There's a game called "I Get This Call Every Day" that was created by David Gallant about the frustrations of working in a call center. Journalist Valerie Hautch interviewed him about his creation, and her article included the identity of his employer (the Canadian Revenue Agency). When his employers found out, they fired him. He commented afterward that no one had played the game before firing him, and that he just wished they had played it.
(Polygon article:
http://www.polygon.com/features/2013/3/7/4071136/he-got-fired-for-making-a-game-i-get-this-call)
Because it was already on
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cirne's App Store purchase list, I tried a new game last night called Pipe Trouble. It's like Pipe Mania/Pipe Dreams/etc, but it's reskinned/rethought as an examination of the difficulties of running natural gas pipelines.
In the original pipe building game concept, you're just trying to get from start to finish while dodging inappropriate placement squares. In this version, you're charged from a stockpile of game money for every section of pipe you lay, and there's a man to the left who gets upset whenever you lay pipe through forests, through fields, or too close to animals. If you upset him, ecoterrorists may show up and bomb your pipe. If you go too close to houses or farms, you get fined and delayed by the government. If you don't get your pipe laid in time, it will spill out natural gas and poison people and animals in the vicinity. And all of this, of course, is running on a timer with gas actually flowing while you try to reach the end of your pipeline, because that's how the Pipe Mania concept works. And the big catch is that (for the several levels I played)
most of the maps have no clear path, so you're forced to pick among evils and hope the results won't be too bad.
Frankly, I didn't find it much fun. No matter what I did, I got in trouble with
somebody. Why you got to be so picky, environmentalists! Why you got to cost so much, pipe! And so I got curious enough to google it and see what people were saying about it.
What I learned: The game was created with a grant from TVOntario, and the developer, Pop Sandbox, got excoriated in the media for promoting ecoterrorism and being anti-business with tax dollars. The thing is, the game
isn't either of those things - it's a satire - but people who don't play games are making judgements and statements about the game in public.
As an article at financialpost.com notes, "The histrionic opposition reaction — from both the Ontario PC party and Alberta premier Alison Redford — hit the usual rhetorical talking points. There were people who were enraged that a game would depict the bombing of a pipeline. It didn’t matter that the game was meant to be a work of satire or that the bombing was something you specifically tried to avoid in the game.... What was truly sad was the reaction from Ontario’s governing Liberal party, who seemed pretty much unable to respond to the attacks, largely because they had no idea what the game was about. No one in Premier Wynne’s government seemed literate enough with video games to play the damn thing for five minutes."
(Financialpost article:
http://business.financialpost.com/2013/04/02/pipe-troubles-government-woes-highlight-gaming-illiteracy-and-ignorance/)
Michael Hancock has a lot more to say about games that touch on political topics here (
http://www.firstpersonscholar.com/pipetrouble/). That isn't really what i was thinking about, though.
What I was thinking about is the cry that's gone up from both developers: "But if you would only
play it...." If it were an essay, people would surely read it (or at least part of it) before having opinions. If it were a painting, they would surely look at it. If it were a film, they would surely watch it.
But it's a game, and important people don't play games. Or approve of games. Games are frivolous. They are for fun. They can't express important things... only make light of things. Like violence. They encourage violence. If there's ecoterrorism in a game, it's obviously the player bombing things....
This is wrong. It is
wrong in a way that I care about. Digital games are still young as an art form, but they are a valid way to criticize and comment on the world around us. I look forward to a growing awareness of that validity.
...which is, in part, self-centered: I don't ever want to be the person standing in the cold, saying, "But you didn't
play my game." But I suspect that I
will be that person someday, if I make games that attempt to change the world.
Which (despite being someone who tries so hard never to upset anyone) I hope I do. Someday. Because there are always ways the world could be improved.
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