Homer in Silicon post

on Oiligarchy.

Unpersuasive Games

Budget Hero is a game in which the player gets to select a series of policies on spending in the US: taxation policies, social security management, defense, health and human services, housing, education, research, and the ever-popular miscellaneous. In structure, it reminded me a bit of Red Redemption’s Climate Challenge game (where you similarly play cards to affect European policy and budgeting), but Budget Hero is more streamlined and playable.

That said, I had some issues with it.

Ayiti: Cost of Life

Recently, on a recommendation on this blog, I tried Ayiti, a UNICEF-sponsored game about the difficulty of making ends meet as a poor family in Haiti.

It’s deeper and more playable than some of the other political games I’ve mentioned here recently: the interface is mostly well-designed (though I had a couple of particular gripes); there’s enough variation from playthrough to playthrough that you have to adapt your strategy a bit even when you think you’ve cracked the game; and it didn’t feel like preaching to the choir, at least not all the time.

McDonalds Videogame

Continuing with the protest game theme (something that I’ve found increasingly interesting of late), recently I played a few rounds of the McDonalds videogame.

The premise is that you’re running McDonalds (no coy alternative parody names here — they frankly use the brand and icons throughout) and must make decisions about how to raise and feed cattle, run your employment lines, and set up advertising systems. Some of your options are pretty disturbing: there are a range of hormones and animal-byproduct-based feeds that you can use to bulk up the cows, for instance. You can bulldoze rainforest and steal land used to feed the local population in third-world countries. And if you overgraze pasture for too many years in a row, it will lose fertility and eventually become an unrecoverable wasteland. There are plenty of opportunities for villainy.

The press I’ve read on the game generally suggests that it is meant to make us all question McDonalds and similar corporations. Personally, I found myself feeling unexpectedly sympathetic for the corporation.

Oil God

Only a liberal would find this game remotely interesting and even then not for long.

Teaching, Persuading, Lampooning

I’ve been thinking more about “Airport Security”. Maybe I’m being unfair and judging it by the wrong criteria: given the off-the-scale absurdity, maybe it would be most reasonable to regard it as a kind of interactive editorial cartoon, rather than as an interactive argument.

I might put Persuasive Games’ Disaffected into a similar category: it’s a frustrating game to play, in a way that pokes fun of the frustrations of a copy shop in real life, without actually emulating the system at work in any depth. And their Presidential Pong goes even further, with the game-play almost entirely separate from the political content, which is expressed chiefly in editorial-cartoon format. (The “special powers” of each candidate are cute, but some of them work better than others, both as political comment and as powers within the game.)

Is there a single axis here, from anti-advergames and lampoons through semi-educational pieces like Electrocity into hard-core investigative or scientific simulations?

And how much do supposedly incidental aspects of the user interface determine our experience? I’m not talking about the assumptions buried in the simulation — those are necessarily ideological — but about surface qualities, like how difficult or easy various tasks are, how well optimized the game experience is, and how it uses the frustration that Grant Tavinor identifies as one of the key emotions evoked by gaming.

I’ve now played several games whose persuasive point was mostly achieved by a) annoying the heck out of the player and b) framing that annoyance as the natural result of some kind of unreasonable system — Airport Security is only one example. This may be emotionally effective, but is it rhetorically fair?

Airport Security

Someone recently recommended “Airport Security”, a mini-game about being an airport security worker trying to keep up with a constantly-changing set of rules about what can and cannot be brought onto a plane.

While I sympathize with the message of the game, it didn’t really work for me, for two reasons.

Persuasive Games

Those who follow Grand Text Auto are presumably already aware of this, but Ian Bogost has published a new book on persuasive games. So far, I’ve only read the chapters available in PDF, but this looks like an extremely interesting discussion of the ways in which simulations can argue for a position or an idea about how a system works.

Data Visualization and the State of the Union

While I’m on the topic of games and IF with educational or persuasive value, I should mention (though I’m not sure how to place it relative to everything else) the State of the Union explorer. It allows the reader/player/experiencer to explore statistical information about the State of the Union addresses, discovering which words gain and lose prominence in political consciousness, and comparing any two specific years in overlay.

Educational and Editorial Games

Lately I’ve played a few rounds of Electrocity, a simulation game by a New Zealand power company in which the player gets to manage the power supply for a young city. It’s designed to be played by school kids, so the interface is deliberately a bit simpler than for most sim games, but otherwise it basically works in a familiar way: you have various resources, and you can build things (mines, gas wells, airports, hydro-electric plants) and clean them up. At the end of the game, you’re scored on how well you did at building a large population, a clean environment, and a steady power supply.