A Dystopia of Grinding: How Cart Life and Diary of A Spaceport Janitor Subvert Video Games’ Love of Capitalism

(This piece was originally written in May 2017)

As independently developed games (or ‘indie games’) rose to prominence, in the last ten years or so (Browne, 2015, p. 14), what once was an industry pushing forward products that tended to present relatively homogenized cultural perspectives, opened itself to a more diverse and multicultural stage. We are currently living in an era where an unpreceded number of “alternative voices” are expressing themselves through the video game medium and using their different perspective to subvert mainstream tropes and narratives (Pearce, 2015, p. 5). Looking at these indie productions and analysing how they subvert the status quo of game design, is a necessary and important endeavour that can help us understand how mainstream games succeed and fail in conveying themes and representing society, in a way that was previously not possible.

This essay will specifically look at how games procedurally represent economic systems, highlighting how indie games like Cart Life (Hofmeier, 2011a) and Diary of a Spaceport Janitor (Sundae Month, 2016) subvert the usual attitudes that video games have presented toward capitalism, by modelling their systems around the struggle of the working class.

Plenty of papers have engaged with the problematic nature of how economic systems are portrayed in games. This essay will start from those to then use Bogost’s concept of “procedural rhetoric” (Bogost, 2007) to engage in two case studies: looking at both Cart Life and Diary of a Spaceport Janitor, comparing and contrasting the meaning communicated by their in-game economic systems to those of other more ‘mainstream’ games. In the specific, the case studies will be approached through Consalvo and Dutton`s methodological toolkit (Consalvo & Dutton, 2006), executing a Gameplay Log and an Interaction map while using Bogost`s theory of procedural rhetoric as a lens, with a specific focus on the game`s commentary on real-world economic systems and situations.

Looking at what apparently fantasy-based game systems end up saying about our real-world struggles is not only useful in reminding us how every bit of design in a game should be thought about and developed thoroughly, as every bit of a game, voluntarily or not, speaks about something in its own way; but also, especially with the case studies this essay will present, it provides us with an example of what methods games can use to intentionally satirize and critique the world and culture in which they are created, avoiding the way too common trap of hegemonically representing society.

GAME ECONOMIES

Video Games have been commonly defined as systems characterized by elements like rules, pieces and resources (Salen & Zimmerman, 2004, p. 64), and when analysing in detail how those elements relate to each other to create the interactive artefact that is a game, it is easy to start to notice parallels between the systems that define and delimit our everyday life and the ones modelled by game mechanics.

One particularly uncanny parallel can be found when looking at definitions of economy:

“We define economy as a system of norms, values, institutions, and practices” (Coraggio, 2010, p. 3)

“[…] we define economy as the process of production and distribution of resources in order to satisfy needs” (Enguita, 1998, p. 3)

“The economy is defined as a social domain that emphasizes the practices, discourses, and material expressions associated with the production, use, and management of resources” (James, 2014, p. 53)

Reading these definitions a connection can be immediately made to videogames, especially the ones that are more heavily resource-driven like Civilization (MPS Labs, 1991) or World of Warcraft (Blizzard Entertainment, 2004), just to use two examples.

While these games might not have been designed with the direct intention of modelling and commenting on real-life economic systems, as Bogost notes in his ‘The rhetoric of video games’ paper, the values of interactive systems can and are usually found in the real world (Bogost, 2008, p. 119) therefore, even when presenting interactive systems of resource exchange and management completely based on fantasy fiction, the connections with real-world values and the inevitable gap between reality and simulation (Bogost, 2007, p. 43) will make those systems present an inevitable commentary on systems and cultural values of the real world.

An example of how the simulation gap ends up implying meaning and endorsement when portraying in-game economies can be seen in how most games present shopkeepers that will always buy items of any kind from the player, regardless of any supply and demand logic, transforming every activity the player can undertake to gain items into a source of constant economic gain (Booth Simpsons, 1999, p. 16). While this can be seen as a simple gameplay consideration, to not overburden the player with information to keep track of, it also models a world where tedious work-like activities like grinding (the process of killing monsters over and over to continuously acquire the items they drop) are portrayed in the most positive light, as they provide a potentially endless source of progression and economic growth to the player, limited only to the amount of time they are willing to invest in it (Rettberg, 2008, p. 32). Even Simpsons in his 1999 analysis of the Ultima Online (Origin Systems, 1997) does note the idiosyncrasy of a world that, while trying to represent a nuanced fantasy civilization, automatically turns every inhabitant of said world in an entrepreneur engaged in a all-time-consuming cycle of production and sale (Booth Simpsons, 1999, p. 16).

