Fatworld aka Life: Redux

A recent issue of Wired magazine contained a short article about a game called Fatworld, designed by Georgia tech professor and game designer Ian Bogost. In the game, the player controls “a consumer paradise,” runs restaurants and convenience stores and battles food allergies and diseases like diabetes and heart disease.

Bogost says that the game isn’t meant to be fun per se, saying that fun “would hardly be accepted as the highest possible praise for a song, novel, or movie.” Other games from his studio, Persuasive Games, skirt the same line of fun and social commentary. In Airport Security, the object of the game is to remove disallowed items, but the disallowed items continually change.

Bogost’s new book, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames, discusses how games “engage us through irony, luring us into a pattern of actions that we recognize as reprehensible…while at the same time exciting our competitive drive and allowing us to inhabit an unfamiliar point of view.”