A noble effort and looks like a decent game. As-of-yet though, I think "Papers, Please" is possibly the best take on a dystopian game. The oppression in that game isn't just some puzzle mechanic but the whole monotonous process and being a cog in a gigantic bureaucratic machine. Could something similar be made for surveillance?
Oh man. "Papers, Please" is way too realistic. I used to be a Foreign Service officer, and part of my job was doing visa interviews/approvals. Playing feels very similar to the job (minus random in game events, etc).
I tried to get into it, but after doing visa interviews for a year, I don't want to do them, or anything remotely like them, ever again (although some people enjoy them....)
NIV (non-immigrant visa, like a typical tourist visa) interviews are the worst.
Imagine sitting in a chair, behind bullet proof glass, with a room full of people in front of you. You and the other interviewing officers (I was in a very small post, so it was usually me and one or two others) have about 3-4 hours to either approve or reject all of them.
You will end up interviewing about 60 people in this time period (unless you are slow, which hurts everyone). Imagine picking up a passport, calling a name, waiting until they come to the window, asking questions, and determining if someone can come to the US (is this person on the terrorist watch list? Are they likely to illegally migrate to the US?) all in 5 minutes or less.
I was in a post with very high fraud and people illegally overstaying in the US (Guyana), so we had a lot of rejections. I think our average was 50%, but people ranged from 40% to 80%. So, imagine doing all of the stuff I described, but in the end, you reject half of the people. Imagine that most of them plead with you, and say that they have sick relatives in the US, they haven't seen their family in years, or they really need to go for business. The worst were the ones who had a relative that died or was dying in the US and wanted to go for the funeral/to see them one last time, but you couldn't approve them because they were likely to overstay. Things like this make me really hate US immigration policy.
You might be thinking "visas, who cares about those?" because of how easy it is to travel as a first world (I don't like this term, but it is concise) citizen. It is a big deal in countries where visas aren't automatic. Imagine being stuck in one country the size of Maine and unable to visit the rest of the US.
IV (immigrant visa) interviews are more interesting, because your goal is to determine if there is a legitimate family relationship between the two people. You get to examine documents, look at photos, do follow-up interviews, etc. Sometimes you even get to take trips to the persons' house to canvas the area and talk to the neighbors to see if their story checks out. You see a lot of fake birth certificates, and a lot of "marriage" photo albums where the couple is just in a courthouse, signing the marriage paperwork. The main source of fraud here is people from the country getting a fake marriage to an american citizen to allow them to migrate. Usually the american citizen is paid a lot of money or is a relative/friend of the other family. This, too, can be frustrating because american citizen fraudsters who are persistent enough eventually will succeed because of all the bureaucracy.
Luckily, unless you are consular coned, you only have to do one consular tour. My first tour was a split tour, so I only ended up in consular for a year. I did some economic work in the second year, where I talked to economic leaders in the country and wrote cables back to DC. This was more interesting, but like anything in the foreign service, is highly dependent on the competence of your boss. I was not lucky in this regard.
Wow, reading back on this sounds really negative. A good friend of mine (and current FSO) once told me that the Foreign Service is the "same [stuff] as any other job, just in different places." I think this really sums it up. I enjoyed my time in the FS, and enjoyed the country I lived in. I know some really great and intelligent people who are in the FS. I also ended up cutting my first tour short and leaving after 1.5 years. I am really glad I did that, as it enabled me to learn and do a lot of amazing things.
My advice to people who want to join the FS is always -- do it, it will be fun and you will learn a lot, but don't put the job on a pedestal, and don't be afraid to get out when the time comes. It actually is surprisingly hard to leave early on, so do your homework in that sense. Please feel free to email me if you want to talk more about this.
They needn't be in competition with each other. I'd really like to see "social commentary" become an established genre in gaming, as it is with other forms of fiction.
