Decided to play Orwell. It's a fascinating game and one that I think we have a lot of things to learn from.
I had to set it down because it started making me feel highly uncomfortable. There's a certain feeling you get when you realize that this game isn't a "what could be" but more a "what is right now" -- a very careful look at the fact that we, as a society, are pushing the envelope back on what we consider acceptable w/r/t surveillance.
The game revolves around you picking out chunks of information to pass forward on to a hivemind called Orwell.
Orwell consumes a huge amount of information about a person, but it's dependent on humans to create connections. More, it forces you create a delicate balance of what should be known vs. what shouldn't about a person. What is relevant to a person's being? What isn't?
The problem is that it then forces you to guess what it feels is going to be useful to the hive mind.
This... made me need to stop. The person is fictional, yes, but I couldn't help but feel that it was meant to make me feel this way.
The game uses some of the classic tropes of the surveillance state to make sure you know what's going on. It's intentionally uncomfortable for those who know how to read into extremely nationalist propaganda. Words are used as a means to pigeonhole people. People are painted in a specific tone to make them be a certain person.
@indrora this game sounds like a shit ton of scary fun
For instance, the first step of making someone a villain is to call them a terrorist.
Label them, and their friends, a terrorist organization and nobody, ever, will fight that. Connect them in some way to a terrible event and now you've created a villain.
This is how we destroy people.