Cynicism

He's done it again, Paolo Pedercini has made a fun, polished, punk-positive satire, but this time instead of focusing on a particular industry or scandal, he's taking a broad-view of a world economy driven and chained by oil. In Oiligarchy you play the CEO of an international oil company, drilling your way to riches and dominance. I've been looking forward to this game since Paolo mentioned it to me at Games for Change in June, he told me "the better you are at the game, the worse you'll do."

Paolo Pedercini is a mad bastard, and the McDonald's game is his sharp, procedural satire of how fast food is a corrupt industry by necessity. The game is set up so that you cannot win without compromising. Try it, you'll see. While you can maintain mild growth without using hormones or genetically modified crops, your bosses will not be satisfied. To really succeed, you have to employ what some might call "unnatural" means, though at Corporate, they call it "McFriendly growth measures".

Most "serious" games are, well, seriously dull -- high-minded, doubtless, but way too earnest, and often just bad games (since, you know, actual gameplay gets short shrift in favor of the message). And "The Redistricting Game" does not exactly get the pulse pounding as a name, no?

But surprise, it's actually engaging. It's a level-based game in which the challenges increase: at first, you're just redistricting for population equality, but then you try to gerrymander in favor of your party, and then you also have to deal with racial considerations (a constraint in federal law). You're facing a map of the state of Adams, with little blue dots representing Democratic voters, and little red ones Republicans, sliding district boundaries across the map.

Disaffected! is an anti-advergame, if you will, in which you take the role of a Kinko's employee who is not all that interested in working and is faced with a constant stream of increasingly annoyed customers. Gameplay is somewhat similar to the old arcade game Tapper, or to games like Diner Dash, in that you must run around attempting to satisfy the demands of your customers--although in Disaffected!, sometimes your character just doesn't feel like working or gets confused...