now playing: "the republia times"

Introductory preface prologue: I played L.A. Noire yesterday! For the first time. With some people. Laughing at me as I raced imaginary Nintendo go-karts through downtown 1940s Los Angeles a la Just Cause 2, imparting considerable chaos in the form of city and citizen damages. But I have a lot in common with the honey badger. I don't give a snitch.

But in other news, the Ludum Dare 23, a 48-hour indie game design marathon, was the subject of many of a recent tweet, seeing as it just happened and is infinitely more impressive than any of my recent gaming exploits. So in the process of stalking hashtags and retweets I found out that The Republia Times (Lucas Pope, 2012) was created as a warm-up for the challenge. Get that? A warm-up. Not even the real deal (which I haven't played yet, so I wouldn't know how good or bad it is by comparison). But let me just say that the Republia Times--which I can best describe as the novel 1984 simulated in the Apple II era--is one heckuva "warmup." Like I could pull off making something like this in a day or two's time.

Your occupation is simply that of a newspaper editor selecting articles to print in the official publication of an authoritarian regime. Your motivation for printing goodthink articles rests on how much you value your family's well-being, whereas your motivation for printing articles the anonymous rebellion would like to see also depends on your family's safety. Who to trust, which instinct to follow, what to do? As it is, I have not managed to reach any kind of satisfactory ending to know whether or not there is only one inevitable fate for completing this game--that of reassignment and the vague fate of "elimination" for your family--which, I forgot to mention, has been assigned to you.

Obviously, the political metaphor could breed its own fruitful discussion in an IB English classroom, but what primarily interests me here is that it's a "news" game. I know there's a whole debate about the value of journalist-related games within the field of games-for-change education-ftw genre, but not even that is what interests me the most. Specifically, if I can assemble a newspaper with a click here and a drag there, why can't I write blog posts like this? IB English essays? Lab reports? Love letters? To me, the mechanic is the most interesting part. Completely mundane, this click-and-drag mechanism is. Yet how completely intelligent and sophisticated is the significance of the content associated with that action! To think that you could become a popular media figure and sway an entire population's political loyalty with just a click-and-drag motion? I almost wield the same interpersonal power as Phelps, badge 12-47. Maybe not the same graphics and mechanics as he does--okay, definitely not--but something about picking headlines reminds me of picking clues. That probably seems like an incredulous lot of stretch to you, but it means something to me. It's the principle of thing.

Ironically, however, not even your overseers recognize this fact. They reassign me because print has become outdated and the need for digital delivery outweighs my importance as an editor.

Um. Did you not just see. That I am the ONE who's making digital delivery possible? I'm doing this on a computer screen after all, over the Internet.

I leave you with this meta-tastic thought to muse on while you go try and see if there isn't a happy ending stored somewhere in this game's code.