Welcome to Fatworld! Experience Refreshing Moral Discomfort!

[Ian David]

Welcome to Fatworld! Experience Refreshing Moral Discomfort!

Ian Bogost likes to play with failure. The 30-year-old Georgia Tech professor designs popular Web games powered by sarcasm and social commentary. In his latest, Fatworld, players navigate a consumer paradise (A), rule their own empire of restaurants and convenience stores (B), and enjoy food allergies, diabetes, heart disease, and death (C).

Most games with social themes are built around tiresome moral lessons. But the titles created by Bogost's development studio, Persuasive Games, invite us to be ruthlessly greedy, helplessly incompetent, and breathtakingly rude. The goal of Airport Security, for example, is to relieve infuriated passengers of prohibited items in accordance with continuously changing carry-on rules. In Bacteria Salad, players grow veggies for profit and try to avoid poisoning too many people. And in last year's Disaffected!, we assume the role of a Kinko's employee struggling to deliver print orders as lazy coworkers shuffle papers into the wrong stacks. Bogost proudly cites this user review: "I could actually feel myself getting angry and depressed and my sense of self-worth going right through the floor."

Which raises an obvious question: What makes this fun?

"The question of fun hangs like a cloud over this medium," Bogost says, pointing out that "fun" would hardly be accepted as the highest possible praise for a song, novel, or movie. In his new book, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames, Bogost describes how games can engage us through irony, luring us into a pattern of actions that we recognize as reprehensible, or at least dismaying, while at the same time exciting our competitive drive and allowing us to inhabit an unfamiliar point of view. Fatworld — although outwardly neutral about whether your character should inflate like a loaf of yeasty bread and die young — works through a strange mix of empathy and ridicule, more like a short story than a toy. "Fun" is not adequate to describe the experience. In fact, Bogost brings to gaming something that fiction writers have always known: Moral discomfort is the root of comedy, and pain can be a source of pleasure, too.



More:
http://www.wired.com/gaming/gamingreviews/magazine/15-07/pl_games