of failure. While Kudos strives for a more complete simulation of the daily struggle to survive, Spent is more about providing a light, casually playable experience driven by current research on the costs of living. 

Spent is a game about short-term personal finance, or the daily need to pinch pennies just to keep food on the table and provide a small levee against emergencies. Although the game's loose causal chain between decision and consequence (coupled with the emphasis on text-based delivery of information) provides a less pure procedural rhetorical model of poverty, it is nevertheless effective given an assumed target audience of middle-class teenagers and young adults. For many this game will merely serve as an exercise in sensitivity to the plights of the less fortunate (a balm to relieve conservative semantic engineering), perhaps inspiring a small donation at the end of the game. Instead of seeing Spent as a "call to action," it might be okay to settle for the more feasible--yet no less daunting or important--goal of educating young adults who are about to make decisions about whether to take out loans to go to college, keep an unwanted pregnancy, drop out of high school, or enter the job market.
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The Truth in (Mostly) Black and White

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By Simon Ferrari on June 3, 2011 12:36 PM | No TrackBacks
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You Shall Know The Truth is a timed hidden object game developed by Jonas Kyratzes for the Wikileaks Stories project. You play a spy sent by the U.S. intelligence community to retrieve leaked documents and biometric data on an unnamed Wikileaks employee from his or her apartment. It's a difficult game, not in that it's particularly trying to find all of the mission-targeted data before the timer runs out but because it adds a dark, humorous edge to a genre of casual games that traditionally has no ideological bent. It is also contradictory and perhaps difficult to take seriously at times, but, taken as a whole, it's a complex work with a novel take on the intersection between politics and play. Check it out before reading on, because there are spoilers ahead.
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Wikileaks Blues

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By Simon Ferrari on May 24, 2011 1:56 PM | No TrackBacks
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We've been somewhat remiss in our coverage of the Wikileaks Stories series of games here on this blog. One reason is that the project has been somewhat well-covered elsewhere, and we try to focus on games that aren't being looked at by other sources. Another reason is that sometimes we've got to ruminate on how newsgames work and what they mean before we're ready to explain how they fit into the work we do. And, to be honest, we still probably don't entirely understand what the project represents, how it's different from newsgames projects we've seen in the past, or what it will mean for the future. 

Obviously it's wonderful to see indie developers who haven't engaged with the genre in the past sticking their toes in the water (or their necks on the block), but it's impossible to ignore that the most timely and nuanced entry in the series thus far has come from Paolo Pedercini, a grizzled veteran. That boy has had to roll his eyes through enough of my insufferable critiques in the past, so we'll only be looking at the latter two this week and next. If you're unfamiliar with the project, Joel Goodwin's blog Electron Dance is a great place to start for links to all the games, brief analysis and comparison, and a lengthy interview with Jonas Kyratzes (one of the two Wikileaks Stories project coordinators).

Damian Connolly's Wikileakers is the most recent of the three currently-extant Wikileaks Stories games. It's clearly the most accessible, and it has, perhaps, been written off as overly simplistic. And we can see why: it's more cartoonish than the previous Wikileaks Stories games, it uses Internet slang ("pron"), marijuana jokes, and cheap one-offs at the President, and it hinges on a somewhat conservative score-chasing goal structure. There's no gray area here: Assange is our hero (as pointed out by Goodwin, it's the only game that features him as the player character), and the "propaganda model" media is trying to keep him down.

Players control a pixellated Assange as he runs back and forth in what appears to be an FBI lobby, dodging lasers and bombs. The former represent corrupt media sources, while the bombs drop from a crane ominously labeled "PR" (the bombs themselves alternately accusing the man of being a terrorist and sexual deviant). Lasers constantly track Assange, stopping briefly to intermittently fire. Players can mouse-click to place single a block labelled "free press" that will obstruct exactly one laser shot before disappearing. While the first two media lasers bear American flags, Swedish and Australian media sources are added as the player's score increases.
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An Introduction to Micro-Rhetorics via Minecraft

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By Hank Whitson on April 19, 2011 11:20 AM | No TrackBacks
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As a part of our work on a newsgame authoring tool, the newsgames team has been working on ways to dissect and analyze the raw components of classic videogames. One term we've used to describe the fundamental dynamics of game-player interaction is the "micro-rhetoric," which can be described as a discrete impression created by the smallest possible aspect of a mechanic or object parameter. For example, enemies moving according to a slow and predictable displacement rule will result in pattern-driven play, producing a micro-rhetoric of "routine," whereas enemies with quick and unpredictable movements will require twitchiness from players and create an impression of danger.

