To give myself a better idea of what kind of game I would be making, I decided to conduct a small case study of games in this field that I wanted to attempt to emulate elements of. Through consultation of peers and faculty I realised that I wanted to focus on making what I called a satirical game but could better be described as games that put you into a role that it proceeds to mock in either an absurdist or comedic way.
The best way to explain the style is to get right into it, as the selected games will speak for themselves. The games I chose to look into were:
- Oiligarchy (Molleindustria, 2008)
- To Build A Better Mousetrap (Molleindustria, 2014)
- You Are Jeff Bezos (Kris Ligman, 2018)
- Thoughts And Prayers: The Game (Everyday Arcade, 2018)
I will be attempting to view these games through an instrumentalist framework, as I believe it better serves to analyse and design political moral and philosophical games (Sicart, 2010). Given that this is a new concept for me it may miss some aspects of the framework, but as I understand it instrumental play serves to critique procedural rhetoric for analysing games, which states that a games meaning and message is contained entirely in it’s rules, and only configured and experience by players through play. Instrumental play seeks to reintegrate the player into the process of understanding games theoretically, as it states that the player is not only a passive configurator of the simulation, but a creative, politically and ethically minded part of the simulation, once they engage with it. I believe this work’s publication follows somewhat the debate in literature about authorial intent, and resonated with me as I prefer the Death of The Author approach (Barthes, 1967)
Oiligarchy: Molleindustria
Oiligarchy is a game where you play as an oil company executive, looking to drill, expand to new countries and manipulate the US government to allow you to continue destroying the planet until the resources run dry. Throughout the game you can send troops in to destroy “terrorist” insurgencies, bribe a party to win races and put politicians favourable to you in power, and build and expand your operation to get more oil babyyyy.
When playing this game as a kid, I really couldn’t comprehend the ethics of the oil industry, and didn’t know what an oligarchy was, so I engaged with it purely as a fun timewaster where I saw all opposition to me as something to get rid of, and only struggled with depleting oil reserves to get me where I wanted. This is just to state that the player engaging with a game is as important to it’s political message as the game’s rules and systems itself.
Playing Oiligarchy again, I see that it’s an excellent way to simplify geopolitical problems and place you in the drivers seat as the cause of a lot of the world’s destruction. One thing it does well is incentivise you to be good at your job. You want to find oil reserves, build drills in new places, and bribe countries to get your way, because it pads your bottom line. For this reason I think it’s excellent of simplifying the profit motive’s effect on how a lot of the worlds powers operate, and without humanising the player’s role, allows them a better understanding of what too much power, and a goal to generate profit can do to hundreds of people (the people represented in the game being pushed out of their homes, killed and protesting).
It allows me to understand one instance of where placing a player into the shoes of those on the “other side” can allow for a better understanding of the systems acting upon them, and the ways through which they maintain power, without humanising them to the player or justifying their actions.
To Build A Better Mousetrap: Molleindustria
This is a much simpler game than Oiligarchy. You are placed in the role of an executive, trying to best make stuff, and workers come to your door looking for a job. You can place them in any of the spots available, and they will produce for you. The top row produces “innovation” a simplified version of the concept (more on this later) and the middle row produce the product. As the game goes on, workers will become dissatisfied with their pay, position, or lack of work, and you will have to manage this by either replacing them with robots, paying them more, or “putting them in a box”.
This game managed to make me think in new ways about how capital exploits workers, as by putting me in the position of power, my own philosophy and ethics led me to do my best to pay my workers well, give them work, and never put them in the box. This led to an increasingly unemployed workforce, satisfied workers, and eventually, the dissatisfied unemployed destroyed the floor and toppled my business.
