Dartmouth Prof Creates Recession Videogame

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

layoff_02jpgIn 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! Read the rest of this entry »

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