The devs are also running a crowdfunding campaign for this,
with 10% of the donations going to the EFF, Demand Progress, Mozilla, etc:
https://back.nothingtohide.cc
This is the url of the video on that page--just in case you've disabled JavaScript like me and download it with youtubedown[1]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxvXdwRNDUM
Thanks for that. As noble as I believe the aims, knowing that it's funding Demand Progress has saved me from making a donation I would have otherwise regretted.
At its core, absolutely nothing. In its execution, it's extremely partisan. I'm neither a Democrat nor a Republican, but I've found that, for me at least, I despise when either side slings mud on the other.
Demand Progress isn't quite so blatant, in that they "question" Democrats, or "suspect" that they might be wrong, but similar judgements of the Republicans are downright hateful.
I don't begrudge their right to engage in "my party's right and your party's wrong" sorts of politics, but I will make sure that none of my money gets spent in furtherance of it.
Fans of shady government games should check out Floor 13, an early 90s game where you are in charge of a secret British agency charged with keeping the Prime Minister popular by any means necssary. I vaguely remember manipulating the press and torture being some of the options. Sadly, I was never able to play the game very much. My friends and I all had Macs, and were never able to get our Windows emulator to run it very long without crashing. And at some point afterwards, when we had access to PCs, we were defeated by its copy-protection scheme (despite having a legitimate copy!) and by then many more games were much more compelling.
Even if we'd been able to play it, though, it's not clear we'd have gotten much more out of it than we'd gotten by reading 1984, Fahrenheit 451, and being at the mercy of the administration of an American public high school.
As for this game, it seemed much more compelling in the intro screen, which resembled some sort of Twitter / Facebook wall and had some cool effects while scrolling. When the actual game started it seemed like a puzzle game combined with a paranoia game, which is great for those who are already convinced by the world the game depicts but not convincing otherwise. It might be a tougher game mechanic to figure out, but it might be more compelling if the UI were Facebook, Gmail, and Twitter clones, and the game was such that the player attempted to sift through volumes of intercepted correspondence and communication metadata, fingering bad guys, political opponents, and hapless citizens, and, with limited resources, decided who to investigate/hassle. The game could have real terrorists that need to be detected, rewarding real detections and penalizing false positives, or have super-cynic Floor 13 mode, where the player used the surveillance system to their own personal gain. Or, turn the system described in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6882378 into a game (I posted then and still believe that the concerns there were, while possible, vague and improbable, but possibly a game could convince me and others otherwise).
Really love the game. The puzzle mechanics are interesting, and I picked up the logics fairly intuitively. The ambiance and art sells it. The intro is cleverly set up, but the story about the father politician is a bit confusing.
$20000 out of $40000 and 8 days left... hopefully he'll manage to raise it all. I played it soon after the demo was released and it got me super excited. Feels like Portal - when in some vlog entry the author admited to be a big fan of Portal series I wasn't surprised ;)
I was liking the art style quite a bit already, but when the "conveyor belt" mechanics started - which kicked the challenge up (a good thing) - I was sold. This game has some surprisingly well-executed ideas in it!
I really enjoyed playing the demo just now. Great atmosphere, incredible music, and clever game mechanics. I definitely felt something for the characters in the game, and I really enjoyed the story and cutscenes. I can't wait to see what a full version of the game looks like. Backed.
<
Using Baysian type on data is very damaging on society, for those with strong maths:
We'll move from causality( we noticed you are stocking up on baking powder, lets chat) to inference (according to our data there is 85% chance you are not compliant - w/o a cause).
<One outcome: The populace will be demotivated to do anything, just to be safe.>
>
Stardust’s It Is Safe Law:
1> IIS1: To be unknown and invisible is to be safe.
2> IIS2: The Freedom Law:
We enjoy the freedom of the press,
the freedom of speech,
and the FREEDOM to use neither
in our Total Information Awareness
digital surveillence state.
http://papersplea.se/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QP5X6fcukM