Homeland Guantanamo is a Flash "game for change" dramatizing the iniquities of the American system of immigrant detention. This system is indeed iniquitous -- no proper judicial oversight, no mechanism for appeal outside of the system itself, and based on the a priori assumption of guilt, a notion contrary to Anglo-American common law on which our justice system is supposedly based. Or to put it another way, I am in complete agreement with the premises of the game, so my criticisms of it should be understood not as an attack on its politics, but on its merits as a game qua game, as well as its effectiveness as an instrument of persuasion.
It was developed by Free Range Studios under the aegis of Breakthrough, a human rights organization that also produced ICED. Free Range also produced the short film The Story of Stuff, a noxious bit of scare-mongering, extreme-Green, anti-capitalist propaganda that presents highly dubious assertions and demonstrable untruths as "fact."
In Homeland Guantanamo, you play a journalist who has gotten a job as a guard at a detention center in order to investigate the death of one of the people held there. Using a pop-up map, you navigate from one location of the center to another, guided by one of the prisoners who speaks to you frequently in voice-over. Each "location" is a circular panoramic view, scrollable left-right with arrows at the sides of the screen. At some locations on the screen are "+" signs you may click -- hotspots, in other words.
Most hotspots trigger some bit of spoken audio from your guide, generally about how horrible things are at the detention center. Occasionally, they trigger a pop-up video, generally an interview with someone who was held at a detention center testifying as to what the experience was like. There's also a notebook that fills with text about what you've found, and an "inventory." There are no real puzzles to solve, but you need to obtain some inventory items, then revisit some locations to find the evidence you need about the detainee's death to "win."
In other words, there's something of the external indicia of an adventure game here -- journal, inventory, etc. -- but gameplay is essentially non-existent, since there are no puzzles to solve or other challenges to overcome. Instead, the game, if it be such, exists for the sole purpose of exposing you to exposition from "your guide" and the videos.
While the videos in themselves are effective, the testimony of "your guide" is not, precisely because it, unlike the videos, is fictionalized. Rather than having the authenticity and believability of an eye-witness, you are very aware that "his" words are put in his mouth by the developers of the application, whose political objective is to persuade you of a particular stance; thus, the fictionalized nature of the presentation works against its believability and impact.
In other words, the parts of this application that work are the videos; the parts that don't work are the game. Why, then, make a game?
Indeed. Don't. Make a documentary. It would be more effective.
Thus, yet again, another "game for change" that does not take advantage of the capabilities of "the game" as a form, that does not understand that games, being systems, are better able to impart information about systems than other media, and instead tries to cram facts, better transmitted in other forms, and stories, also better transmitted in other forms, into the medium of the game, for no obvious reason other than, perhaps, the notion that the press might pay more attention to the message if it is in game form.
Games are not movies. Don't try to make them like movies; you'll only make something that's both a bad movie and a bad game.
Like this one.
The Story of Stuff, a
The Story of Stuff, a noxious bit of scare-mongering, extreme-Green, anti-capitalist propaganda that presents highly dubious assertions and demonstrable untruths as "fact."
WTF!??
I think THAT you just wrote is a "dubious assertion and a demonstrable untruth", but of course you dont hesitate on state it as a "fact", dont you?
Maybe you should remember more often that people can have different criteria, conformed arund data sources different, and probably WIDER than yours.
A simple check on Wikipedia
A simple check on Wikipedia documents where there are said assertions and untruths.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_Stuff
Fuck consumerism, but at least get your numbers straight.
Stuff
Just for the record, I do not own a car, bicycle almost everywhere, have replaced all my light bulbs with fluorescents, cook one vegetarian dinner each week and have reduced my consumption of meat during other meals, and purchase ~80% of my groceries from the Park Slope Food Coop, which has a commitment to offering organic and local products. My apartment is filled with "stuff" -- books and games for the most part, no interest in bric-a-brac -- but I don't feel particularly guilty about that.
