Molleindustria: Recent Episodes
None
Molleindustria is officially and primarily on BlueSky.
The Twitter account will remain active for the time being. In addition to it there is a searchable static archive of Tweets from 2010 to 2022 (that is until Musk’s takeover). Experience the best possible Twitter.
Meet me at the Workers’ Club is an interactive reconstruction of Alexander Rodchenko’s Workers’ Club. The original installation was created in 1925 to represent the Soviet Union at the Paris World Expo (aka International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts).
The interactive experience offers plenty of commentary on the original pieces, on the historical context, and on Rodchenko’s work, so I won’t spoil it here.
Meet me at the Workers’ Club was made in one week in occasion of the Fuck Capitalism Jam and as a complementary piece to KLUB WRKR, a traveling art exhibition reimagining Workers’ Club today.
Play it here on a computer browser (10 minutes)
The New York Times Simulator is out now, free to play from any browser. It works decently on mobile too.
It’s a meta news game about how corporate media manufacture consent for genocide, minimize police misconduct, and serve the ruling class.
The content of the game is literally “ripped from the headlines” in that it uses mostly real headlines (and even actual edits) from the NYT, the Wall Street Journal, and other “liberal” mainstream media. I originally wanted to make parody headlines but I just couldn’t come up with anything more shameless and contrived than what’s already out there.
The New York Times’s use of its signature lyrical style to avoid incriminating IsraelThe indie connoisseurs will immediately recognize the similarities with Lucas Pope’s The Republia Times. The NYT Simulator is basically a modern remake that replaces totalitarian censorship with the “propaganda model” of Western corporate media, as described by Chomsky and Herman in Manufacturing Consent.
Instead of a turn-based narrative puzzle, you have a real-time gameplay more reflective of online publishing in the 24 hour news cycle. Instead of one power to propagandize, you have three interest groups you are trying to not piss off. Like in The Republia Times, Reigns, and the Democratic Socialism Simulator, the effects of your actions aren’t explicit. The variables affecting the approval are hidden, so you have to make educated guesses – meaning you have to interpret the headlines in relation to the interests of the police, Israel, and the capitalist class.
An actual post-publication edit from the New York Times reframing Amazon’s union busting as a workers’ victory.Whether you play the game “cynically” or try to do your best without getting fired, I’m hoping The New York Times Simulator can train players to quickly identify common spinning and framing techniques like the infamous passive voice (children “found dead” in Gaza), weasel words, or biased euphemisms (“officer-involved shooting”).
Beating up protesters is presented as “strong police response”. The ethnic cleansing of an entire region is presented as “letting civilians flee”.Headlines are important. Notoriously most people only read the headlines, and things only got worse with social media becoming the primary way to get news. It turns out that even when the full article is read, the headline dramatically condition how the information is interpreted and retained.
If you want to know if a headline in the game is real or made up, or what was the reasoning behind its inclusion, you can check out the links next to each news item in the game data.
Public game dataI managed to put together this spreadsheet very quickly thanks to media watchdogs like FAIR.org, and NYT diffs, (which tracks post-publication edits of major outlets). I’m also thankful to the thousands of individuals holding media into account every day on social media.
Of course, the danger of relying on mainstream Western media is to reproduce the same omissions. For example The New York Times has devoted almost zero coverage to Palestine Action which accomplished newsworthy results including the permanent shutdown of entire weapon factories. You also won’t hear more graphic details like the story of the Palestinian child carrying the body of his 5 year old brother in a blood-soaked backpack.
As I final note, I realize how the media’s role in cheerleading a genocide may not be the most urgent aspect of the conflict, but it’s the only the aspect I felt I could turn into a game. It’s hard to do satire and moral role-play in the face of unspeakable horrors. I hope a ceasefire will make this game dated very soon, but until then, I’ll try to update the news database to keep the game timely.
The Green New Deal Simulator is out and free to play on all the main operating systems.
It’s a spiritual sequel of the Democratic Socialism Simulator, in that they share the same visual style, simple drag-and-drop interactions, and short-term practical utopianism.
When it comes to climate change, we are well past the “raising awareness” phase of the discourse; we need culture that raises awareness of the solutions, which are:
1) technological, infrastructural, and cultural
2) already available (at least to all the industrialized nations) and
3) inevitably threatening the existing economic and political powers.
I wanted the GND Simulator to be an accessible, almost child-friendly, catalog of these solutions and their challenges.
Even if climate change is a global issue, I was aiming for a certain geographic specificity. There are several recent games representing climate issues in a proactive, utopian, and systemic way. Half-Earth Socialism posits a global ecosocialist revolution as a prerequisite for a just energy transition; Beecarbonize abstracts a wide range of policies that the player implements as an undefined, global, collective consciousness; Terra Nil postpones ecosystem restoration to a post-apocalyptic and possibly post-human, future.
To be clear, these are all excellent titles, but I felt the need to tackle climate change as something that has to be done right here, right now, and without the need of entirely new political and economic structures. There is a chance we won’t bring down capitalism in the next 20 years or so, and that’s the timeframe we have to avoid irreversible environmental damage.
The original plan was to have three scenarios: USA, Europe, and China, with slightly different mechanics pointing at the different degrees of state agency. It turned out to be too complicated for the time I allocated, but there may be expansions if there is enough interest. Besides, the United States is the biggest emitter, historically and cumulatively speaking, and arguably the most politically resistant to climate policies.
The gameplay is more complex (and less proven) than the Democratic Socialism Simulator, incorporating a map, a bit of deck-building, and a few more moving parts.
