Mass Surveillance Part 1: Orwell (2016)

Review of Orwell
Developed by Osmotic Studios
Published by Surprise Attack Games
Review Copy Purchased

Review

Orwell (2016) places you in the role of a surveillance operator of the latest technology developed by The Nation, Orwell. Part Person of Interest machine and part database, Orwell processes datachunks being collected about specific people based on what you, the operator, upload. Orwell presents you with articles, social media feeds, phone calls, instant messages, and laptops or phones of the people you are surveilling. For the player, this manifests as a series of click and drag operations between windows on the screen.

The story of Orwell revolves around an explosion at Freedom Plaza in the incredibly non-specific fictional city of Bonton. You are guided by an adviser who comments on the datachunks and guides you towards the information you need to find so that they can contact authorities with the information. The bombings appear to be tied to a group known as Thought. Thought as it turns out is a rebellious group of students led by their history teacher, who slowly become more and more radicalized as the game's story unfolds.

Orwell as a Mass Surveillance game does a great job of having you scare yourself. Within the first chapter of the game, you go from a simple news article to listening to someone's private calls. Orwell as a system of infiltration and surveillance is based on real world spying technology and this is the most powerful portrait it paints. Especially due to the nature of the system, Orwell seems to pinpoint only the aspects of a person that it needs in order to incriminate them. You get to see other aspects of their lives, even aspects you can point out and upload, from simple information such as favorite colors to people they've slept with or their sexual orientation.

Sometimes you have to make a choice between information that is contradictory to other information. These essentially act as the game's decision-making points. Are you going to report that this character is married, or gay? This has small changes on how the story unfolds and in some missions can seem to change the outcome.

You breach the privacy of lives more than a hundred times before the game ends, and it's that simplicity that is frightening.

Or at least its meant to be.

At this point, we have to go ahead and get into spoilers, and we'll switch from review mode to analysis mode. If what I've said intrigues you, and you have fifteen bucks and five hours to spare, check out Orwell it's a pretty good little game.

All right, just to make sure.

*SPOILERS AHEAD*

Everyone gone? Okay.

So Orwell begins with a great enough premise. As you research Thought more and more as an activist group, you begin to build a nice web of people all linked to each other. And as I played Orwell I anticipated this to be the first in a nice long web, the size of which I was expecting to be massive by the end of the game.

Instead, hours later, I was somewhat disappointed. While the cast had grown from the one person of the first episode, the last episode really only plays between about seven or eight characters total. They're all linked by being in Thought, but that's it. And only one of them has really been orchestrating terrorist attacks, and when you understand the reason the game leaves you, the operator, with the choice of what to expose to the public.

I understand why they went in this direction. The concept of creating stories and facts and details around one hundred characters and making the gameplay and story interesting is an incredibly difficult challenge. But that's exactly what I wanted. Instead, it felt like Orwell's world was incredibly small. All over there were background details about corporate sponsors, foreign wars, peace talks, and the potential for big large movement activism or terrorist organizations and almost none of that is delivered on.

Even the final mission, a ticking clock wherein you can only report so much information to Orwell before the final decision comes to light, operates almost as a red herring mission. You will still learn who the big bad guy is, and I imagine that you still get the choice as to what ending you will get. This was disappointing in a game that had seemed full of branches before hand.

There are some serious problems with the specific details of this choice you make to. The idea is that you can choose to whistleblow, report Thought as terrorists, or expose that they've been spying on you, an out of country citizen. This somehow blows up in the end as either a good, bad, or neutral ending, all of which end with you sliding one last datachunk over to Orwell to end the game.

The worst part of all these problems is that the information you upload, and the people you're spying on, are absolutely suspicious and all potentially capable of being the major bad guy you're looking for the entire game. All of it is information that would be difficult to capture otherwise, and so, even with all the "breaches" of privacy (some of which include people handing out the equivalent of their IP addresses in chatboxes) are hand given to you as a means of looking through. Who on earth is uploading their plan to blow a place up on social media? (Okay a lot of people, isn't it good that they can be caught?)

