Let Them Eat Lead!
I visited the Kloonigames website (www.kloonigames.com/blog/games) when it got a mention in the Gladstoned column of the latest edition of Games for Windows. The column was a confusing combination of a rant on the computer game production industry and a half-baked review of “The Truth About Game Design,” a tongue-in-cheek simulation of a game development project. I like business sims, so I decided to give this one a try.
Calling TAGD a simulation is extravagantly generous, since only two variables under your control are of any interest: how much you pay your wage slaves, and how frequently you kill them. The more you pay the slaves, the faster they trudge back and forth along the catwalks of their factory building hell, improving your game quality (thus sales) at the reckoning of the shipping date. Naturally, this increases expenses. Cheap bastards can instead motivate the slaves by clicking whichever laggard catches the eye, causing his head to explode. The survivors, inspired by fear, will speed production…for a while. Then it’s time for another round of motivational executions. Kill too many slaves, and you’ll face a general strike, forcing you to ship your product as-is. Your score is determined by the return on investment upon shipping.
So TAGD is not a deep game, although the panache with which its black humor is delivered makes it an entertaining fifteen minutes. (To be fair, its designer treats it as nothing more than a silly exercise he knocked off in a week.) I wouldn’t bring it up at all, were it not for the slyness of its hidden message.
Despite all its cues, from the quote on the opening screen to the gulag drumbeat music, to the gradual revelation of a picture of a rifle-wielding boss (you), killing idlers is a losing strategy. That’s right: the entire theme of the game is a red herring. Even without a general strike, killing more than a handful of slaves cuts long-term productivity so much that your game will ship half-finished. I’ve had vastly better success with only a few executions to jump-start the workers, coupled to a slow, steady diet of raises. The starting salary, sneakily set to a default $2, should be $4 or more right from the start, and reach somewhere around $10 by game end. Take care of your workers, says the game, and you’ll get your reward, no matter how tempting it is to revel in your power over life and death, or, symbolically, employment and unemployment.
At least, that’s what the game says if you have the patience to play it a few times. Gladstone apparently gave up after several tyrannical failures, without bothering to try the carrot as well as the stick. Rarely do you see that kind of deliberate bait-and-switch in a game’s design. You can find games that swear they include peaceful development as a viable strategic alternative to conquest, but trust me, these are lies from marketing division. Games that challenges you to question the very premise, to cut the Gordian knot to find deeper truths of the subject matter, are rare.
That’s not surprising. Unless done with finesse, the experience of buying a game of betrayal only to learn cooperation works better, or a game of conquest to learn success lies in diplomacy, or a game of construction to learn that sabotaging your rivals is the path to victory would feel like a rip-off. The key is to make many strategies viable, but allow the subtler, more ingenious strategies to pay the biggest dividends. We could use more of that. But then, we could use more intelligent design decisions of all kinds, I suppose.