Even the simplest video games have the potential for numerous micro-rhetorics depending on factors such as movement speed, firing patterns, numbers of lives, and scoring variations. The classic Atari title Kaboom, which has served as a Rosetta Stone for our ludic deconstructions, contains at least 16 micro-rhetorics. 

One thing that we quickly learned during our deconstructions is that individual micro-rhetorics are rarely unique. Variations on enemy health, movement, and attack speeds result in different shades of aggression and evasion while different scoring and reward structures reinforce or discourage certain patterns of play. It is the various combinations of these existing micro-rhetorics that produce unique procedural arguments. There are rarer mechanics that are particularly expressive, however. The neutral zone in Yar's Revenge has a number of rhetorical applications. It can be a shelter, or a place to hide. Retreating to it can be considered an act of cowardice or an intelligent tactical move.

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CheneyStar: This is Not a Newsgame

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By Hank Whitson on April 11, 2011 12:35 PM | No TrackBacks

"Is this a newsgame?" isn't a question that comes up too often in our project studio meetings. In Newsgames: Journalism at Play, Bogost, Ferrari, and Schweizer clearly outline the various categories and qualities of different newsgames, and it's usually easy to identify new newsgames through their classification system. At the same time, it can be difficult to take stock of a title with newsworthy elements without playing it.

So when I heard about CheneyStar, a downloadable title available on Xbox Live's Indie Games Channel featuring the likeness of Dick Cheney, I decided to investigate. The strange thing I played is definitely not a newsgame. It isn't even about the news, save for the fact that it features the pixelated face of a controversial ex-Vice President as its primary antagonist.  It is a useful example, however, of what the border between newsgames and other games can look like.

The game is based on the arcade classic, Sinistar, which plays similarly to Asteroids in that you navigate a space-ship through a 2-dimensional space while destroying asteroids and enemy fighter ships. The twist is that you also have to destroy a roving robotic battle station.  In CheneyStar said battle station resembles Dick Cheney's head re-imagined as a terminator.

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Brainstorming Games for Wikileaks Stories

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By Brian Hertler on February 22, 2011 10:32 AM | No TrackBacks
wikileaksStoriesLogo_small.pngThe treatment of Wikileaks by the American press has been troublesome on many levels, but the most saddening fact is that -- among all the commotion -- the actual content of the leaks has been largely ignored. Whenever Wikileaks is discussed, what gets the most attention is simply that it exists, that it embarrasses the United States government, and the question of whether Julian Assange is a sex offender.

Video games on the topic to date have underscored this: the most popular game, Wikileaks: The Game, simply depicts Julian Assange stealing documents from President Obama, without any apparent interest what those documents contain.  It's a tabloid game, focused entirely on the colorful personalities involved (in this case, a shadowy Assange and a Barack Obama literally sleeping on the job). 

Another popular game of the same stripe is Uncle Sam vs. Wikileaks, in which the player, as Uncle Sam, must punch Wikileaks servers to destroy them while blocking projectile-like "classified documents"; when the player is hit with a document, a jokey headline appears onscreen ("Wikileaks: Uncle Sam Doesn't Wash His Hands After Using the Bathroom"). The fact that no actual leaks appear in the game strikes me as a tremendous missed opportunity, and indicative of larger coverage of the Wikileaks story. The revelation that, for instance, the United States is actively undermining international action on climate change, is almost completely ignored and unreported in the American media, with the unfortunate result that -- at least in America -- Wikileaks' efforts have largely been in vain. For all the persecutions that it suffers, its work has so far failed to meaningfully engage the American people. 

Wikileaks Stories, a new initiative from the gaming blog Gnome's Lair and indie designer Jonas Kyratzes, proposes to change this. The main site touts itself as a place "where independent game designers use their artform in the service of freedom and democracy, transforming the information revealed by Wikileaks into computer games." It's a powerful idea, and one that could potentially demonstrate some of the unique capabilities of newsgames. 