Some might see this as a critique of dissatisfied “ingrates” destroying the property of others, and an “ethical boss” getting punished for nothing. But I believe the title of the game suggests that this is the point. While I was doing my best to build a better mousetrap, my workers were happy in a way, but the only way to keep the pay coming in, was to improve the product and replace them with machines, or swap them for new workers. The “new” products were just different colours of boxes, as the role of the top floor was not to innovate, it was to find new ways of keeping the business afloat, against the interest of it’s own workers:
- Creating new products with no real change that served no new purpose
- Replacing workers with machines
- Replacing office workers with computation.
I believe the game seeks to critique the fundamental idea that our current system is sustainable, as much like Oiligarchy, the resources are finite, and at some point things will go wrong as you are not set up to survive catastrophe (excuse the pun), but only to make as much money as possible until then.
This serves as another excellent example of abstractifying real world systems, to both express an idea, but also to allow people to grapple with them devoid of complications of the real world that may cloud the discussion (as well as some that add nuance to it).
You Are Jeff Bezos
While the one on this list that is a little different as it is text based, YAJB is still a game focused on expressing an idea, and it’s simple framing as waking up as Jeff Bezos and having to spend all his money is a fun way to introduce this. Throughout it’s playtime, you discover (roughly) how many things you could accomplish, with the wealth that Jeff Bezos currently has.
The main thing that the game expressed to me (as someone who already believes that the existence of billionaires is immoral) is what issues were solvable with fractions of fractions of the wealth currently available in the world, and how far that money actually would go. I have played the game 3/4 times, and had friends play as well, and none of us have been able to go below $13Bn.
The game is a humorous text adventure where you spend your money, but as part of the plot you also talk to your child about not leaving them the totality of your wealth, and help some baristas out by tipping them $1mil. This is to say, the game is first and foremost hilarious, and keeps you wanting to continue, while expressing it’s idea and message through the flavour text that follows each decision, and the decisions you can make.
Thoughts and Prayers
By far the simplest of the four games, Thoughts and Prayers is my favourite, as it pokes fun at an idea that has become very popular in mainstream politics in the US, with a silly simple mechanic of thinking, and praying. Throughout the short 30 second game, you think, and pray. see shootings happening on the US map, and are given locked options for making actual systemic change (gun legislation).
The game keeps you gripped for it’s entire 30 second runtime, and at the end shows how many thoughts and prayers were issued, and the 0 deaths they prevented. This ending, in my mind, seeks to ridicule the use of thoughts and prayers as a measure to put off the enacting of any meaningful change that could prevent the atrocities it seeks to downplay.
The real strength of the game for me is its simplicity, and that simplicity bringing something Lev Kuleshov called closure, or the idea that the removal of “noise” from a shot, will strengthen the effect of that shot, and it’s relation the the other shots preceding and proceeding it.
Conclusion
From this short study I did of four political/ethical games that I personally enjoyed, I am convinced that I want to make a simple game that expresses one idea, or more likely system, well, and allows the player to experience the system I build and hopefully learn something about the world, or themselves.
My goal will be to chose a political interaction that I find particularly interesting (I’m leaning towards Media Bias, Online Discourse and “The Culture Wars”) and find a way to express both my view and a small microcosm of the reality of the concept, through my own lens.
References
- MOLLEINDUSTRIA (2008) Oiligarchy [Download] Windows. itch.io
- MOLLEINDUSTRIA (2014) To Build A Better Mousetrap [Download] Windows. itch.io
- KRIS LIGMAN (2018) You Are Jeff Bezos [Online] WebGL. itch.io
- EVERYDAY ARCADE (2018) Thoughts And Prayers: The Game [Online] WebGL. https://everydayarcade.com/
- Sicart, M., 2010. Game Studies – Against Procedurality. [online] Gamestudies.org. Available at: <http://gamestudies.org/1103/articles/sicart_ap#:~:text=In%20essence%2C%20procedural%20rhetoric%20argues,and%20guided%20by%20the%20rules.> [Accessed 3 March 2021].
- Barthes, R 1967 “Death of the Author” American Journal Aspen no. 5-6