Bunny Blog

We recently had the great honor to contribute a little pro bono headscratching on behalf of Mary Flanagan and the good folks at Tiltfactor Labratory out of Dartmouth College. Tiltfactor, in case this is your first time hearing about them, spends most of their time dreaming up games that have some kind of critical or value-based interaction at the heart of their experience.

Their new game just came out. It’s called LAYOFF, and you can play it here.

The Bunny’s thoughts on the experience and the inherent problem after the jump.

Did you check it out?

Cool.

Okay, so here’s the thing about LAYOFF:  Yeah it’s basically a match-3 casual game so the experience isn’t very deep, but what’s to like about the game is the way it evokes the ethos of Pop Art and, well, really, Dada. Tiltfactor’s taken something familiar and gone one step further and clothed it in the blocky pixel art of the bygone 8-bit era (complete with synth tunes) in a way that can’t help but evoke the warm fuzzy feelings of nostalgia… only to cruelly subvert them by using the game as a political critique on the current financial crisis.

Every three you match drop to the bottom of the screen, joining a growing throng in the unemployment line. Meanwhile, clicking on any piece on the board (in other games meaningless jewels it’s fun to eliminate) gives you a detailed biography on the worker’s family, hopes, and dreams. Eliminated workers are frequently replaced by executives and managers and bankers who cannot ever be laid off, and all the while a news ticker runs facts that are all-too-true at the bottom of the screen.

The overt message is all well and good, but what we really like about the piece is one level removed: the very act of turning layoffs (a dark fact we as small business owners see both sides of the coin on compared to many other artists in our space) into a game of any kind is where it gets truly insidious.

While we’ve succeeded in owning and operating an ethical company for almost four years now, it’s true that there are plenty of people out there in charge of workers who not have the same respect for that responsibility. Making the metaphor into a game is one thing, but then making it into something as trivial as a casual game, the kind of thing you play online to waste five minutes at the office… that’s the kind of twisted artistic genius we’ll buy Tiltfactor a beer for.

Here, however, is what we’re really on about:

It’s really too much to hope that a game like this finds its way into the inboxes of the bastards out there who could stand a wakeup call about this, and it’s a sheer farking impossibility that any of the ones in need of a digital Jiminy Cricket will actually play it long enough to understand the dark deep higher-level truth we just offered Mary and her team a beer for.

The world needs games like this to raise awareness, sure, but what it desperately needs is the kind of game experiences that reach not only the people who get angry about the world’s problems, but also the people who cause them.  Chances are, those will have to be crafty little experiences that slip under the radar and teach a lesson in some kind of struck-from-the-horse or least Dickens-esque manner, and that’s certainly a challenge. But it’s a noble one to undertake.

Open invitation: anyone who wants to work with us on that can get in touch.

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