Unfortunately, video games take a long time to make, so we're unlikely to see much quality content before several months (editor's note: excepting Leaky World). Luckily, Wikileaks seems poised to remain relevant in the news for some time, not least because only a small fraction of its roughly 250,000 diplomatic cables have been released. At least a handful of games for the initiative appear to be under development, at least one of which will be interactive fiction, but we'll have to wait to see the full extent of Wikileaks Stories.

In the meantime, I'd like to propose a couple of ideas for future games based on Wikileaks' revelations. These ideas range in genre and scope, but they're all primarily designed to get players thinking about the actual facts that Wikileaks has uncovered, and not simply the controversy that surrounds the organization. Given a little imagination, virtually any one of the leaks can be turned into a meaningful newsgame, and with any luck we'll be seeing more indie developers working with the Wikileaks Stories initiative in months to come.
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Super Mario BP Oil Spill

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By Benjamin Chapman on February 15, 2011 10:07 AM | No TrackBacks
MarioOilTitle.pngSuper Mario BP Oil Spill is a flash game whose title exactly describes its content. It is also an example of the importance of timeliness with newsgames, as upon its release in early December 2010 on Newgrounds, many online reviewers immediately pointed out that the game was "so six months ago." Nonetheless, the game attempts to recontextualize the BP Oil Spill of 2010 as one of the many problems that only Mario can solve.
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UAV Game: Differing Interpretations

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By Chris DeLeon on February 11, 2011 1:47 PM | No TrackBacks
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A couple of nights ago, I received a call from Remy Karns, a student at UC Berkeley. He had a 3-page design document (uav-designdoc.pdf), but needed help with implementation. Seven hours later, I had UAV Game [Play in Flash] implemented according to his spec.

The short time frame matters here because it means that after the document hand off, he and I had minimal communication, except to confirm resolution to ambiguity and conflicts in the plan. We didn't have time for iterative feedback, nor mock-ups and meetings to unify vision. Remy and I weren't necessarily on the same page.

(Disclaimer: although UAV Game bears resemblance to the newsgame September 12 by Powerful Robot, it serves a different rhetorical function. Remy hadn't seen or heard of September 12 until I mentioned it after implementing his design.)

All three parties - Remy as designer, myself as developer, and the players (shared via NewGrounds, Kongregate, and social networks) - have different ideas about what the project means.

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Remy's intent as designer was to "allow for player driven narrative to take place," based on the idea that "targets and followers don't denote any type of specific individual, save for their function within the game... The context of the game is left open to the player." From his design document:

"UAV is not a game with a moral or a message - it exists solely as a game entity... Identifiers for NPCs are left neutral to allow player driven narratives to emerge. Targets are targets, which do not denote their occupation... Therefore, the player may just as easily interpret the game as an American UAV eliminating a leader of a religious terrorist organization in the middle east, or as a secret spy plane used to quell a political uprising in a foreign country, or a disillusioned and guilty UAV pilot hoping to right his wrongs by killing the corrupt commander who had blatantly committed war crimes."

However, everyone who has played this game and spoken with me about it has assumed that the target was a terrorist.

I suspect that the designer's expected interpretation is lost because we typically treat assumptions as true unless definite contradiction arises. We don't hold as equally probable what seems likely (the UAV is a US military aircraft attacking terrorist targets in the Middle East, since this has been its most publicized deployment) and what could possibly be without a violation of consistency (UAV turned on its own forces). The latter is how plot twists and detective novels surprise us - so that while a less obvious role could be revealed to the user on the end screen, without doing so the possibility is likely ignored.
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Downing Street Fighter

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By Benjamin Chapman on February 2, 2011 11:00 AM | No TrackBacks
DSFtitle.pngTabloid games that mock political leaders are nothing new, and T-Enterprise's 2010 game Downing Street Fighter is a prime example of putting political figures into a ridiculous game environment, presumably for the sake of laughs. The game was made before the 2010 general election in the United Kingdom, and features the foremost three candidates for Prime Minister thrust into a fighting game that pits them against each other and finally against a bizarre character named the Blair-Witch, an ogre with the heads of Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher.

