Snowden Inspired game: Need to Know
Need to Know, the game based around spying on citizens’ texts, emails, geodata, and much more.
Australian indie developer, ‘Monomyth Games’ have recently released a Kickstarter project for their upcoming “surveillance thriller sim” which places players as a lower-ranked employee at the ‘Department of Liberty.
As the player selects suspects while at work, they then explore evidence to incriminate them and decide their fate. After spying on the target and getting paid, players will eventually climb through the ranks of being an agent to impress other employees and unlock bigger powers and access to more in-depth information about other targets including geo-tracking, shopping patterns and drone tracking.
While not “working,” why not go against morals to use your intel and powers for the help of others’ financial gain or romantic encounters.
You must spy on citizens, pick apart their private lives, and determine how dangerous they are. You can also resist these suffocating privacy invasions by aiding underground groups and leaking internal reports to the media. Or, you can just use all of that juicy classified information for your own, personal gain. Your call.
Need to Know emphasises story, and will sculpt the crushing growth of our real-world surveillance society into a meaningful, gripping journey. It critiques the system by passing the uncomfortable (or too comfortable?) mantle of power onto your shoulders, and testing which choices you’ll make. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll sweat bullets under the searing blaze of an interrogation lamp.
Check out the project on Kickstarter here
Oh, if you donate $3600, you get a special copy of the game with you being the protagonist with your name and picture as the character- cool!