Similarly, ‘hack and slash’ games like Torchlight (Runic Games, 2009) present a system of progression for which the income of a player will inevitably and constantly rise through the game. Every expense allows the player to exponentially grow their income through upgrades and as the player progresses through the levels the items he finds are worth more and more money when sold to merchants. This is another gameplay consideration, which aims to give the player a pleasant sense of progression (Lopez, 2006), but it unfortunately also leads to uncritically model a world where class struggles are non-existent and every individual has unlimited potential for wealth as long as they engage in the capitalistic system.

Scott Rettberg in his ‘Corporate ideology in World of Warcraft’ paper takes this line of thought one step further, framing massively multiplayer games like World of Warcraft, as something akin to training for the actuality of the capitalist world: products that both celebrate and teach the fundamental of how to succeed in our society (Rettberg, 2008). While the question of if games like World of Warcraft work as a didactic tool might be outside of the scope of this essay, what is interesting about Rettberg’s paper, is how he highlights how the game systems in the game once again celebrate the grind, portraying mindless work as an inevitably fruitful way to succeed and progress:

“[…] the implicit message to the World of Warcraft player is quite clear. The World of Warcraft is a world in which work is valued as an end in its own right. It is also a world in which slacking will bear little fruit.” (Rettberg, 2008, p. 26)

It has to be noted that most of what has been written regarding in-game economies in video game academia uses online games and virtual worlds as a point of reference. While still giving us interesting insight into how game economies are built and structured, there are two issues that differentiate how economies are modelled in those games to how economies are generally modelled in single player games:

• Interaction between players can lead to the emergent development of behaviours relating to the game that expands beyond the intended constraints of the game systems. Gold farmers in MMOs would be the obvious example (Nakamura, 2009, pp. 129–131), but these interactions can develop in a multitude of ways, even creating inflation in ways not originally defined by the game’s rules (Robinson, 2014, pp. 4–5)
• Ongoing massively multiplayer games often structure their business model around their in-game economies, so in many cases their systems are not a fictional representation of an economic system, but actual economies that deal in real-world money and are driven by the exchange of scarce digital goods. (Lehdonvirta & Castronova, 2014, pp. 1–4)

Both of those issues are obviously relevant and interesting in the wider context of video game economies and how players interact with them but, as mentioned, not entirely relevant in the scope of this essay, which is to look at how economic systems are represented in game design through thematic framing and procedural rhetoric.

Adams and Dormans in their book ‘Game Mechanics: Advanced Game Design’ have an extensive chapter which talks about the design of in-game economies, in which they both discuss tools to develop and analyse game economies and dissect some instances of game economies in different genres, showing how different games use them in different ways (Adams & Dormans, 2012, pp. 59–78). One of the most interesting passages of that chapter is the one that highlights how economies are generally used as a secondary mechanic in games (this includes any game that adds to its core mechanics the ability to buy or acquire any kind of advancements or power-ups).

“Super Mario Brothers and many other similar platform games use a simple economy to create a reward system […] It is safe to assume that you are able to reach all coins, so if you spot a coin, there must be a way to reach it. This creates the opportunity to reward skilful players for reaching difficult places in the game. Used in this way, the internal economy of the game can be very simple. However, even a simple economy like this already involves a feedback loop. If players go out of their way to collect many coins, they will gain more lives, thus allowing them to take more risks to collect more coins.” (Adams & Dormans, 2012, p. 72)

It is easy to connect this to the procedural rhetoric that has been highlighted before: economic systems modelled around a constant positive reinforcement, with any failing being exclusively tied to a lack of skill or effort. Once again this is problematic, as the games that take this approach portray the capitalistic economies they model as inherently perfect meritocracies, where the only thing standing between the player and wealth is skill and dedication.