While the game falls well within long-established tropes of tabloid games, it also features a written press release that explains the game's purpose. The press release states that the game was made specifically to fight political apathy in the UK, and  "... is completely unbiased as the three main characters are balanced in terms of their abilities so you simply have to choose the one you want to win. It is therefore only a political tool as far as its use to promote the election is concerned rather than favouring any particular party." The press release goes on to assert that the game is especially targeted at youth who remember Street Fighter, the classic video game series. These are ideals that attempt to present Downing Street Fighter as more than a simple tabloid game.
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Dilma's Adventure

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By Hank Whitson on November 26, 2010 9:54 AM | No TrackBacks
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Special thanks to Ramiro Corbetta of Powerhead Games for helping us translate the Portuguese text in this game.


On Sunday October 31st, Dilma Rousseff defeated Jose Serra in a second round of balloting to become Brazil's first female president. Earlier that month, Rousseff became the first Brazilian presidential candidate to have her own videogame when Give Me Five Entertainment Group released Dilma Adventure on October 19th.


In this Flash game, players guide Dilma through a level of stony platforms and perilous drops populated by shuffling zombified versions of Jose Serra, while scoring as many votes as possible by collecting ballot boxes. Dilma can also pick up red stars scattered throughout the level, which are the symbol of the Brazilian Workers Party. As long as Dilma has stars, she can survive contact with enemies (a rule from the Sonic series), and she can use them as projectiles against the Serra zombies.


The game's cleverest mechanic is Dilma's special attack; the ability to call in outgoing president Luiz Inacio Lula Da Silva to run across the screen, defeating all the enemies in his path. Silva chose Rousseff as his favored successor to the presidency and has supported her throughout the election. Furthermore, players gain the ability to summon "Lula" by collecting gold stars marked with a "13," Rousseff's number on the ballot. But the game doesn't try to assign every element of play a political mapping: projectile-dropping toucans randomly assault Dilma throughout the level, emphasizing the whimsical nature of the game.

 

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Conflict: The Middle East Political Simulator

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By Benjamin Chapman on November 10, 2010 1:24 PM | No TrackBacks
conflict.JPGConflict: The Middle East Political Simulator is a political strategy game designed by David J. Eastman that was published in 1990 for MS-DOS, Atari ST, and Amiga computers. The game is a fairly good example of a complex turn-based strategy game, but what makes it far more interesting as a historical artifact is its armchair depiction of Middle East politics and the scope of events that the game predicts based on the player's input. The chosen subject matter and the violent predictions that the event generator is inclined to generate would make the game nearly impossible to reproduce in 2010, so Conflict also marks a time when games were not as culturally observed (and Middle East politics were not as controversial) as they are now.  

Upon starting a new game, a series of newspaper headlines establish that the player is the new premier of Israel, freshly instated after the assassination of the previous premier. The date of January 1997 is shown, projecting 7 years after the game's release. The player is tasked with managing relations with 7 other nations: Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, and Syria. Representing Israel, the player may interact with other nations in a number of ways, ranging from peaceful diplomatic gestures to nuclear war. The game is turn-based, and on each turn the player chooses how to interact with each nation. Other concerns include dealing with the "Palestinian problem" within Israel, managing Israel's development of a nuclear arsenal, and purchasing arms from a list of suppliers including the United States.   Once a player makes all the decisions desired, the turn is ended, a month passes, and a new series of newspapers are displayed reporting the events that the last turn has caused.
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Representation and Meaning: Comparing Mansion Impossible to Property Savvy

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By Chris DeLeon on October 29, 2010 4:14 PM | No TrackBacks
Discussion of games-with-meaning is often limited by lack of basis for relevant comparison. We're stuck with either apples-to-oranges comparisons between games with vastly different purposes or offering best attempts at interpretation without a practical way to further inspect those ideas. Tech Savvy produced Property Savvy in 2007 as an interpretation of Mansion Impossible, creating, inadvertently, a relevant basis for comparison.

To borrow Ian Bogost's description of Mansion: Impossible from Persuasive Games:

"Mansion Impossible is a web-based videogame about real-estate investment... Houses pop out of the empty ground to go on the market, and disappear back into the ground when they sell. The price is inscribed on the house, and each house experiences a single gain-loss cycle before stabilizing. The player starts out with $100K, and the goal of the game is to build enough capital to buy the $10 million mansion on the edge of the screen. The player clicks on houses to buy or sell, taking care to time a sale for maximum profit. The town is divided into lower- and higher-cost housing areas, with the top right near the mansion offering the most exclusive and most expensive digs... A great amount of detail is abstracted from Mansion Impossible."