This small scope, and actions that seem to be there only for the sake of easily moving through the story, really cuts into the message of Orwell. I would've been aghast at a huge scope of a hundred people very quickly reported on. I would've been shocked by personal violations such as publicly exposing someone as a depressive and making them lose their job, or by calling a married person gay with "evidence" pulled from alternative social profiles. I would have been mortified by the concept of inventing evidence based on nothing, but none of these things happen in Orwell.

You stalk eight people who openly brag and speak against the government that has recently cracked down on people speaking against the government, who are all directly connected, related, or involved with an actual terrorist mastermind for the entire game. There's nothing shocking about that! It sounds like an argument for the very system you're arguing against!

But that doesn't mean its all bad.

As I said before, the act of reporting information to Orwell allows you to grasp how databases work, and the choices point out how databases can be abused.

The art style of Orwell is stunning. Fractal geometric shapes are used for everything. The background, people's faces, real world settings. It impresses on you the idea of a world that is cut and dry, where the shapes and plans and the actions all fit together perfectly. There is no need to second guess. You can see the shadows on their smug faces.

And at the very least the story functions as a very good mystery story, the likes of which will keep you interested and guessing in your play time. It's just that, for this genre, which we established really needs to strike the fear into the heart of a normal citizen, it just didn't do it for me. I didn't came out scared of a system like Orwell as much as I felt the game had justified the very existence of a system like it.

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This was the first part of a two part series. Previously an introduction discussing real world Surveillance and George Orwell was posted as an introduction. The next part will concern Oliver Stone's latest thriller, Snowden. Let's just say, this genre doesn't seem to be getting very far off the ground with me. Until then,

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Mass Surveillance Part 0: My Thoughts

Mass Surveillance has been a fear of the public conscience ever since George Orwell's novel 1984 (1949). Big Brother is the name of the entity that constantly watches the public and populace through what was essentially a computer screen in every citizen's home and in the stores and on the streets. There was virtually nowhere the characters could go to achieve any sense of privacy, and even worse, they'd grown used to it.

Prior to Edward Snowden's whistleblowing of the NSAs global surveillance programs, there were many people who had a finger pointed the Patriot Act, an anti-terrorism incentive that allowed law enforcement agencies to acquire, act, and prevent planned attacks, as the primary force of Orwellian politics in modern America. Even being a younger teenager at the time, I remember every time something along the lines of mass surveillance came up, "Orwellian" was always the functional adjective of the sentence.

While some might look at 1984 and see the nightmare of totalitarian government, it does feel like people take the most visible level of what was happening in that novel and use it to paint certain real world things as much worse than they seem. It's important to remember that the citizens in Orwell's novel weren't protected from government criticism, whereas in a country like America freedom of speech is protected. I've said a lot about the most recent election outcome in this country - as have a lot of others - and nothing is happening to us, and there's very little reason to think anything will happen to us. That's because of the protections American Democracy affords to its citizens and is one of the biggest benefits of that system.

In short, the horror of Orwell's world is not the horror of this country.

Let's get American, y'all.

Even in a post-Snowden world, I'm not all that scared or surprised that the government uses technology to spy on its citizens. I'm not surprised it uses it to keep an eye on potential dangers. What I don't see is any violation of the Bill of Rights in the country being done. If you are skeevy about web cameras, cover them. If you are worried about being spied on, don't use Facebook. There's a lot of things you can opt out of to keep your privacy, but there's no privacy on the internet and based on the huge amount of racist, threatening things that happen there, that's kind of a good thing.

I'm glad Snowden did what he did, but he really only allowed us to stop guessing at something that's been possible since nine years prior to his whistleblowing. And until something more substantial happens ...

... that's basically all she wrote about the situation. It's fear and paranoia and a huge self-importance that people place on themselves to think they'll be stolen away unknowingly into the night.

