Author: emshortif

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.

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IF Competition Discussion: Act of Murder

For the first time since I can remember, the annual IF Comp has relaxed the rules that prohibit judges from discussing games during the competition period. That being the case, I will post some of my reactions here as I go along, but I will try to protect the innocent by hiding all substantive comment, including whether I liked or did not like the piece, behind a *more* tag.

I’ve also settled on a (possibly awkward — we’ll see) two-part format for this. The first part will be a description of the game in a non-spoilery mode, the kind of thing you write for people who are deciding whether to play; then there will be spoiler space; then there will be comments intended for people who already have played. The post-space bits will be more like my usual comp game reports — some stuff about my play experience, together with gripes, spoilers, etc., but above all, specificity.

Okay. First up: Act of Murder, by “Hugh Dunnett”.

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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.

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