Continuing from that quote, Adams and Dormans also note how economic systems are also used in games to ensure rewards to the player in terms of progression, both by gating arbitrary story progression points or by providing the player with a steadily increasing income of resources as they succeed in the game, to deliver an abstract sense of growth (Adams & Dormans, 2012, p. 73). While the act of progression is extremely tied to the player’s enjoyment of a video game experience (Lopez, 2006, p. 1), presenting unilateral loops of positive reinforcement tied to simplistically modelled capitalistic systems, with no effort of subverting or commentating on them, inevitably ends up portraying the politics of the real-world economies those models are based on a glorifying and overall positive light.

CASE STUDIES

The following case studies will look at Cart Life and Diary of a Spaceport Janitor, looking at how those two video games subvert the aforementioned attitudes in modelling game economies and manage to create experiences in which interacting with those economies is in itself a commentary and critique on them. (Osborn et al., 2015, p. 8)

METHODOLOGY

The case studies will look at the two games singularly, focusing on showing how they use procedural rhetoric to critique the systems they model.

The approach taken to research the games, hinges specifically on two of the tools developed by Mia Consalvo and Nathan Dutton in their paper ‘Game analysis: Developing a methodological toolkit for the qualitative study of games’: Gameplay Log and Interaction Map.

The ‘Gameplay Log’ tool involves playing the game while asking oneself a set of specific questions, as for example:

“Does the game fit a certain genre? Does it defy its stated genre? How and why?” (Consalvo & Dutton, 2006, p. 7)

This approach is helpful in evaluating the emergent aspects of a game and seeing how all its elements come together to communicate meaning (Consalvo and Dutton, 2006, pp. 6–7). In this case, it will be used with a framework revolving around the games` procedural rhetoric regarding their economy, which in turn means asking questions such as:

• “How is the game’s economic system modelled and how it influences progression”
• “How do the ludic and formal elements of the game frame the economic progression”
• “How does this system differ from the tropes of mainstream games’ economies?” and so on.

The second tool used is Interaction Mapping, which involves recording the possibilities for interaction that the player is offered, therefore mapping the rules that define the game. This is helpful in that it allows us to take a less anecdotal approach when studying the procedural rhetoric of the games, allowing us to try and deconstruct the logic of the systems themselves, rather than just studying the experience resulting from those systems. (Consalvo and Dutton, 2006, pp. 5–6).

While the Object Inventory method could also seem fitting for mapping and analysing the economy of a game, in the end I have decided against directly using it, as our issues are more concerned with the flow of resources than with cataloguing the single objects tied to those resources (Diary of A Spaceport Janitor includes a huge range of objects, for instance, but all of them are interacted with in the exact same way).

In addition to the toolkit developed by Consalvo and Dutton, another useful tool to track the economic systems of a game, and in particular the flow of resources, is provided by the already mentioned chapter on in-game economies from ‘Advanced Game Mechanics’ in the form of “Economic Shapes”.

Drawing the “shape” of a game economy involves tracking the player’s wealth (the amount of the main resource in the game that they own) against the time axis, and then identifying a trend, or “equilibrium”, that shows the direction that the game systems push the economy towards (stability, growth, etc.) (Adams & Dormans, 2012, pp. 64–66). The book mainly frames this as a theoretical approach to take when designing a game, allowing a designer to predict what direction their mechanics will push the economy towards, but in this case it will be used in pairing with the Gameplay Log to track how the resources flow during actual gameplay, and discern the direction in which the economies of the analysed games drive progression.

CART LIFE

Originally released on Steam in 2013 and then re-issued as a free and open-source software, Cart Life is a video game developed in Adventure Game Studio by game designer and illustrator Richard Hofmeier (Hofmeier, 2011b). The game draws inspiration from a period in his life when he was working “a bunch of bad jobs” to tell a story about three street vendors trying to earn their living while struggling with personal issues. (Edge Staff, 2013)

Cart Life has the player controlling one of the three street vendors as he wanders through the streets of a typically American city, having to balance their time between work, their personal issues and basic survival (eating, sleeping, etc.). Aside from managing their time, the player also must manage their finances, being able to spend the earnings of their vendor job in a various amount of ways, ranging from food to upgrades for their cart, while also having to deal with the constant pressure of repeating needs like hunger and payment deadlines for things like rent and restocking your cart inventory. The different tasks in the game, like selling things to people and preparing the cart in the morning, are executed through simple and repetitive minigames, which see the player having to either quickly type a sentence or mash one or more buttons repeatedly.