While the DSS was primarily about what reforms we should enact, the GND Simulator is more concerned with where the investments should go.
Rural regions, in particular in non-coastal and southern states, will play an outsized role in the energy transition due to their higher potential for renewables. This presents a challenge because they are the least progressive (i.e. Republican) areas in the current political terrain.
This challenge can be turned into an opportunity to achieve consensus on climate issues, because a green transition means jobs and state-driven development in regions ravaged by neoliberal policies.
Therefore, negotiating employment and emission reduction goals is a core mechanic in the game, reflecting a central tenet of the Green New Deal.
Another important design choice was the differentiation between fossil fuels for electric power generation, and fuels for heating and transportation (gasoline and natural gas). This is the aspect that confused my playtesters the most, but it’s a crucial communication goal: you don’t save the world by driving an electric car if the electricity is created by burning fossil fuels. Conversely, transitioning the grid to wind and solar won’t automatically take care of a big chunk of emissions that are not related to electricity. I hope to convey that electrification and the development of renewables are interrelated but distinct problems.
I also wanted to communicate the importance of energy infrastructure. The highest potential for renewables is in sunny deserts or windy mountainous regions. That’s not where most Americans live! Transferring massive amounts of energy across the United States will require high voltage power lines that are simply not there yet. In order to make intermittent sources like solar or wind more reliable we will need pumped storage hydropower, batteries, and more sophisticated “smart” grids. Infrastructure is less photogenic than wind turbines and electric cars, but it will be a major aspect of the energy transition.
A design pillar very dear to me is “No Exposed Numbers”. All the quantities in the game are expressed visually through bars and charts. This strategic vagueness is meant to encourage a more qualitative approach to the issues.
There is some research informing the variables and the algorithms in the game, but any game model will have to resort to gross simplifications to be even vaguely playable.
The use of “simulator” in the title is in line with the ironic contemporary usage, as in: Goat Simulator. I want people to keep in mind that this is fundamentally a fable with talking animals, an interactive toy, and not a scientific model. I maintain that all games claiming to be realistic, or based on real data are misleading their players. When it comes to complex systems, realism is just an aesthetic.
Since the map is fixed and the cards are limited, the GND Simulator may have a puzzle-like vibe, but there are multiple pathways to decarbonization. There is also no silver bullet: you cannot win by only using nuclear power or carbon capture.
There are so many aspects of the energy transition I couldn’t fit into the game. That’s the downside of making a small, minimalistic game about the most complex challenge the human race has ever faced.
A 5 minute video about testing the limits of the critically acclaimed medieval strategy game.
Can you replace nobles with republics, dismantle the papacy, and create an ecofeminist society in the AD 1200?
Yes, yes, and yes.
Rules: 1. Start from a random Wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random 2. Click on the link that might take you closer to the “Capitalism” page 3. Repeat 2 until you get to “Capitalism” Each click = 1 point. The player with the lowest score wins. Variants / house rules: *A page mentioning capitalism counts even without the […]
This is the transcript of an artist talk I gave about the end-of-life of Adobe Flash, and digital art preservation in general. It was part of “Gone in a Flash”, a series of events organized by the MacKenzie Art Gallery and Neutral Ground Artist Run Centre. You can also watch the video here or check […]
This is the transcript of a talk I gave at the 2020 Play Festival. The festival normally takes place in Hamburg but was moved online due to COVID. It’s a sequel to my previous Indiepocalypse talk. The Google Slides can be found here , a pixelated video recording is here. Today I’m gonna talk about […]
Rules & Roberts is a print-and-play educational roleplaying game to learn Robert’s Rule of Order. Even if it’s a spoof of Dungeons & Dragons, R&R is more of a storytelling game: it’s light on mechanics, there are no dice rolls or complex stats, and the Dungeon Master doesn’t have to prepare any material nor read […]
TweeVee is an engine for interactive videos built in javascript. You can create a branching movie in the style of Black Mirror: Bandersnatch starting from Twee files exported from the popular hypertext editor Twine. TweeVee source on GitHub TweeVee was created for a LIKELIKE livestream showcasing four interactive movies, from the pioneering Kinoautomat to the […]
In 2018, architecture critic Michael Sorkin wrote “Two Hundred Fifty Things an Architect Should Know”. The items on the listicle are poetic, thought provoking, introspective, practical, and sometimes even canonical. They all connect architecture with broader social issues. In July 2020, four months after Sorkin’s death due to COVID-19, I challenged my Twitter friends and aquaintances […]
This Fall, due to COVID-19, I’m teaching a class about online multiplayer games. It’s a great excuse to learn new skills and run some little experiments in these long, socially distanced days. As class material, I put together two Processing templates to facilitate Twitch-powered multiplayer experiences. Every Twitch channel comes with an IRC chat and […]
The third iteration of LIKELIKE Online is a text-only multiuser environment for the exhibition The End of the WORD as we know it. In this Twine-meets-chatroom, you can catch language viruses from other uses. The viruses affect your way of speaking making you siiiiing, SCREAM, or adding other funny affectations. The six curated games are […]
LIKELIKE, the little game space I run with some friends in Pittsburgh, suspended all programming due to COVID-19. The pandemic is going to have long lasting impacts on the world economy; millions of Americans are suddenly unemployed and entire industries came to a standstill. It’s not a great time for event organizers, but in gaming […]
Democratic Socialism Simulator was released yesterday for Windows, MacOS, and Linux. The Android version is still under review. It’s a casual, single player game in which you play as the first socialist president of the United States. You have to evaluate an endless stream of policy proposals, balance the budget, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, gain […]