But I was part of the first generation to grow up with these virtual worlds. My parents, and even my older brothers, would never willingly play computer games. So, which is it: a world saved by gamers or a world lulled to sleep by too many hours spent glued to a computer screen? The highest drama comes when, out of frustration, you bang your head repeatedly against the negotiating table. Yes, you too can go online and experience hours and hours of tedious haggling over clauses in documents that may never get signed anyway. Precisely this kind of focused cooperation is needed to solve climate change, the energy crisis, and all the other disasters on our doorstep.īut here’s the problem: can resolving problems in a virtual world ever be as emotionally satisfying as killing bad guys and wiping out civilizations? In a devastating spoof by John Oliver, The World of PeaceCraft shows just how boring peace simulations can be. In the gaming environment, after all, millions of people are focused intently on solving challenging problems and often cooperating in order to do so. But to solve the myriad problems facing the real world, she argued, we need to spend 18 billion more hours per week staring at our computer screens. In 2010, she said the world spends 3 billion hours a week interacting with various virtual worlds. The game designer Jane McGonigal made a splash on TED when she proclaimed that, in order to save the world, people should be spending more time playing games. In World Without Oil, you experience the first 32 weeks of a global oil crisis. In Unmanned, you experience a day in the life of a drone pilot, from shaving and driving to work to targeting persons of interest. In Pandemic, you are a bacterium, a virus, or a parasite trying to take over the world: kill everyone and you win. They don’t so much help you escape reality as insert you back into it at a different angle. Welcome to the latest generation of computer games. Soon I was fully in the mindset of someone “just following orders,” and I was horrified at how easily I could step into the shoes of a faceless civil servant trying to survive in a blandly evil system. It didn’t take long before I was eagerly trying to excel at my job, rooting out people with false documents and agonizing over whether to let in a desperate asylum-seeker even at the risk of losing my position. If you think that computer games these days are all about shooting terrorists, throwing birds at pigs, or racking up points with “zoology” on a triple word score, you need to check out Papers, Please.ĭeveloper Lucas Pope bills the game as a “dystopian document thriller.” I played the game for about an hour and found it surprisingly absorbing. And the next day, you’re back at your desk, stamping documents.
At the end of the day, you go home to spend your pitiful salary on the food and medicines to keep your family alive. Occasionally bombs go off nearby as terrorists blow themselves up in protest against your government. You have to scrutinize the documents carefully and interrogate the person in front of your desk if any discrepancies turn up. Every day the rules change regarding the paperwork that the border-crossers need to show.
You need the job because times are tight, and several of your family members are sick. Your job is to check the documents of visitors, immigrants, and returning citizens. You are living in a grim East European country.
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