Orwell

A bomb goes off in the middle of down-town. Surveillance cameras have identified a person with a police record at the site moments before. She attacked a policeman at a protest a while back, and now she was filmed at the site of a terrorist bombing. Coincidence? You browse her homepage, find her chat handle. Moments later, you watch a chat between her and her lover. It's inconsequential, but it gives you a few chunks of data to upload, unlocking more items to sift through. Destined for a cushy job in her family's business empire, she dyed her hair blue and became an artist. Radical change, no? Let's check her social media to see what happened. And oh dear, she's on antidepressants! Do I need to upload that? Your job in Orwell is as menial as it is exhausting: Sift through mountains of more or less private data and select the relevant bits to bring to the attention of law enforcement. You're the human component required by some ethics codex. But how do you know what's pertinent? Being in possession of all the data is not actually the same as being omniscient. Her medical records show an old leg injury. His fishing buddies say he's gay. Does the system need to know that? Even to establish which data is relevant to your case, you need to survey a ton that isn't. An ethical mass surveillance system would be one that you couldn't use. I like how the basic conundrum is mirrored in the game mechanics: We do want to fight crime, you do want to beat the game, so you need to upload something. But with all "the signals, all the time" at your fingertips, does your selecting uncover the truth or create it? A police investigation is perhaps the only place where you don't want player choice to change the outcome, but there's surprisingly much of that in Orwell. You sit in front of the calm blue GUI, dragging and dropping snippets. Every now and again your adviser pops up saying good job because they arrested someone based on your research. Should you care?

Game relies much on a narrative aspect in a style which leaves more a sense of using an application than gameplaying in the common rogue (vulgar) sense. Its particular theme is rather hard-shell and its scope so far outreaching in grasping organizational theory against a surrender to pragmatism -or vice versa?

I love it. U need to be carefull to achive ur goal

A choose-your-own-adventure exploring the morality of privacy and intel without being preachy or judgy. All in all a worthy buy and time well spent. Would recommend for anyone generally interested in the topic, or those looking for a way to teach younger folks.

I found this game to be a lot of fun and thought-provoking. It had me thinking between sessions about the conspiracies involved and who was guilty. It's a short game, and the only interaction that you have is uploading data to the government computer, so it comes across as more of an interactive story than a full-out game. The premise that Orwell only has access to the data chunks that you upload takes some getting used to, and they are very literal in their interpretation. Now I'm pestering my friend to try this game out so that I have someone to talk about the investigation with! If you're running it on Linux, it didn't work for me on Debian 8, but ran alright in a virtual machine with Ubuntu 16.04.