Review: Persuasive Games' Food Import Folly

Politics and games have always made ostensibly strange bedfellows. Are Donkey Kong's characters a meditation on the id, ego, and superego? Is America's Army a game or a shameless recruitment tool? Is it all in good fun to make mods that allow you to assassinate Osama bin Laden, or merely knee-jerk catharsis for the bereaved and/or sadistic? Are games that appear to glamorize shootings like Columbine or Virginia Tech social commentary or merely juvenile and exploitive?

Testing the waters, The New York Times is partnering with developer Persuasive Games to launch an exclusive monthly series of casual Flash-based games that unabashedly tackle tough political issues. Call them "newsgames" or "op-ets" (opinion-entertainment, as opposed to op-eds)--they're designed to be casual in style, play, and challenge, but complex thematically.

The raison d'etre, from Persuasive Games' founding partner and Georgia Institute of Technology professor Ian Bogost's website:

Almost four years ago, Gonzalo [Frasca] suggested "newsgames" as a genre that intersects videogames and political cartoons. Last year, my studio Persuasive Games took our own take on this genre with The Arcade Wire series (Airport Security, Oil God, Bacteria Salad, Xtreme Xmas Shopping), published by AddictingGames.com / Shockwave.com. Those games enjoyed considerable success, tallying at least 10 million plays or so. But Shockwave is still a gaming site, reaching gamers, not necessarily reaching ordinary citizens more broadly. And that's what news and editorial should do.

Food Import Folly is the first of Persuasive's "broader reach" ventures, created remarkably by a small group of designers in a single week's time. I hustled over to the site earlier today and upgraded my viewing membership to TimesSelect ($50 a year for all-you-can-eat access--it's required to play) and gave it a go. It's a casual Flash-based quick-clicker that grapples with the issue of food inspection in the United States. According to the game, "Food imports increased from 2 million shipments in 1997 to over 9 million last year, while FDA personnel and resources remained roughly constant." Ouch.

On a stylized map of the U.S. overlaid with a light white grid and drifting clouds, you can grapple with those increasingly bleak odds by clicking on imports (fish, fruits, vegetables, nuts, sweeteners) in realtime as they enter by boat or truck through any of five ports. Containers take time to be processed, and you only have two FDA inspectors, so appropriate prioritization is essential. Some imports are contaminated--if one enters the country, you'll need to assign an inspector to identify the problem, then inspect that type of food more closely (three simultaneous food alerts = you lose). Each level corresponds to a real-world year, so in 1997 you only have to import a poky 2 million shipments, but by 2006, you'll have to manage a rather ridiculous rapid-fire barrage of 9 million.

In theory, it's a clever idea. In practice, it leaves a bit to be desired. You mostly just click as fast as you can around the map, minimally prioritizing imports by food type and tagging new food items as your little FDA fellas finish inspections or address contamination alerts. I quickly beat the first four levels, then jumped straight to 2006 and--though I'm not especially skilled at Whac-a-mole style gaming--managed to effectively double the required 9 million inspected in a few unhurried, unilluminating minutes. In short, what a great idea that's not altogether here yet. Clicking to shoot down balloons or fire arrows at something...that's one thing. But clicking fast-as-you-can on food crates? Paint me 50 or 60 and subtract my gamer bias and I still think I'd want more to juggle strategy-wise. Give me a population to save (or sicken), lobbyists to manipulate, and supermarkets to confound. Even one of the oldest economic sims in the biz makes you think more about the interrelationship of economic variables than Food Import Folly, which gives away its point (and gameplay) in a single introductory sentence.

But this is only the first of presumably many monthly efforts, and I'm interested to see what Bogost and his team might pull off given a few more times at bat. The endeavor is, as Bogost claims on his blogsite, an "unprecedented" move, if only because of the power and reach of the country's third most widely read newspaper. Combine these games with a "related articles" tab that lets you easily leap from playing the game to reading related stories and op-eds--say in this case Steven R. Weisman's "Food Safety Joins Issues at U.S.-China Talks" or economist Paul Krugman's "Fear of Eating"--and the potential for newsgaming to actually catch on suddenly seems huge.

Can news be "fun"? I don't see why not, and to the extent it can help us think more dynamically about tough issues, I'm certainly hoping so.

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