Staged or not, it's a powerful message that works better than all those "for the price of a cup of coffee" ads we're all used to seeing, assuming you buy one brand new video game a month..

Except that the execution is cringeworthy and manipulative.

This is obviously real, just listen to that music. Look at that shaky camera.

If this were real, some isotope of evilhomer would be asking the devs if it was possible to reskin the protagonist as a pony.

You're damn right I would. The mane character's name would be Hope Harmony, and she'd be an Earth pony with a cutie mark that resembled a UN globe behind a heart-shaped landmine.

So what would you do different Gmork?

"mane"

Different?

I'd probably start by scrapping the whole "fake video game idea" and just dong an actual awareness campaign that doesn't rely on false pretenses to lure people into hearing about it.

I don't really see where the manipulation bit comes in. And if it is what I think it is, it really isn't that big of a deal. It's not like they're preachers smearing big government as anti-catholic/christian/judiasts and rather admit the entire political push is so they can be free to persecute others. It's pretty clear the NEXT NEW VIDEO GAME premise is dropped pretty quickly during the presentation.

*rather than

If they added "and THEN Elika grew up to be a hardened special-ops assassin who does the ugly jobs that no one talks about" they'd have the plot for about half of all action games, movies, and TV shows. Hollywood and its video-game stepchildren regularly appropriate third-world suffering for melodramatic backstories.

My favorite traumatized-kid-turned-specops-badass was Laughing Octopus. DAT ASS, amiright??

frown frown frown!! I dissprove of you all with my stentorian beard of righteousness!!! That last comment was very serious!

What are you working on?

Well, I recently made this thing..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qU3aVAADZY
Not actually a game, its a particle/liquid physics asset you can buy as an addon for the Unity3d engine.

Sure...until they start with the fucking MICROTRANSACTIONS.

I'm with you. Seems like a pretty good idea for a game.

Ohhhh yeah, forgot about that. .99 for a new Waterbottle skin, Day One on-disc DLC to unlock the "ten year old boy who has no legs because of a land mine" character.

Actually, now that I think about it, they already sort of have a game like this. Real Lives, a vaguely educational freeware game that was released over a decade ago. It's almost entirely text based and is sort of dumb, from a purely design perspective, but you can do all sorts of neat things in it, like die of AIDS in an African village or get raped to death by a Maoist rebel militia.

Oh, nevermind, I guess it's not freeware anymore. :(

http://www.educationalsimulations.com/

Still, if starving to death on a Third World subsistence farm sounds like your kind of game, you can probably pirate it.

My favorite game was this one time I got born as a rich Australian girl whose dad owned a company or something. That's hard to do, since 99% of the time you're born as a Third World subsistence farmer whose fate is virtually guaranteed to be one of the things I mentioned above. Anyway, I had a really easy childhood in Australia, and got into an awesome college, which pretty much guarantees a good job and makes the rest of the game a breeze. Then I went to do some activist work in Darfur over my summer break, because, you know, social conscience and all that... whereupon I was promptly captured by terrorists and raped to death.

Why do I get the feeling that if the game was made that gamers wouldn't hesitate to call this emo dreck, boring or blatant propaganda?

because unless it was really well done, it probably would be?

Any more insight, Captain Obvious?

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