Thursday, November 28, 2013

Snowdon’s Endless Run – The Game

The NSA hacking story, brought to light by the leaks of Edward Snowdon are currently major news and will be for some time. However being a whisleblower is no easy role to undertake. Your often going up against powerful vested interests and will be faced with a barrage of criticism from many quarters. Ask Chelsea Manning about the price you pay? She was sentenced on August 21st 2013 to 35 years’ imprisonment for leaking files relating to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and diplomatic cables to Wikileaks. Both are big news stories and big news stories mean the potential for a newsgame. In this instance the topic is Edward Snowdon and the game is called ‘Snowden Saga – Escape from Den of Iniquity’. The game was covered on its release by The Guardian and GTN spoke with one of the developers, Mike Smith, to find out a bit more about the making of the game. We started talking about the motivation behind the game, “The purpose was always to incite a comedic response from the player, giving one the chance to play as a widely-known person in a parody of a widely-known smartphone game. … It does create awareness of the specifics in the Snowden media saga with those that might have missed some details in the newspaper or have forgotten it, such as the countries Snowden was exiled to and the protection he received from Russia and its president, but this was all unintentional and a natural evolution of creating a game on that topic.”