Following the structure delineated by Adams and Dormans, we can map the core elements of

Cart Life economy to have a clearer view of how its economy works (Adams & Dormans, 2012, pp. 61–62):

• Sources: Labour (working at the vendor cart)
• Drains: Rent, Food and other basic needs, Restocking the cart
• Converter: Cart upgrades

(Note that this is a simplified model that does not take account food as a separate resource, given that its only use in the game is to satisfy basic needs, making it effectively a regular drain on the player’s wealth)

Unlike in the previous examples of mainstream game economies, selling things is not a universally available action: the player is prompted to wait at their vendor cart while people will slowly approach it requesting specific items. This is a power shift that already alters the tone radically, as the player has no longer absolute agency in dictating the flow of resources, but is instead forced to conform to the whims of a wider landscape. Another consequence of this is altering how progression and upgrades end up working, as the player does not upgrade their cart to increase income or to directly progress, but to diversify the offer of goods available in it. Upgrades, therefore, are not framed anymore as a unilaterally positive index of personal progression, but as an attempt by the player to try to keep up with the requests of customers (upgrades allow to sell different things from the ones you start from, like food or coffee).

Another interesting thing to note is how the mini-games that the player has to execute to successfully sell products while working at the vendor cart, do significantly shift the focus of the game, as the centrepiece is not the simple exchange of resources anymore, but the labour involved in getting to that exchange of resources. Each morning the player slowly unpacks the newspapers, places them on the stand, waits for customers, retrieves the newspaper and hands them to them, calculates the change to give them and so on. Not only the fiction but also the systems driving Cart Life do not frame the player as an entrepreneur gaining wealth by speculating on resources, but as a labourer trying to survive through painfully repetitive and unfulfilling work.

The economic shape of the game reinforces this, by modelling a flow of resources which, even when played perfectly, will leave the wealth of the player constant. Assuming that the player works for most of the day every day of the game, the drains will balance the earnings allowing them to survive while their wealth remains low and unchanged. Any error in playing the game, be it wasting too much time wandering around or wasting too much money in non-essential things, will quickly cause the player’s wealth to plummet, leading them to a harrowing ending (as an example, Andrus, one of the characters, stabs himself if he reaches the point where he cannot pay rent anymore).

The harshness of this system is reinforced by the detail with which the world is modelled. The player is forced into a constant grind of mindless mini-games while having to ignore the expansive environments that the game provides, the huge amount of dialogue given to every character and even most of the upgrades that could make their life easier. Playing the game ‘correctly’ is not rewarded by progression or by additional snippets of narrative, like in many games (progression happens automatically given that the game flows in real time), but with simple survival, as the ‘successful’ epilogue for each character involves them passively accepting his new life in the city as a street vendor.

It is relevant to also mention that a lot of the work that the game does in framing its systems is achieved through the overall theming of the game. Aside from the narrative, which foregoes fantasy worlds and heroic story arcs typical of video games to instead focus on a much human and relatable situation, a good amount of the tone of the game is given by its mise-en-scene: the arrangement of its visual elements. (King and Krzywinska, 2006, p. 115)

Using the simple framework provided by Giannetti and Leach in ‘Understanding Movies’ (Giannetti and Leach, 1999, p. 89) we can look at how the screen is generally composed in Cart

Life noticing, for instance, that the protagonist is always kept in the middle of the screen, which causes the player’s eye to be constantly drawn to him, creating a connection between the two. At the same time though the screen is also scaled in a way for which the small sprite of the protagonist always seems dwarfed by the big cityscapes he inhabits, this difference in scale and the density of detail of these non-intractable environments, both contribute to give an almost oppressive feeling to the visuals of the game, which is also reinforced by the omnipresent grey scale colour scheme of the game, that paints the whole experience with an air of lifelessness.

To sum this up, Cart Life successfully manages to have the player engage and succeed in a capitalistic system while at the same time critiquing said system (Osborn et al., 2015, p. 8). It does so both by visually framing the experience as oppressive and lifeless and by modelling its systems to subvert many problematic tropes of video game economy design. It is a game very careful in how it designs how its economy rewards the player, purposefully modelling a system where the struggle is to survive, and where the grind of repetitive labour is not a gateway to wonderful rewards and life progression, but a dire necessity to survive in a hostile society.

