Game & Paper Overview
Escapist is a prison break game where you are asked to assume the personality of a prisoner trying to break from prison. This game has many different game levels to test player’s ability to plan, steal, deceive, beat up other players, form alliances with some others still, and more in order to break away and escape from prison.
The paper and discussion for the week was mostly surrounding morality in relation to how people think through what actions to do during Escapist gameplay.
Did I feel guilty, then, when I stole from other inmates or beat people up during my Escapist gameplay? Honestly, I did not.
It was something about the pixel-art nature of it all, the roboticity of the movements that made it all seem very far away from real life. Even the game notifications and copy contributed to making things not feel unethical. The game was giving me instructions — this is how you beat up, this is how you steal — and with that came the implicit messaging that this is what I will need to do to win this game.
However, there is a slew or research that joins the dots from gaming to morality. Having read some of it, I am of the belief that games shape culture, especially when they are played by our impressionable youth, and especially when they subvert reality to make it violent– thereby teaching children how far violence can get you in life.
Gameplay Description
I played the iPad iOS version of the game, and first and foremost, I want to point out that the game is not adapted to fit the iPad screen. This issue was especially bad as this meant I was unable to properly read the instructions I was being given, which contributed to an especially bad gameplay experience.
Apart from that, I quite enjoyed the demo and I would use it as an example of good demos in a world of very bad ones. I had a lot of fun just going through the demo experience because of the range of actions it not only taught me about — but also gave me the space to try out in a low-stakes environment.
That said, as I was unable to read the text bubbles due to the iPad configuration of the game, or maybe due to lack of completeness of the game demo, once I started the game I felt like I knew what I had to do, but in reality there were a bunch of questions I still had about the protocol and what was expected of me from the game, that I didn’t know how to get answered. This was things like — ok, I knew how to hit and climb and steal and make stuff, but I didn’t understand the significance of the different times of the day, nor did I know what kinds of things to steal or not, nor did I understand how to calculate the risks vs the benefit of stealing things from other people. Are some things riskier than others? Or is it kind of the same?
Overall, I played for 20 minutes and got disengaged due to a number of confusions I had about the game that prevented me from playing tactically. Thus, I would argue that this game would benefit from a little bit more instruction.
