I Look Like I'm Just Playing a Game, But I'm Thinking About Real Problems | Hack Your Life

Games shine a light on reality.

Happy New Year! We've put together a Lunar New Year edition of Hack Your Life — two things a day, turn left for a new life skill, turn right to meet a few unusual games. Today, a handful of games that make you think.**

Last year's Ready Player One showed audiences one picture of the future: how games, and the giant companies behind them, would seep into people's lives and take them over.

The film uses dazzling effects to build a cyberpunk world where people live with almost nothing but can have everything in virtual space, where the effort they pour in there turns into corporate output, and where one careless move can leave them in debt and unfree. The ending settles all of this rather crudely: shut the game down two days a week and force players back into real life.

You don't have to wait for the film's 2045, though. Games are already inseparable from our lives. A game is a diversion in idle hours, a tool for socializing, a place to put your feelings, the enemy of getting things done, a steady expense, a parallel calendar, a source of rebellion, a claim on your attention, a killer of eyesight, and the living that feeds a very large workforce.

We escape reality inside games. Occasionally, inside games, we turn around and question it.

People get hooked on games partly because the rules are clear and predictable: effort means reward, even if the reward is only a virtual number. Some games do the opposite, copying the randomness of real life to make you think about it. We've gone through the past year's games that do this — see which ones strike you as "too real."

A Single Word Weighs a Ton 《一字千钧》

Link: A Single Word Weighs a Ton | Yi Ci Yuan

In this board-game-style simulation you play a green reporter, running from street to street collecting material for news stories and columns. You can take a reformist or a conservative line, and you have to choose between cool objectivity and headlines that grab — and clickbait tends to sell more copies.

Across the five articles in each issue, you have to spend your exploration points wisely, deciding which events get covered and which fade out on the street. How well you can write a given story depends on the starting stats of the character you picked, and those stats improve as you file.

Besides wielding the fourth estate's power to chase leads, expose or bury the truth, and stoke or cool an argument, you have to handle what the job demands and what daily life costs: don't miss a hot story and lose performance pay, don't fall behind on rent and end up on the street.

Compared with games on the same theme, such as The Westport Independent (Steam | App Store | Google Play) and Headliner (Steam), this one takes a finer-grained view, looking at the power in the hands of the reporter on the front line. Facing all sorts of hardships and temptations, you can hold to your ideals and cover valuable news straight, or chase sales and spread gossip under lurid headlines — so the thinking behind the work happens in the act of choosing what to cover.

The developer, Studio 1982, previously made Rose and Byzantium《玫瑰与拜占庭》 and 1982: Eve's Duty《1982 夏娃义务》, the latter imagining a world where women who turn 26 are conscripted into compulsory "pregnancy service." It puts you in a prosecutor's seat, investigating a death connected to an abortion and ruling on applications to defer service.

In the game's most recent update, drawing on how the team actually felt while crunching to hit a deadline, the developers added an overtime button: volunteering for overtime raises your exploration points, and also raises the odds of dropping dead.

Similar games:

• Headliner: NoviNews (Steam) — you're the editor-in-chief controlling what the outlet publishes, and how you handle each issue shapes society, your career and your family;
• Ethics: Journalist's Way (Google Play) — a Reigns-style card game, simple to play, swipe the cards, use the power of the press to move society;
• Behind the Truth《真实幻象》(Chengguang | Steam) — interview and investigate, gather material for stories, and uncover the conspiracy behind predatory student loans;
• 1979 Revolution: Black Friday (Steam | App Store | Google Play) — drawn from the 1979 Islamic Revolution; as a reporter you take risks to shoot photos and write stories, recording the revolution as it happens;
• The Republia Times (Link) — an early work by Lucas Pope, who made Papers, Please; choose what to run, and build subscriptions and reader loyalty.

My Child: Lebensborn

Link: Official site | App Store | Google Play

The game is based on the Nazi "Lebensborn" program and shows what became of its children after the war. The program was a Nazi eugenics experiment during World War II: women in the occupied territories judged to be of "superior Aryan stock" were picked out and forced to bear children by German men, and the "pure Aryan" offspring were raised collectively. In Norway alone, between 8,000 and 12,000 children were born in these "breeding farms." After the war no one was left to raise them, and because the records had been lost their birth parents could not be traced, so they went to orphanages to wait for adoption. You adopt one of them, the boy Klaus or the girl Karin, feeding and caring for them and keeping them company as they grow.

With limited action points, you have to work overtime for money, cook, clean, keep the child company and go out, and choose between eating well and merely eating enough — and none of that is the most heartbreaking part. Postwar hatred had not cooled, and many people took it out on innocents connected to the program. Your child's bloodline costs you your job and gets them bullied without letup. The spite of classmates and teachers leaves them baffled and helpless, with nothing to do but act as if everything is fine. All of it lands on a household that was already stretched thin, and you have to catch the small shifts in their mood, help them handle other people's malice, and go on enduring after the system betrays you.

The game is a realistic model of how hard raising a child is: the same labor day after day, the forced choice between being there and working late, the deep helplessness of facing a crying child. And the way you teach them to cope shapes their character, which shows itself gradually in the later stages. There is some comfort, at least — a kind teacher, relatives far away, and endings that go well all help the player keep going.

When the game ends, oral accounts from survivors of the program come up in the credits. Game and reality meet on the screen, across history, with a force that goes straight to the heart.