DIARY OF A SPACEPORT JANITOR

Developed by “independent game developer & art collective” Sundae Month (Tiny Build, 2016) Diary of a Spaceship janitor is a short game released on PC through digital platforms like Steam and Itch.io, and has been labelled by its own creators as an “anti-adventure” (Kill Screen Staff, 2016).

Diary of a Spaceport Janitor, unlike Cart Life, models its system around a far more fantasy-based premise. As the title implies, the player takes the role of the janitor in a huge and colourful spaceport, and is tasked with surviving their day to day life by earning enough to deal with their hunger and health. The game is set in a vast and looping 3d environment (although all characters are 2d sprites) that the player can explore freely searching for randomly placed garbage as the days flow from day to night in real time. After collecting said garbage, which mostly takes the shape of ‘discarded’ fantasy-based items (old laser guns, dungeons keys, etc.), the player can choose to immediately incinerate it, for a low wage, or to store it into their limited inventory to later be able to sell it to one of the merchants in the game. The earned money is then spent to buy objects from those same merchants, most of which are used to keep the player healthy and fed.

Once mapped (Adams & Dormans, 2012, pp. 61–62), the economic system driving Diary of a Spaceport Janitor is a bit simpler than the one in Cart Life, given that it does not include upgrades to buy or systems like rent:

• Sources: Incinerating garbage, Selling to merchants
• Drains: Buying food and medicines

(Once again this is a simplified model that focuses purely on the money resource of the game)

A major aspect in Diary of a Spaceport Janitor’s modelling of a capitalistic economy is the manner in which it shifts the focus of the game from portraying said economy as an absolute meritocracy, like in most games listed before, to instead portraying it as an oppressive system in which luck is often more important than strategy or planning. An important way in which it does so is in the design of how selling garbage to merchant actually works in the game:

The player can either choose to incinerate the garbage they find for a meagre and inconsistently calculated wage (game systems being opaque and hidden to the player is a recurrent theme in the game) or to sell it to merchants for an increased price. We can already see how unlike the games described previously, Diary of a Spaceport Janitor has the player choose between an employed job, framed as economically exploitative and unsustainable, and entrepreneurship.

The latter though it is, once again, not framed as a skill-driven enterprise: there is an overwhelming number of merchants in the city and each of them only buys specific items that randomly change every day. This makes it basically impossible to plan out any strategy, as not only remembering the location of every merchant is basically impossible, but any income that can come from selling to merchants is left to the whim of the game’s randomization system (the garbage you find, the garbage they request and the price they are willing to pay are all randomized variables). In addition to this, the interface of the game puts a huge focus on an opaquely explained “luck” stat, as the player is prompted repeatedly to spend money and time to increase their luck, without any explicit explanation of what actual effect that has on the game. Plenty of other random events in the game reinforce the game’s theme of luck, rather than skill, being the driving force of survival under a capitalistic system, for instance the player can randomly be harassed and robbed by city guards when walking the streets of the spaceport during the night and randomly occurring religious holidays can completely alter the items sold and bought by vendors.

It is actually interesting reading how the developers commented about the obscure luck-based mechanics when interviewed by Daniel Fries for a Kill Screen article:

“There’s a sweet spot, that’s just ambiguous enough that you’re kind of confused, but just responsive enough that players feel like they can affect it, which is what we want” (Shasha, 2016)

While in many trade-based games, like Stardew Valley (Concerned Ape, 2016), the economy and the factors that play into it are made as transparent as possible, Diary of a Spaceport Janitor does the exact opposite, filling the player with a continuous sense of uncertainty as they have to constantly doubt and re-evaluate if their efforts are even having any active effects in bettering their wealth and general life situation.

Looking at my time spent with the game I noticed that, just like in Cart Life, the Diary of a Spaceship Janitor’s economic shape has a fairly constant trend, as the player does not ever accumulate money in any significant fashion. Where they differ though is that in Diary of a Spaceport Janitor the shape itself is characterized by a series of significant spikes, both in positive and negative, as random events, like being robbed or finding extremely valuable items, can affect the player’s daily income wildly. Despite those spikes, more often than not the player’s actual wealth seems to be driven to come down to around zero, meaning that the player will rarely be able to accumulate wealth for long, which consequently drives the gameplay to be vastly based around trying to earn just enough money to satisfy the monetary drains of food and health on a daily basis.

