Politics

As my review of Runner suggested, perhaps the effective way to create emotional meaning in games is through metaphor. Gray is all metaphor, and is interesting precisely because it is. But it's also, well, very tedious to play. Which raises the question of whether art is effective through a metaphorical level even if it is, in some sense, bad craft.

Layoff is developed by Tiltfactor Laboratory, which is run by Dr. Mary Flanagan, a well-regarded game studies academic, with funding from the NSF. Flanagan also runs Values at Play, which is devoted to studying how games are or can be expressive of social values.

Given these impressive facts, how interesting or successful is Layoff?

Gregory Weir swerves from the psychology of being trapped in a room or the body of a tentacled monster to give us a casualized take on the hacking type of game we could probably use more of. In fact, now that it´s been thematized to a more blantant puzzle, I think we can go ahead and level these things up to "sub-genre" status, in the same way that a Squire in FF Tactics levels up to become a Thief. The game itself doesn´t have a whole lot to do with actual hacking; it´s an abstract logic tracing game with time sensitivity on a turn-based cycle. That´s my one sentence analysis. You just click on these little packet launchers and try to clear a packet to the pyramid (why is the cliched hacking goal always a pyramid? Is there some Amon Ra/Illuminati current to the cyberpunk genre?). In order to clear it you have to shoot switches and things, which means you have to figure out the right order of packets to fire with the right timing.

Now that we're in the throes of some new and even weirder version of "Camelot," Caroline Kennedy is being considered as Senate replacement for Hillary, and they've just renamed the goddamn Triboro Bridge the "RFK Bridge" (the swine), perhaps its time, since I'm also desperately low on games to write up for "Tabletop Tuesdays," to look at The Exciting New Game of the Kennedys.

Which, you know, is most empatically not new, since it was published during the Kennedy administration (my edition doesn't have a copyright date on it), and frankly that that exciting.

Campaign Rush is like Disaffected! meets Howard Dean for Iowa. The former was a satire of Kinko's and the latter an earnest campaign game paid for by the Democratic Party. Campaign Rush is a satire of campaigns paid for by CNN, who apparently are unclear yet as to whom is putting on whom.

The game involves clicking around to answer phones, deliver campaign literature to these callers, making copies of said literature, and of course drinking regular coffees. The game is on the verge of being fun, in a manner reminiscent of Diner Dash, but then something goes wrong. There are too many phone calls coming in, and there's a sense of meaninglessness associated with their trappings.

The day after 9-11 I mowed the lawn on the rider, burning gas to halve flora on non-food producing land, then I played a videogame using brown electricity. Had I been playing Stallions In America or I Was In The War then the circle of life would have been complete - unfortunately we didn't have the technology back then.

Cactus' game is an action shooter, using the ASWD and the mouse to run and gun. You play four superstuds with soy-processed American Cheese(tm) names like Cody and Mitch, and you go through every US State slaughtering everyone, birds, bees, pigeons, peacocks, men, women and children. The moral of the story is, I guess, that they hate us because we're free.

The contest between Kennedy and Nixon for the presidency in 1960 was a watershed moment in American history. On the surface, it was between two men who couldn't have been more different from one another: a young, glamorous war-hero, scion of an immensely wealthy East Coast dynasty, brimming with optimistic visions of the nation's future, opposing an experienced, stolidly ordinary establishment Republican with a deep anti-Communist streak and solidly conservative policies. Behind their respective facades, though, both men were ruthless, cynical political campaigners who fought bitterly for an entire year over what became one of the closest presidential elections in American history.

Campaign is ostensibly a game of the 2008 US presidential elections; at start, you're given a choice of three Republican and three Democratic candidates (sorry, George). However, your "candidate" is like your king in Chess; they're all the same. 120 hit points, the same list of potential attacks, and so on. It's one of the pieces you move across the board.

The game is played on a square-gridded version of the continental US (guess Alaska and Hawaii don't count), divided into seven regions. In addition to your candidate, you start with three other units -- the possibilities include Hatchetmen, Spinmeisters, Fundraisers, and Operatives; you get to choose what combination you want.

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.

Game Tunnel's 2005 Sim Game of the Year

Books can be important; movies can be important. Games, however, are the degraded purview of violent male adolescents. Democracy cannot exist.

Except that it does, of course. It is not without flaw; but it's a game that every citizen of a democracy should play, to get a better gut understanding of the pressures faced by their leaders--and every citizen of a tyranny should play, to get a better gut understanding of why democracy, whatever its flaws, is better than the alternatives.