Similar games:

• A Gay's Life (Chengguang) — see He made a game simulating a gay life, but doesn't want it to blow up | 100 People With Ideas;
• Mysteries of Fence《篱笆庄秘闻》(Chengguang | Steam) — escape an internet-addiction treatment center;
• Behind the Screen《荧幕判官》(App Store | Steam) — set in Taiwan after martial law was lifted, it looks at one-sided reporting and being killed by public opinion;
• One-Way Ticket《单程票》(Steam) — a brutal voyage on a deep-sea fishing boat;
• Apart of Me (App Store | Google Play) — a game to help people through a low point in life; after losing someone close, you listen to stories of people who went through the same thing and find the strength to move on.

Chinese Parents

Link: Steam | WeGame

This much-praised "parent simulator" added a daughter version in its latest update, fixing an earlier bug that gave you sons generation after generation, and adding random events and career paths only daughters get.

The game runs on the usual raising-a-character formula: build up stats, keep spirits up, learn skills, then school, work and love in one long pipeline. What lands with players in China are the Chinese details that draw a knowing smile — pushing the red envelope back and forth, running for class monitor, mock exam papers — and the hope of finally understanding why your own parents did what they did.

The jokey tone, though, weakens the satire the game is reaching for. Roles inside the family are fixed, talking to each other comes down to issuing commands, the cultural detail is decoration, the characters never step outside the frame they start in, and the reflection on the Chinese family ends up short on force. Then again, maybe a family pattern this uniform is itself a comment on the way things are.

As the latest update shows, the developers keep adding to the game, and plan to fill in more storylines players will recognize.

Similar games:

• Crazy School Simulator《高考工厂模拟》(Steam) — another simulation about education in China; as a high school principal you use every method available to push up the college admission rate;
• Academia: School Simulator (Steam) — another game about running a school as its principal;
• Gaokao Love 100 Days (Steam) — high school seniors cramming for the gaokao need romance too;
• A Perfect Day《完美的一天》(Steam) — a look back at the last day of China's 20th century;
• All Beings《众生》(Steam) — a stick-figure life simulation;
• One Hour One Life (Steam | App Store | Google Play) — live an entire prehistoric life in one hour;
• A Mortician's Tale (Steam | App Store) — a funeral home simulation;
• Authority NYC (App Store) — a simulation of 20th-century New York;
• Stats and Life《属性与生活》(Steam | App Store | Google Play) — a life simulation run by stat points;
• Bamboo Rat: Survive《竹鼠：活下去》(App Store | Google Play) — a card game about the fate of a bamboo rat;
• ARTé: Mecenas® (Steam) — as a member of the Medici family in the Renaissance, invest in artists, churches and cities, produce great works of art, and shape the course of history.

Not Tonight

Link: Steam

A pixel-art dystopian game set in Britain after Brexit, mocking the country's post-Brexit predicament and the madness of the far right. You play a British resident who loses their citizenship and their old life when a radical right-wing government comes to power. To keep the right to stay, they take short-term jobs, working the door at one venue after another for money. The play is simple: watch the door, check people's papers, decide who gets in.

The settings include nightclubs, exhibitions and other bright, boozy places. As the game goes on, entry passes give way to guest lists and passwords, and you can break up the tedium by taking bribes and moving goods on the side. A phone app lets you find new work, and your pay buys clothes and furniture, turning the vague idea of residency into something you can touch.

The play resembles the earlier Papers, Please (Steam | App Store), while the look is cyberpunk pixel art: a few confined scenes sketch a city's night and fog, and the club's music sits hard against the silence of the rented room. And the view is not the customs officer's, looking down from above. It belongs to a marginal figure whose immigration status hangs by a thread — the sort of person the system turns into one of its own defenders by handing him a scrap of power.

Similar games:

• VA-11 Hall-A: Cyberpunk Bartender Action (Steam) — a dystopian bartending simulation whose purpose is getting your customers drunk;
• 2064: Read Only Memories (Steam) — hired by the most advanced AI around, investigate the conspiracy behind Neo-San Francisco;
• The Red Strings Club (Steam) — mix the perfect cocktail to fight the brainwashing scheme of a company dedicated to wiping out negative emotions;
• Tales of the Neon Sea (Steam) — be a detective in a cyberpunk world;
• Blackbar (App Store | Google Play) — in an age when letters are read by censors, guess what the blacked-out words said;
• Beholder 1 (Steam | App Store | Google Play) & 2 (Steam) — an apartment manager secretly spies on the tenants, & a petty bureaucrat climbs the ladder by whatever means work;
• Do Not Feed the Monkeys (Steam) — a voyeurism simulator: watch strangers' lives through cameras and decide whether to step in;
• Need to Know (Steam) — use every means available to collect everything on your target, in order to find the suspected criminal;
• This Is the Police 1 (Steam | App Store | Google Play) & 2 (Steam) — play a police chief hungry for power, working your own interests while staying out of prison;
• Frostpunk (Steam) — in the extreme conditions of a frozen apocalypse, decide, as the one in charge, which strategy gets your people through the winter;
• Orwell: Keeping an Eye On You (Steam) & Ignorance Is Strength (Steam) — as an agent of a security service, dig through every suspect's private information to find the real culprit, then choose whether to expose the truth or bury it.

Cover image from Ready Player One; all images in the article come from the games' own pages.