Fatworld

Well, I wanted to review Ian Bogost's new game Fatworld today, as it was just launched, but as it happens it runs like molasses on my 1.5GHz machine, so this will have to be more of a "first impressions" post, perhaps with a more in-depth review to follow in future.

The fact that a 13MB game is so slow, incidentally, is an example of what happens when you try to implement a serious simulation using ActionScript. Bad idea, really, but of course Ian uses the tools he's familiar with.

The didactic purpose of Fatworld is to demonstrate the effect of unhealthy lifestyles on mortality by having you control a character and see what his or her lifespan turns out to be based on your eating and exercise decisions. Exhorting people to eat more healthily and exercise more demonstrably doesn't change most people's habits, and at least a priori, using a sim to demonstrate effects is a better way to persuade people to change.

Avatars are highly customizable, not only in appearance, but in terms of age, starting weight, initial health difficulties (e.g., diabetes), and social class (which determines your starting money and income). On the gamemap are a number of restaurants with varying cuisine choices, and you can purchase and operate a restaurant, preparing food via a variety of menus. Your income determines what scale of housing you can afford, and also necessarily impacts your food alternatives--as far as I can tell, poor people basically get stuck with McD's, though actually rice and beans are cheap, and it's perfectly possible to eat reasonably well on a budget if you work at it. Richer people also have more exercise options (personal trainers, for example).

You can also "lobby" for governmental changes, including fairly extreme ones (meat is murder!), but this is more like changing game settings than simulated in detail.

Of course, everyone winds up in the cemetary eventually, but some die younger than others.

It's an interesting effort, and certainly larger in scale, more detailed, and more coherent than most of Ian's games (which tend to be amusing throw-offs); it's hard for me to tell at this juncture how compelling it actually is, since it is so damn slow. One minor point that I find irritating; the gamemap is designed so that streets run NW/SE and NE/SW, while the arrow keys, used to move about, move you N/S/E/W. As a result, to get anywhere you wind up wandering back and forth across the street, like a drunk areel, since the street grid doesn't conform to your movement directions. Rather ugly from a UI perspective, and certainly makes me wish they'd at least used the numeric keypad and allowed you 8 rather than 4 directions of movement.

Still, it's an attempt to tackle a topic very unusual for games, and if you have a recent, high-end system, probably worth looking at.