Sweatshop is a game dramatizing the plight of Third World sweatshop workers, created by Littleloud for the BBC's Channel 4, in the form of a tower defense game.
That is, the creeps are items being manufactured and move along a conveyor; the towers are sweatshop laborers, who "add work" to each item until it is complete, and if too many incomplete items get to the end of the belt, you lose the level, and are berated by your obnoxious boss.
You can, of course, increase the speed of the belt to make your workers work faster, and in later levels, you must also do things like place water coolers strategically so they don't keel over from dehydration. Workers can become badly injured on the line, and even die.
As a tower defense game per se, it is not particularly innovative; but the use of the genre in this context is imaginative and, unlike most "games for change" that adopt an established genre, it actually fits the subject matter. And it's even funny, in a sick way.
Littleloud also developed The Curfew.
Channel 4 isn't BBC
Channel 4 isn't owned by the BBC (confusingly Channel 4 and BBC4 are two different channels)
(PS: Love the blog)
Oops, sorry about that....
Oops, sorry about that.... Ignorant Yank making an unwarranted assumption.
I really liked this, it made
I really liked this, it made me think deeply about economic statistics and what most people have to go through just to keep it together. It also made me think they'd be better off growing food, but there's nobody yelling at them to do that so maybe it's an impressionistic thing rather than a sheer homo economicus kind of calculation that drives all this. Obviously there's room in the profit margins of these businesses for better conditions and pay, though this may not be true in all circumstances.
I thought the game design worked well and while not always conducive to the themes (the "For Real" bits added most of the color) the playful drudgery of having to crunch level after level (I droned on through the whole set of content) somehow bakes in the lesson of labor.
I was thinking about the "Fantasy of Labor" discussion at GDC this year, it made me crack up.
What? "they'd be better off
What? "they'd be better off growing food" The whole idea behind the industrial revolution is that people stop subsistence farming and take up factory jobs. That's whats taking place in China right now. While working in a sweatshop is obviously grueling for the employed and distasteful to think of for us relatively pampered Westerners, it's hard to overstate the modernizing effect the presence of factories has on a society. People are working in these sweatshops because it's a step up from their previous lives. We can all hope for a time when the first and third world distinctions are no longer useful, but there's no denying that sweatshops are part of our own history as well and should be taken as signs of movement in the right direction rather than sources of unambiguous misery.