I also have no interest in being told that, for instance, the evils of capitalism are gulling third-world people to abandon "sustainable life styles" (meaning poverty of the most appalling sort) for "sweatshop jobs" (meaning employment that allows them to live in what is still grinding poverty by Western standards, but clearly an improvement by theirs, since they flock to these jobs). Economic development is hauling a third of the globe's population out of misery and into reasonable living standards -- and since wealthy societies are those that have the best track record of protecting and sustaining the environment, this is an outcome devoutly to be desired.
I'm all for living more sustainably and modestly and rediscovering the virtues of thrift; I also have no interest in being hectored by the intellectually dishonest. Which "The Story of Stuff" is -- both intellectually dishonest and hectoring.
Read it again
Im sorry Dustin, you should read that again.
What Wikipedia actually states, is that the information she is expressing in the documentary, is actually backed up by entitled sources and studies, that MAY differ from other reports... like **government** reports!
Wow! Really?
Like government reports that do not match reality? What a surprise!
Once again, I think the context of the information is as much important as the info itself.
Thanks for the link though.
Middle class snobism from
employment that allows them to live in what is still grinding poverty by Western standards, but clearly an improvement by theirs, since they flock to these jobs
[...]
Economic development is hauling a third of the globe's population out of misery and into reasonable living standards
Oh! Really? What a perfect living room vision of the world!
Please educate us, what else you have learned of the third world countries from your fluorescent and Go-Veg magazines decorated house?
Something else those dirty tribus from the amazonia or african clans should thank to the ever florishing western economies for?
Subsistence
So what do you suggest? We should all commit suicide to avoid placing an undue burden on the planet, and after the Great Dieback, a handful of neolithic humans can return to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, slaying the occasional animal with a fire-hardened stick and subsisting on berries and grubs found under rocks?
Back To The Earth Ect.
A few weeks ago I visited an "eco-village" located in the abandoned foundations of a university building left incomplete when the Peron-driven spending spree sputtered out. A bunch of hippies are living in this place, which is currently halfway between a garbage dump and a bowl of flora, cement poles and vines co-mingle, extreme beauty and remnants of trash live in relative harmony. I was interested to visit because I´m really into models of food production that are low waste, more efficient, and produce higher quality stuff, I think such models are going to be the foundation of any future the "developed" world might have. However on the other hand these hippies weren´t really growing all their food, they were growing some, sure, I had a carrot straight out of the ground that was pretty good, but they seemed more interested in doing "research" such as growing plants and weeds together but without taking any rigorous metrics, on also in playing guitar, experimenting with architecture, taking nude steam baths, and smoking weed than they were in producing a lot of food. The don´t read books to study techniques, its all from scratch, which has a nice appeal but doesn´t seem to be working in practice as they depend on donations to buy rice and so forth.
I´m more enthusiastic about the work of Joel Salatin (both in his physical farm, its soil quality, the succor of the meat raised there, and in the books he´s written on the subject) than I am with anyone whos advocating a wholesale detatchment. It has its appeal, just fuck off and become self-sufficient, but laws of entropy make it easier said than done. Salatin takes a capitalist libertarian environmentalist hybrid approach to it, and I think his approach taps into the feedback loop nessecary to really proliferate carbon-sequestering grass and more secure, quality food supply.
What this all has to do with immigration should be obvious if you consider that a large portion of illegal immigrants work in the production of industrial food. Conversely, if people in Latin America, Arfica and elsewhere utilized the full efficiency potential of their soil using low-tech procedures they´d be able to balk at the sweatshop wages for industrial multinationals. There´s a big difference between someone who grows a large portion of their own diet and makes 5k a year and someone who lives in a city, rents, and makes 5k a year.
I Read It...
I actually was pointing to the blatant alteration of data that they did.
"We [The U.S.] has 5% of the world's population but we're consuming 30% of the world's resources and creating 30% of the world's waste." She cites Seitz (2001), who says, "...in 1990 the United States, with about 5 percent of the world's population, was using about one-quarter of the energy being used by all nations."
"80% of the planet's original forests are gone." She cites the Natural Resources Defense Council website, which says that only about 20% of the world's original wilderness forests have been logged or developed"
Again, they should get their numbers straight. But if it's banned by a Montana schoolboard it's doing something right.