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So what are we looking for when it comes to the Mass Surveillance genre? Well, let's get what Orwell did when he wrote 1984. There is a genuine fear that people had of that world. There's a reason the word "Orwellian" stuck and get's brought up. Hell, one of the things that will be reviewed in the next post is a game literally named after the man himself.

So in short, the Mass Surveillance genre is conspiracy thriller mixed with government horror. There's something unthrilling about the very real possibility of existing without privacy. There's something very horrifying about not being safe inside your own home or your own country.

Part of the reason I wrote the first part of this post was so we could lay this out. The goal of a genre is to allow a range of emotion or a feeling painted with specific aspects. Mass Surveillance as a topic should absolutely be involved in the political conversation surrounding that topic, and ideally, if the goal is to say Mass Surveillance is a bad thing, then I should be horrified.

So with that in mind, part two of Mass Surveillance will be a review of the point-drag-and click adventure thriller, Orwell (2016).

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The Crown Season 1: A Masterpiece, quite simply

I belatedly watched Netflix's newest show, The Crown. Each time I sat down the show excited me with just how amazing its execution is. Each shot as it lingered, each framing of the scene, the way it zooms in and out. The show made it very clear that it was a portrait of a country at a time of significant change, and at the center a mindful and passionate - if a bit hapless - young woman suddenly thrust into the most looked upon in her country.

But the show does more than that. Much more.

More #1: The Show is not just about England

I'm American. For that reason, the British Royal Family and its place in the political spectrum of modern day England does not concern me. My biggest concern when I began to watch the Crown was that I would not be intelligent enough about the history of England to recognize the stories taking place in the show.

And I was thoroughly wrong.

The Crown concerns itself with characters, first and foremost, and their relationships to each other. England, the Monarchy, and the Politics that run the nation are treated very realistically as the very things they are: monolithic ideas that are more brushed and understood as abstract philosophy than boiled down to easy choices or motivations.

Elizabeth is not simply the Queen, she is a young woman out of her depth in a world of politics and ruling that she never got the proper time to understand. She just very recently was married and then her Father has died out from under her. Her introduction to the role is as much her storyline as everyone else's. If the characters ask Elizabeth, "What will you do?" her very frequent response is, "I don't know, what do you think I should do?"

*ahem* I'm waiting...

This brings us to our second point,

More #2: Characters

If the Crown merely concerned itself with Elizabeth, it would lose its tracking. Instead, we also have her Uncle, Edward VIII who abdicated the throne so he could marry the love of his life. Princess Margaret is the impish sister who captures the nation's heart with a relationship scandal echoing her Uncle's. Elizabeth's Father plays a very important role in defining his children and their relationship with each other and their respective roles. Winston Churchill (played excellently by Jon Lithgow in a "best of his entire career" type of performance) plays advisor and introducer to Elizabeth in the show, making him the most respectable and most ugly of the characters. Churchill is a figure who stands in Elizabeth's way and shows her the ropes. By far these two are the central focus of season 1 and its overall theme of transition. We also have the Duke of Edinburgh, Elizabeth's husband, played almost archvillanously by Matt Smith. The Duke is a man who wishes to be recognized and powerful like his wife, but who has very clear problems submitting to a female authority. If everyone else is testy, the Duke is outright vicious about it. It's almost inhumane or far too caricaturish to buy into and believe, but even by the end of the show, I felt he had somehow grown into his role and emerged a human character.

This picture well represents the societal pressures young women must go through.

To be clear, nearly every episode represents a type of loss. Typically this is the loss of the old and the established to the young and the new. Not every episode, however, and it is in this sense that the show crafts itself. Each character represents nuanced bits of humanity, the lovers who just want to marry, the old abdicator who just wants to be part of the family, the father who just wants to see his daughters a little older before they take power or the mother who finds her place rapidly disappearing as her friends and allies die. It's by backing away from historical fact and significance that the magic of the Crown works, and why I think this first season will stand as a testament.

