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?
It is a match-three game. On screen are little employees clad in differently colored clothing. Swap positions to create a line of three or more, and those employees disappear, with your score changing to indicate how much money your company has "saved" by "laying them off." They appear at screen bottom walking back and forth in front of the "unemployment office." Some of the nodes are replaced not with other employees (i.e., jewels), but with "bankers," who cannot be removed.
It runs as slow as molasses on my 1.5GHz machine, for which there is little excuse; it should be possible to do a Flash match three game that runs zippily, so I assume it is simply coded sloppily.
From a gameplay perspective, therefore, Layoff is simply an inferior Bejeweled clone. Which raises the question of whether its political statement is effective and insightful, since there's nothing meritorious about it as a game qua game.
The rubric I normally adopt when examining a serious game or "game for change" is that "the mechanic is the message." Or to put it another way, the only reason to do a game on a particular subject rather than, say, a documentary, manifesto, or blog post, is to exploit what games do that other media cannot -- and that is to place the player in a system, make him complicit in operating it, and allow him to explore the complexities and problems of the system. Thus, a good game on the subject of the current financial crisis, the bail-out, and our increasingly high level of unemployment should choose at least some elements of this highly complicated system, simplify them so that they can be portrayed in a game context, and allow the player to come to a better understanding of the problems.
Therefore, the question is: to what degree is a match-three game an insightful potrayal of the current economic crisis? And the immediate answer, of course is: Not at all.
In a single word, then: Fail.
Fail, indeed
I actually wrote a bit on this subject when the slew of George W. Bush shoe throwing games came out. I even made a response to a flash game about suicide bombing. This type of game is just your typical game skinned to look like it's political. There is no real content here at all.
What we need are games like Oiligarchy which at least attempt to educate the player on a subject, and replicate real life situations. I am currently brainstorming a way to work the whole sub-prime mortgage crisis into a game that educates people as to how we are in the current economic mess...While these people are getting money to make a Bejeweled clone...great.
Hot air warning
I've been following this blog for quite some time, enjoying the format and the accessibility of the quite different games/reviews on here.
What has been more and more apparent is the pompous blowing of hot air between costik/the99th and sadly, also from some of the frequent commenters.
I get it, you run a successful blog, loads of people read it, people don't read it to hear how you could have done the game better given a score of code monkeys (or even yourself with one hand behind your back!) in the good ol' day.
We want to see what happens NOW in the indie scene and I for one do like the references to earlier games on the same mechanic/platform/concept/etc that only a knowledgeable (as I assume that is what you want to sell) can give me.
Now as to this particular game, there are other reasons for using games as a medium for communicating a message.
i.e. Marketing
1. You get a direct link to a certain demographic.
2. Engaging your target in an addictive game leaves them willingly sitting in front of your ad-space.
3. Releasing a great game mechanic for free virtually guarantees someone will play it, which might cause people to recommend it and you get free, great, marketing for your game/message.
Other reasons include building a brand and economic reasons.
I'm sure you know this, but omitting this to make yourself seem all the more pompous/arrogant does not add to the worth of this blog.
With that being said, your archive is awesome and most of those reviews actually review gameplay and concept.
Well done!
um, are you new to the
um, are you new to the Internet? Bejeweled clones are nothing new. This game throws a different skin on it and brands itself as something new, which it clearly isn't. Even by your crassly consumeristic view on a "good" game it fails, because it can't even do that right.
This comment is unrelated to
This comment is unrelated to this review, but just a note: with the permanent death of the-underdogs (its webmaster said it probably won't be going back up because its host went bankrupt), the Scratchware Manifesto can't really be found online anymore. And even before then it was always an unstable site. Do you know of anywhere to read it? I found a site which seems to mirror it, but only has parts of it, so it'd be nice to find the entire thing hosted somewhere again.
Scratchware manifesto
Hm... Well, I'll email Rich Carlson and see if he has the complete text.
You can still read it on
You can still read it on HotU through the Wayback Machine.
Ah, I forgot about the
Ah, I forgot about the Wayback Machine, thanks, I'll try that.