The thing about the flow of resources in Diary of a Spaceport Janitor that the economic shape cannot convey, is how the design detail of payments being received only the day after the player earns them, vastly changes the emergent narratives that the game generates. As the game is already balanced toward the player having to spend all their wealth to survive, a recurring situation the player is faced with is getting to the end of the day with a hungry and broke protagonist. Given that the rules of the game do not allow going to sleep while hungry, this situation forces the player to scour the streets for any piece of eatable trash on the ground just to survive to the next paycheck. In the same vein often the player is tasked with having to play the game while enduring illness, which causes symptoms like scrambled letters in the game’s text, until they have enough money to buy medicines. This subverts the aforementioned positive reinforcement loops typical of game economies, replacing them with loops of negative reinforcement which tend to create a snowball effect. As eating trash will, in turn, make the player more likely to get ill, and getting ill will make the player hungrier than usual, Diary of a Spaceport Janitor models a world in which the poor continuously gets poorer, as the system forces them to get into tricky situations just to fulfil their basic survival needs.

The game’s economy also comments on the added difficulty of being a minority engaging with a capitalistic system. The player at random intervals is hit with attacks of gender dysphoria, as the screen starts wobbling and the game becomes harder to navigate, and the only way to stop those symptoms is buying expensive “gender-shift pills”, which allow the player to change gender and regain stability.

Similarly to Cart Life, Diary of a Spaceport Janitor constantly teases the player with promises of a huge world that their mindless grinding precludes them to explore, but in this case that aspect is upgraded to one of the main aesthetics of the game, as also stated by the game creators (Fletcher & Shasha, 2017). The game’s fantasy theming by itself suggests action and adventures, but the game also goes out of its way to show the players gates to dungeons they cannot access and vendors who sell mystical items for a price higher than what the player could ever earn in the whole game’s runtime. Despite these constant hints, which in many games would be a driving force for the player to increase their income and become a hero, the gameplay never really changes from the dire game of daily survival that it starts as. Even the ending is a final tease of bigger things to comes, as the game shows the player ascending to the stars just to have them woke up again in their room as if that never happened, clearly framing that final sequence as a dream as the player returns to their daily grind for survival.

Just like Cart Life, Diary of a Spaceport Janitor uses a mix of aesthetic theming and system design to comment on the capitalistic economic model that drives the game. Once again, the game frames the capitalistic, merchant-driven, economy of the spaceport not as a meritocracy that rewards effort with progress, but as an arbitrary series of resource drains that the player needs to engage with to survive. It is interesting to notice that while the theming is in some ways subtler than Cart Life, as it coats the struggle of the working class with a more pop-appealing fantasy theming (Shasha, 2016), the systems suggest a way direr take on the economy it models, given that the game has effectively no end, restarting from the beginning every time the player reaches the credits.

CONCLUSIONS

This essay explored how capitalistic economies tend to be glorified in a problematic way by mainstream games. For the sake of providing the player with a pleasant progression curve many games create utopian capitalistic meritocracies where any effort is constantly rewarded with wealth and progression.

While it is easy to fall in the trap of modelling a utopic representation of society while trying to create a compelling ludic experience, games like Cart Life and Diary of a Spaceship Janitor show us how it is possible to craft experiences that focus on trade-based gameplay, while at the same time commenting and critiquing the economy and society that they model. They do this both through theming and procedural rhetoric, as they not only show the struggle of the working class in a capitalistic system through writing and aesthetics, but they also model their systems to explicitly subvert the typical tropes of ‘traditional’ game economies. Both games carefully avoid tying wealth to progression, showing instead the daily grind of thankless jobs as a necessity that hinders the protagonists from engaging in more fulfilling activities. Diary of a Space Janitor also directly engages with the problematic idea of modelling economic systems as meritocracies, in which lack of progress always equate to a lack of skill and effort, instead modelling a system in which luck is a huge driving force in the fate and wealth of its protagonist.

While these games were designed with the specific purpose of subverting those tropes (Shasha, 2016), what they do can be a useful starting point for any designer to think more deeply about the implications of the economic systems they decide to implement in their game. In being successful ludic critique of “wage slavery and capitalism” (Shasha, 2016) Not only they prove that that glorification of capitalistic system is not an inherent characteristic of video games, but they show us effective examples of how video games can be a subversive medium of critique, that can effectively model the darker sides of real-life systems while at the same time providing compelling and engaging experiences.

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