Oil's Well Redrilled

Oil's Well Redrilled is a re-make of the old Sierra game from 1983, created by FireStorm Productions. You should be aware of peak oil, because it you're not this game is just a hack-ish time-waster (and you won't survive the next decade). If you are, this game becomes ripe with metaphor, furling out to a meditative exercise on the nature of the beast, the hunger we share with it, and how we got to this point.

The game involves controlling an "oil drill", represented by a Pac-Man-esque mechanical snake that pipes through the underground, constantly clapping its autonomic maw for the next bit of oil, abstracted to white dots. You must get all the dots, navigating with the arrow keys, retracting with the Z key. The catch is, these little monsters come out at random intervals at each level; if they intersect with the drill, then you lose a life, but you can eat them, no problem. The game is highly unforgiving: three lives are all you get to complete eight levels, and there is no way to gain more lives.

Appreciation of the game takes time, because the graphics and authors have no apparent understanding of what its dynamic implies. You represent a power close to the top of the pyramid, but not quite -- the Neo-con, the resource industrialist. You are powerful, but really quite vulnerable to sabotage. You're a parasite, only as strong as your rapid hunger. Just replace the little gremlins with images of Yankee militias, Nigerian rebels, Mexican guerrillas and Iraqi insurgents, and you have a strikingly poignant metaphor for the current geopolitical situation. Each layer of the map represents more expensive oil; you start with light, sweet crude, then descend to the thicker stuff, then sands, then shale, further extending your vulnerable pipe-line in the process. The very nature of the game is about the vulnerability of corner-stone infrastructural elements, known as systempunkts, that now control the strenuous balance between the New World Order and anarchy, like tooth-pick pillars holding up Colossus.

You don't need a simulation game to make a political statement, you just need a dynamic that shares a key factor in common with a real world dynamic. I just wish more game developers understood, you know, reality, and the power they have in their hands.