Anyway, as for this game, I can kind of see the point that reskinning a genre with something totally unrelated to it might introduce people to something in that way, but it still seems incredibly lazy to do that. If I wanted to make a game about something significant, I'd revolve the central game mechanic around that, not reskin an old game mechanic. I think that's a perfectly valid criticism of this game and many other games that do the same thing -- you can't just replace Mario with Marx and claim it's a game about socialism.
Just to play devil's advocate...
Perhaps the message of the game (through its valid mechanics) is that there *is* no point to the layoffs, and that the selection of people to lay off is just as arbitrary as the selection of jewels to match in Bejeweled? Or that messing with real human lives is about as meaningful to a Fortune 500 CEO as messing with pixellated jewels is to us?
Bad game, good review
Some people get angry when they read a "bad" review about a game that is about a "positive value", cause they feel that all games that support an idea that they like should receive positive feedbacks from the critics, otherwise the critics are speaking against that value. Those are the people who should never write game criticism.
Janos
http://antizero.wikispaces.com/infoblarg
Hope this is okay, but a
Hope this is okay, but a friend of mine, clysm, author of the indie game classic Seiklus, put it up on his site: http://autofish.net/video_games/creation/scratch.html -- I think it's public domain anyway, but I just wanted to let you know.
Cool
....and thank you.
This is a very similar, if
This is a very similar, if not worse, case of a useless "political" game.
Fail - agreed
I agree that it fails. Partly because of the sloppy coding that you mention but mainly because it ends up as a lazy academic critique of layoffs - ignoring the painful reality that many companies can only survive by making staff redundant - and in the long term, companies surviving to generate economic returns (and taxes) in the future is the only way we will ever be able to pay off government deficits.
So I agree it fails, for a bunch of reasons I've set out at Gamesbrief
Another view.
Hello! My name is Henrique and I'm graduated in language and technologies studies of the Apllied Linguistics Departament of Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP), Brazil. I always read this blog, and usually I agree and learn with the posts we have here. However, in this case, I need to present another point of view.
First of all, the games are systems, developed and created by someone who cames before the player. So, all the player choices (there are "real" choices?) depend on the designer previous ones. Well, in the LAYOFF, aren't we take over a role in a system bigger than us? So, I think if we start considering that a game could be a kind of metaphore, it will be easier to find some similarities and interesting relations.
Obviously, we have more than a apropriation of one game logic in another context. We have intertextuality. Why this is so important? There is a agreement in the discourse and textual studies about this concept: the purpose of intertextuality is to bring some characteristics of the original text and reshapes it in the new text.
The player role is to dismiss/layoff people to save money. Someone (some invisible one) of the original game tells that you need eliminate equal pieces to reach a good score. This "innocent" logic is placed in a new context and the player need to make the same thing, the expected right thing to be rewarded. Well, like Pazzon, the "good" thing you need to do is not so good and your only choice is "continue" or "not continue". That means the player is more powerfull than the employees, less powerful than the managers (you can't dismiss them) and its efficiency rewards the corporation, prejudice people and don't bring more than a "good score" to it. And the player (could) keep acting until the employees board allows.
Let's back to intertextuality. In the original game, we are talking about "gems". This abstraction could be transported to the new game and we can have a tension about the material part (employees) and abstract part (the similar objects that needs to be in lines). The pop-ups help to intensify this tension. Treat "people" as pieces to be eliminated is more than a good metaphore. It's the essencial thing to act like the corporation wants. To act in this way (in the game or in the life) it's essencial to keep away from the emotional involvement or to consider the employee as a human being. A guilty conscience needs this involvement.
So, who dismiss? Who really act? The "corporation"? The one that create the rules? Or someone that obey the rules? And what is be rewarded in this system? Who is winning? The player?
Well, I hope that the things I wrote could be readable. I intended write more and more clearly, but it's not easy to write in English. I only think that we need start to interpret some intertextuallity in games in a different way. And we could consider that sometimes the social criticism appears on differents and tenous forms. I think that we don't need only September 12ths.
http://ideogames.blogspot.com