More #3: Cinematography

Film is an art dedicated to change over time. It shares this in common with music and is that which Literature is entirely out of touch with. Nothing changes a book. If you could read it in a single second it would not count or rely on the transition of said second very much. But Film is about being in a fixed place, a moment.

So when I say the cinematography of The Crown is hands down some of the best work I've ever seen, understand I am talking about the way it focuses on just the right aspects at just the right time. There are moments where the camera holds still while an actor on an elaborately designed set takes their time processing and thinking, about what? Sometimes we know sometimes we don't.

Longer shots are the lifeblood of characteristic, tone driven cinema, and The Crown god damn knows it. The Crown is about contemplation. It is about time. It is about change. And it accomplishes those things in nearly every shot. If nothing else, this element will allow the shows "planned" six season run to be executed with an artistic perfection.

What you don't know is that they've been shaking hands for five minutes.

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The Crown is beautiful. It is hands down the most beautiful tv show I've ever seen. Its stories are far more humanistic than the Queen of England has any right to be. It's characters so fully flesh out the world we live in, full of people who want and take and suffer and it paints so much life and blood into these things that I just want to throw it into a time capsule already. This show features so much of the life people suffer through on a day to day basis. If this is truly what the Queen represents to the people of England, then I fully understand. Even if it isn't, this is what everything in life represents to everyone.

To put it short, if you cannot relate to this show you cannot relate to humanity. If you think that's a tall order, then I urge you, watch this show. It is a modern masterpiece.

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In the next few days, I will write on my indifference towards mass surveillance, but also the differing art forms of Games and Film on the topic of such. I'll be discussing Orwell, a recently released game, and how its small focus perhaps sells the horror more than Snowden, the most recent Oliver Stone film, on why surveillance should be scary.

Did you like this post? If so, consider signing up for the e-mail list so you never miss out on the latest film, tv, music, or video game post from Expository Conundrum! (Hint: It's in the upper right-hand corner of the page!!)

Also, consider donating to the blog! Your eyes are enough, but generosity and support can go a long way to making us both feel a lot better. Support your local artist (by local I mean Internet local.)

And finally, you can hang around the Facebook page or Twitter to keep up on Social Media. This doubles as the easiest way to harass me, but you wouldn’t do that would you?

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If you enjoyed the modern day struggles of Elizabeth becoming Queen, you may be interested in a more historical period piece as well. Queen Victoria was one of the youngest monarchs at the time, and did not see herself as a placeholder for more experienced men. Follow her journey, by purchasing the first season by clicking on the image below.

Rogue One: A few misgivings about a galaxy far, far away...

*MASSIVE SPOILERS FOR ROGUE ONE*





Misgiving 1: Characters

There’s a scene in Rogue One where Jyn Erso, our protagonist, cries while her dad gives her a message regarding the Death Star. The message was not sent to Erso, but most of it is addressed to her. He goes into extensive detail about the Death Star, its capabilities, and the weakness that he put there. Jyn is crying emotionally, the first time she’s seen or heard from her father in years, but his message is ultimately exposition. It’s telling us the set-up for the rest of the film.

This happens nearly an hour into the film. This is also the moment where Jyn finally receives motivation to assist the Rebel Alliance, which she’s been testy with so far.

If you can’t quite see the narrative issue on display, let me explain. This is the first time we ever understand how Jyn feels about her father since we’ve seen her as a grown up. It’s also the only moment that really justifies her being our protagonist being the protagonist.

I wish this was the only example of a character being rather empty in the film but it isn’t. The entire Rogue’s (one) gallery is introduced by means of a punctuated action sequence. Typically, you would expect them to be introduced with witty battle wrought dialogue, but instead, they’re usually introduced without even a lick of dialogue. Or what little dialogue they have is like Jyn’s dad droning away about the Death Star without betraying the idea of a personality.

The film recovers from this, but it's this first hour that set off my alarm bells. And I do believe it’s the root cause of a lot of other problems.

