Dartmouth Prof Creates Recession Videogame > Dartmouth, recession, videogames

Dartmouth Prof Creates Recession Videogame

by Dan Haley | March 19, 2009 at 3:37 pm

layoff_02jpg In a sign the global financial crisis may have finally jumped the shark, Mary Flanagan, a Dartmouth "digital humanities" professor, created Layoff, a videogame that challenges you to fire as many workers as possible. The game isn't as mean as it sounds: Flanagan intended Layoff to be "part dark humor, part grim portent." In other words, it's a joke. There's a ticker flashing accounts of unscrupulous corporate decisions and you can hover over workers and get their bios (before you fire them). My favorite part: "The fired workers are replaced by new ones, including suit-wearing bankers and financiers, who cannot be laid off." How do you play the game? According to The Chronicle of Higher Ed:

The gamer is presented with an 11-by-8-inch grid populated by tiny workers—some wearing hard hats, some wearing glasses, some reading books, and some holding spare tires. The objective is to shuffle these characters into groups of three of a kind, at which point they can be banished to mill aimlessly about the unemployment line (a pen that resembles a prison yard below the grid).

After the jump, more screenshots!

layoff_01jpg

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layoff_02jpg

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Tags Read more: Dartmouth, recession, videogames

9 Responses to “Dartmouth Prof Creates Recession Videogame”

Surfin' UWS Says:
March 19th, 2009 at 5:25 pm
It’s not a recession if you can still win in the end.
bleah Says:
March 20th, 2009 at 2:29 am
The game is agonizingly snow and the music skips and misses constantly. Sometimes it drops out altogether. Also, the page takes forever to load. bah, tiltfactor.
KEGGY Says:
March 20th, 2009 at 8:47 pm
Shout out to hot profs:
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~news/releases/2009/03/19.html
http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~tanzeem/
Y11 Says:
March 20th, 2009 at 10:05 pm
Tonight’s hockey games are getting so rowdy. Cornell just forced OT with Princeton. You guys should report on tomorrow night’s final.
@Y11 Says:
March 21st, 2009 at 6:14 am
Why report Hockey when they could report Dartmouth vs. Maryland in the NCAA first round?
RIT Game Design and Development program Says:
March 21st, 2009 at 12:25 pm
Ha, you Ivy League lowlifes had to outsource your game development to the Rochester Institute of Technology!

Developed by members of the Tiltfactor Lab and the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) Game Design and Development program, LAYOFF is an examination of the current financial scandal.
Y11 Says:
March 21st, 2009 at 8:34 pm
Surely you don’t mean women’s basketball?
Anonymous Says:
March 22nd, 2009 at 12:42 pm
Wait, women play sports?
Lev O'Malley Says:
March 22nd, 2009 at 2:54 pm
Dartmouth jumped the shark when they graduated Tim Geithner.