Orwell: Keeping an Eye On You

[h1] An Excellent Educational Tool for Teaching People the Value of Privacy [/h1] I am going to start this review with a hot take: people don't care much about privacy. At least not in the way we're taught to think about it. People desire privacy when they want to hide from others—especially people they know. A classic example of this is your average teenager concealing their sexual activity from their parents. We can define this as [b]interpersonal privacy[/b]—the need and right to keep parts of ourselves hidden from the people around us. In a limited sense, people do care about having (intepersonal) privacy in their lives. But what about a faceless entity like a government agency or a big tech company? Should we seek privacy from their probing eyes? Do we even deserve the right to privacy from the government and Big Tech? This is precisely where people will shrug their shoulders and say that they don't understand or care. Interpersonal privacy matters to the common man. Privacy from institutions and systems does not. Why are we like this? The reasons for this range from the righteous to the fearful to the misguided. [list] [*] Fear: A citizen concerned for their safety will…

super fun game with a fun story and gameplay mechanics. Searching through everyones personal files and totally getting the wrong end of the stick because you don't have enough to go off of shows just how dangerous and dumb survailance states are. The story has some fun twists and turns here and there that kept me hooked until i finished the story. If you enjoy detective games with fun stories then I would recommend this!

nothing is safe

Orwell takes an interesting premise and turns the investigatory gameplay into clicking and dragging blue-underlined phrases into a database, or navigating conflicting yellow-underlined “choices.” The music adds some weight to the situation, the story escalates well, and there are real consequences to your actions. While it becomes a little over the top, that is to be expected in a video game. Overall, it was an interesting experience—especially when thinking about the modern surveillance systems we have today, such as databases and Flock cameras. It really made me think about privacy concerns, and how individuals will sacrifice personal freedoms in order to exist in a society. However, there are often bad actors who will use those restrictions to push their own beliefs, frequently using phrases like “children’s safety” while actively restricting freedoms. I still think about the stories surrounding Flock cameras where police officers looked up their ex-girlfriends' locations at different times; if you Google the story, you can find several variations of this happening with guys in San Jose, Kentucky, and Texas. I am not against the idea of being able to go through people’s in…

Compelling narrative game in which you research suspects and your decisions have consequences on the overarching plot. Strong recommendation for fans of the genre.

Fun stuff. Exactly what the game says it is. Sift through peoples e-mail, text messages, etc. to find clues to piece together exactly what happened in a terrorist attack. Solid narrative with multiple endings. Nice art direction and audio. Ran well, no performance issues.