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Above, Mansion: Impossible.
Below, Property Savvy.

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Mechanically, both games are nearly identical in their simplified abstraction of real-estate investment - that is of course not by coincidence, as Property Savvy was modeled after Mansion: Impossible. In both:

  • The goal is the same. The player spends 14-25+ years of in-game time buying houses while their prices rise, then selling those houses as soon as their price begin to drop, culminating with the purchase of a $10 million mansion.
  • The same information is depicted. The interface shows the amount of time taken, the amount of cash currently available for investment, and houses laid out graphically in a gradient from cheapest (farthest from the mansion) to most expensive (closest to the mansion). 
  • Gameplay tuning is similar. Informally playing each makes readily apparent the commonality in how long houses stay on screen, how quickly progress is made, and what strategies are optimal. 
  • Real-Estate is presented as a coherent, winnable system. Real-world loss risks such as natural disaster, economic collapse, and shifts in criminal/regulatory patterns are non-existent within these games, trimming the activity of real-estate investment down to a bare, easily understood, idealized form.

However, these two games are not identical. There are five primary differences. The first three are relatively minor variations - they are covered here to avoid uncertainty over whether such differences were overlooked, rather than inspected and deemed unimportant. The last two differences - which are closely related - turn out to have a significant effect on the meaning represented.
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Follow Up: Against Escapism

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By Simon Ferrari on December 17, 2008 10:09 AM | No TrackBacks
My last post on how video games weren't necessarily escapist (and the subject I initially set out to address: how they also might fit Chomsky's propaganda model) raised quite a few objections, so I'd like to see if I can clarify my meaning on a few of those points. By the end, I'll try to segue back onto the subject of newsgames and how they relate to this issue.

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Death by Water: Newsgames and Art

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By Ian Bogost on December 5, 2008 12:51 PM | 2 Comments | No TrackBacks
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One question we've been asking in the course of this research is as follows: in what circumstances might videogames serve as a better medium for news than print, image, video, etc. Each medium has certain properties that make it more and less useful in different circumstances. 

One of the possible benefits of games is their ability to reconstruct experiences rather than just describing them. In some cases, the experience characterized by news has to do with events and how they took place, for example, where and when the recent terrorist attacks in India occurred. But in other cases, experience means something much more abstract: the emotional sensation of an event, for example, what did it feel like to cower in fear for hours in a Mumbai restaurant or hotel room.

The important payload of a news story might thus come from the aftermath of an experience itself, whether that experience is one of joy, fear, desperation, or loss. Indeed, if citizens were to be better able to feel the sensations of experiences through simulation rather than description, account, or retelling, perhaps they would better connect such joys, fears, desperations, or losses to their own lives.
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Editorial: Election Games? Citizens, First

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By Douglas Wilson on November 2, 2008 3:30 AM | No TrackBacks

Only two days left until November 4.

For months and months now, it's felt like the election has been on absolutely everybody's mind. With the stakes seemingly higher than ever, all sorts of people are coming out of the woodwork to support their candidate.

If we look to traditional media, we find scores of artists using their chosen craft to engage the election. To use a few Obama-centric examples: we've heard the Black Eyed Peas (and a gaggle of famous pop musicians) singing "Yes We Can"; we've seen Sarah Silverman use her in-your-face TV comedy to get out the Democratic vote in Florida; Ron Howard went as far as to resurrect The Andy Griffith Show and Happy Days for his own pro-Obama short; hell, even the Budweiser "Wassup" guys spoofed their commercial to urge people to vote for change. Hollywood too is cashing in on election fever: witness Oliver Stone's W or Kevin Costner's Swing Vote.

As a games researcher and designer, I can only ask: why are there so few - if any - compelling political games or newsgames about this election cycle?

The question, which plagues the so-called Serious Games movement more generally, is far too contentious to be answered in one blog post. Ian himself tackled the question just two days ago, drawing a distinction between politics and politicking. But in focusing on the various affordances of games, Ian only orbits around what I personally see as the heart of the issue.

For my purposes, I'd like to reflect on one particular example that, in my mind, symbolizes the failure of the game designer community to capitalize on this historic election. In doing so, I want to suggest that the "problem" - if we should even view the dearth of worthwhile election games as problematic - has just as much to do with the culture around game design. We need to address the mindset under which these kinds of games are designed.

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