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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