Humor

In Guillotine, each of the players is a French revolutionary executioner, competing to have the honor of executing the highest-value nobles. At the beginning of play, twelve noble cards are laid out; this is the line of those waiting for execution.

Karoshi means “death by overwork”. The game traps you in a labyrinth of office space with only one means of escape: killing yourself. It’s a satire of the mind-killing effects of constant work. Luckily, the game’s structure makes it perfect for briefly playing it in your cubicle while nobody is watching and sharing it with the colleagues you trust. Watch out, though, the laughter this game will create might attract some unwanted attention from your boss!

The game has twenty-five levels where you must figure out how you can end your life as a suit-wearing work-droid. This isn’t always as easy at it sounds. Most of the puzzles require smart use of boxes and triggers, but many levels require you to think out of the box. Humor is often your reward, as the scenarios are totally unexpected.

Well, why not toot my own horn today?

The genesis of Violence was a conversation I had over lunch with James Wallis some years ago when he was in New York for a visit. He asked if I had any desire to go back to designing tabletop RPGs, and I said "not much"--but mentioned an idea I had for a wholly satirical and very likely unplayable game intended mainly as an attack on both the business practices and unspoken assumptions of RPGs. I believe my original title was "Bloodshed." We chortled a bit, Wallis went away, and a few years later wrote saying he was launching a line of short, brief, experimental RPGs by the likes of John Tynes and Robin Laws, and would I be interested in doing that repulsive game idea I had. Well, good company to be in, anyway, and I had some time between projects.

In Pillage the Village (billed as "the prequel to Defend Your Castle"), you are a disembodied hand (Dungeonkeeper-style) grabbing defenseless peasants, flinging them into the air, watching as they subsequently plummet to their deaths, then riffling their bodies for loose change.

What's notable is the stages you go through while playing the game. At first you think, "This is funny, in a sick kind of way." And then you start to think "Yes, but it's much the same thing after a while, innit?" -- at which point a new sort of villager (like, say, the fellows with the parachutes) show up, or you're given an upgrade to a new 'spell' you can use to kill the little fellows (plummeting anvils anyone?). Which re-awakens your interest just enough to keep on going, until at some point you realize, "Hmm... Some actual thought has gone into the gameplay here."

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".

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...