Save the Robot – Chris Dahlen

The notion of “serious games” has proven that games suffer from the bigotry of low expectations. “Wow – they made a game about hunger?” “They made a game about Darfur?” “They made a game where people have sex?” Any time a game tackles a serious, grown-up subject, someone’s there to give them a medal.

Which is half the reason I was interested in Fatworld, a new game by Ian Bogost’s Persuasive Games studio (and funded by the same public broadcaster behind World Without Oil). The subject matter itself doesn’t interest me at all. A game about bad diet and obesity sounds noble, but, zzzz. I checked it out because it was Bogost, and it seemed like an “important” title, plus maybe it’d be fun to write about.

But after playing it for about an hour last night, I decided I wouldn’t cover it – because it’s bad. Really bad. Again, I only gave it an hour. If I spent all night with it, I might have grokked it better and learned to work around its problems. But right now, Fatworld is overreaching, flawed and in many ways, almost unplayable.

The thing with Bogost is that we – meaning, the whole gaming community – love the guy. He’s a gifted critic, scholar, and lecturer. He repped for games on The Colbert Report. He’s a go-to guy for games journos and an articulate advocate for the art of gaming.

But he’s not quite as highly regarded as a game developer (fond though I am of the Howard Dean for Iowa game). And Fatworld makes so many mistakes that if it had come from anybody other than Bogost, we’d throw it in the budget bin next to Coffee Tycoon and Prison Tycoon 2. The basic idea is that you experiment with the diets of characters, and see how their economic situations, genetic predispositions, and other factors contribute to their weight and health. Yes, a teacher could lecture you on how these things relate – but by demonstrating these phenomena and giving you a chance to play with them, Fatworld can try to make the same arguments in a different and maybe more compelling way. Listening to a teacher explain why people get fat is one thing; watching it happen to your character is something else.

He could have stopped a simple diet simulation: click here to eat a cheeseburger, click there to go to the gym, watch yourself load up on Cheetos because you can’t afford organic vegetables. Instead, he tried to shoot the moon – by remaking Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.

You control a character in a fully walkable, interdependent city, with a range of NPCs, neighborhoods and businesses. Just like in GTA, your character can eat – and crappy food makes you fatter, while healthy food makes you healthier. Just like in GTA, you can exercise to get in better shape.

So, the problems. Where to begin? First off, he made a world that’s bigger than he needs. And you have to walk around it. And you have to walk diagonally, even though you move with the arrow keys. (Holding down up and left at the same time, or right and down, is the preferred way to get around.) And if your character is fat, you have to stop and pant for a few seconds before you can trudge on to wherever the game wants you to go – and wait, where does the game want you, anyway?

You have two general missions in the game: to control your own health, which involves eating right and exercising; and to act as a kind of tycoon, buying and running restaurants and feeding your fellow citizens. It’s not immediately apparent (and there’s no manual) why you want to go around buying restaurants, and bribing the government to change regulations, and all this other macro-level stuff, when the micro-story – trying to turn a fat-ass into a healthy kid – could be complicated enough on its own.

A greater dysfunction is that the game veers from being boringly detailed and realistic, to fantastically silly and implausible. You can look up detailed medical records for a character, and study their BMI and weight and whatever. Yet you can also be an impoverished, obese 17-year old, and find yourself buying a house and a restaurant. I was making bribes before I was old enough to vote. Your goals make no intuitive sense, which makes the gameplay that much harder to decipher. (And by the way, it’s not “bribes” – it’s called “lobbying.”)

On a nuts and bolts level, the game’s ambitious scope and no doubt murderous schedule led to a deliverable that’s riddled with bugs, plus UI problems that even a couple rounds of playtesting could have uncovered. Here’s one of my favorites: can you see what’s wrong with this dialog box?

And I’m confused about who would play the game. It won’t work in a classroom, because like I said, an hour only gets you through the tutorial (barely). There’s also no manual on the site or classroom instruction guide. I guess you could play it with your kid at home, but I’m still gonna harp on not having a manual. This is a wild guess, but maybe the documentation was kept to a minimum so the game could make its arguments through the game, and not on paper. But without a well-paced, interactive tutorial or a much better user interface, the frustration level is too high. The joke here is that all video games are educational in some way: if nothing else, they’re supposed to teach you how to play the game at hand. Fatworld doesn’t even accomplish that.

Fatworld got some nice press before it came out, and understandably so: it’s a neat idea and a good cause. I haven’t seen many reviews of it yet, although this one - by a professor who got a lot farther with it than I did – shares some of my frustrations.

Like I said, I hate to knock Bogost. And I’m not going to bash this on The Onion. But if this had come from anyone else? And more importantly, if we weren’t so giddy every time a game tries to tackle something important, and if Fatworld hadn’t already gotten an “A” just for the idea? We wouldn’t even be having this conversation.