Misgiving 2: War Sucks (in a galaxy far, far away)

Much of Rogue One’s cinematography and scenes are obsessed with one image: people dying. Stormtroopers, extremist insurgents, the Rebels. War in the Star Wars universe is shown to be what it’s never been: dirty, bloody, violent, ridden with meaningless and meaningful sacrifices. The ending shot of the film is composed on this idea, with the action and drama continuing even once our heroes have taken their hands off the main element of the plot.

There’s something transcendental about this focus, and something about it that pays homage to what I once believed fantasy was best at; delivering realism by means of escapism. When you are confronted with the ills of racism in a fantasy novel, you can learn about real world racism without having to—for lack of a better word—“deal” with real world racism.

They start them young nowadays.

Rogue One deals with the little heroes. Jyn Erso, her father, and other players who are small in the world of Star Wars, but big in the possibilities it gives to the heroes.

However, I’m not entirely sure what this “does” for Star Wars.

In the original trilogy, I don’t remember the warfare ever being super privileged. Sure, the Jedi can’t get hit by blaster bolts, but just about everyone else could. Obi-Wan was the first sacrificial mentor I can remember seeing in a story. Dack in Empire Strikes Back was brutally killed in the Battle of Hoth in a way that I still remember being deeply surprised by as a kid. Star Wars has never featured overwhelmingly clean warfare.

Pictured: Not traumatizing

Furthermore, I really feel like the message they ultimately deliver at the end is very nearly lost as they scramble to make the characters work. Jyn Erso ultimately becomes what the film wants her to be, a tragic casualty, another number in the big picture of the Star Wars plot, and yeah, that feeling really works by the end, but it was not working for the first half. That’s an entire hour of character—potentially thematic character—that is missing from the film.

If you think I’m sitting pretty, and ignoring what works for what doesn’t, then I suggest you look back at the first films.

Imagine for a second if the first hour of New Hope was C3PO and R2D2 walking around Tatooine. Not saying anything to each other. Just walking. Along the way they sort of run into a few of the character’s we’ll see later, Obi-wan, Han, just background for now. Then imagine they get captured, we get one shot of them being decommissioned, and then they’re at Luke’s farm. They are quickly bought by Uncle Owen and sent to the garage for cleaning where we meet Luke, who doesn’t say anything and just starts cleaning them, then they find the message and the rest of the film continues but condensed into the remaining hour of run time.

That’s what Rogue One feels like, a film where the characters spend a very long time not talking to each other.

Misgiving 3: Maybe I’m being unfair...

Last year we got The Force Awakens and despite the complaints about that, it lived up to the original trilogy. It was a tightly plotted celebration of its primary influences and offered character driven and characteristic dialogue and plot. Okay, sure, they just HAPPEN to end up in the same bit of space where Han Solo’s ship is, but didn’t they just HAPPEN to wind up in the same bit of space that the Death Star was in the original film?

My point is that we just came off of what ended up being my favorite Star Wars film to date, so was I ready to sit down and see a less than stellar film on the big screen. Absolutely not.

But I do feel the concerns I have addressed are worth noting. Rogue One is not a perfect film, and its setting the stage for future flicks. I just can’t imagine Young Han Solo being anything other than a typical fun Star Wars flick, however, and it makes the choice of this dark and dour flick beforehand a very strange shade.

Still, go see it and see what you think. It’s looking to be a divisive flick.

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Did you like this post? If so, consider signing up for the e-mail list so you never miss out on the latest film, tv, music, or video game post from Expository Conundrum! (Hint: It's in the upper right-hand corner of the page!!)

Also, consider donating to the blog! Your eyes are enough, but generosity and support can go a long way to making us both feel a lot better. Support your local artist (by local I mean Internet local.)

And finally, you can hang around the Facebook page or Twitter to keep up on Social Media. This doubles as the easiest way to harass me, but you wouldn’t do that would you?

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