Representing the scores of workers who face unemployment in the wake of the global economic crisis, "Ioannis" is one of many characters in Layoff, a new online game released on March 12 by the Tiltfactor Laboratory, a game design center based at Dartmouth and led by Dartmouth film and media studies professor Mary Flanagan. The game is loosely based on Bejeweled, a puzzle game in which players align similar gems into rows. In Layoff, players reorganize workers into groups based on appearance. When three or more similar workers are lined up, they are laid off and replaced by a new set of characters.
While the game's release coincides with the highest U.S. unemployment rate in more than 25 years, the game was not inspired by the current economic crisis, Flanagan, the game's designer, said. Flanagan originally conceived the game two years ago at Hunter College, where she worked until last fall, as an investigation into the economy of the 1970s, she said.
"It's not a quick response to the current situation, but it couldn't have been timelier," she said.
Like the character Ioannis, each worker has a personal story, which players can view when they click on the game's characters. After they are laid off, disgruntled workers drop into line at an unemployment office at the bottom of the screen.
"We thought it should be really difficult to lay people off," Flanagan said. "They should have their own sense of self, and they should be angry at the bottom."
In addition to the workers' biographies, facts and statistics about the current economy scroll across the screen during play. Flanagan said she gathered these facts from blogs and articles written by real bankers.
"We wanted to involve critical thinking and education, as well as basic gameplay," she said.
The game also features businessmen, who sometimes replace fired workers, but cannot be laid off themselves.
Brendan Scully '10, who served as a game tester, said this feature was introduced after the initial tests to increase the game's difficulty.
"It makes it harder as the game goes on, and it also has the sort of satirical tone of the 'black suits' looking out for themselves," he said.
Since its release, the game has received over a million hits, Flanagan said, and the response has been mostly positive.
"People seem to understand that it's not making light of the situation," she said. "It's really more of a dark, educational kind of game."
In a review on Kotaku.com, a web site that critiques newly released games, blogger Michael McWhertor called the game "edutainful" -- a combination of entertainment, education and pain.
Using a game to address a topic as heated as corporate layoffs allows a more diverse audience to respond to the issue, said Anna Lotko '10, who created the game's tutorial.
"Games have a great potential for sparking dialogue about these issues in a new kind of format," she said.
Scully voiced a similar sentiment, noting Flanagan's ability to incorporate relevant information into gameplay.
"What she did is pretty difficult," he said. "Making a game enjoyable, but also having a message is a lot harder than making something where you just shoot space aliens."
