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I recently received an out-of-the-blue email from the owner of GameHacking.org. He said that he enjoyed an article I wrote about hacking video games for Christine Alfano’s “Rhetoric of Gaming class” at Stanford.

His email made me realize that I never posted the final version of that research paper here on my blog. My writing style has changed a lot since 2009 when I wrote this paper. I like to think I’m less verbose now. Still, it’s a pretty cool paper and definitely a fun read – especially if you’re a gamer.

Without further ado, here it is:

by Feross Aboukhadijeh (June 2, 2009)

Abstract

The last decade has seen a dramatic rise in the number and popularity of video games. This rise in interest has not been without its negative side effects, however. There are many thousands of players who are not content with playing the game as designed by the game developers.

These players – hackers and cheaters – seek to manipulate the game experience for their benefit. Repercussions of this behavior include ruined game experiences for other players, theft of virtual currency, and intimidation of other players. Cheaters are often looked down upon in the gaming community as “spoil sports” and troublemakers because they dare to push the limits of the video games they play.

However, despite the obvious negative effects of cheating, this paper will argue that creative innovation of game action that was not intended by the producers is actually positive for the game experience. These so-called cheaters are actually innovating in new ways, creating an entirely new form of creative expression.

Cheating in Video Games

God-like immortality. Infinite ammunition. Really large heads.

What do all these things have in common? They are all features that can be accessed – or “unlocked” – by using cheat codes, cheat devices, or software hacks in video games. Most players wouldn’t consider using a cheat code in a single player game to be cheating, but what about using a hardware add-on like a Game Genie to make a game easier to beat?

Or what about hacking the game files in a MMOG (massively multiplayer online game) to make your attacks stronger against other players? Or what about just playing the game in a unique way that the game developer did not intend? How far is too far and where should the line be drawn? What is the significance of stretching the boundaries of games, as gamers often do? When does the experience stop being a game?

The answers to these questions are not clear, and the discussion is often muddled by the misunderstood history of cheating in video games [ref]. Almost every type of video game – online and offline, single player and multiplayer – has cheaters. Although most game companies don’t consider cheating to be within the realm of legitimate gaming, cheating does have many of the characteristics of a video game.

For example, it has well-defined rules or goals – it usually involves obtaining items of value or increasing one’s in-game rank – but, like a good game, the methods by which to accomplish these goals are up to the cheater to decide. In this paper, I will examine the place of cheating in video gaming and argue that cheating can and should be seen as an important, and indeed essential, part of video game culture.

Definitions and Interpretations

Cheating in video games is a topic that is frequently debated on gamer message boards and in the academic community. The game world is a designed to be a closed structure: “the game mechanics define the interaction processes” says Professor Tonguc Sezen, a digital media analyst. However, gamers frequently break the predefined rules and “cheat.” But what actually is cheating in a video game context?

Every player, it seems, has her own definition of what specifically constitutes cheating in a particular video game. The conflicting opinions about the definition of cheating are a source of confusion for many players, contributing to the ethical ambiguities surrounding video game cheating. The differences between online and offline games also figures into our analysis of cheating, since offline cheating does not affect the game experience of other players.

Online cheating, on the other hand, affects real people who have invested their time, money, and emotional energy into developing their online avatars. Game of thrones catelyn stark cheating lemon fanfiction. This difference is very important.

Three Different Perspectives

Mia Consalvo, author of Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Videogames, the seminal work on video game cheating, cites three main perspectives that players take with regard to cheating:

• “Purist” Perspective: Purists see any outside help to complete a video game as cheating. Anything other than a solo effort is an ethical compromise for purists. Strategy guides, cheat codes, walkthroughs, hacking – all are off-limits to purists who want to experience the game in its entirety without outside aid.

• “Code is Law” Perspective: This group of players sees walkthroughs and strategy guides as acceptable game aids since they don’t involve modifying any of the game code. They believe that the game should not be modified from what the developers intended players to experience, so cheat codes and hacking are not allowed.

• “You can only cheat another player” Perspective: This group believes that cheating “only exists in relation to another player.” In other words, it is not the act of using cheat codes or hacking which is unethical, but rather the act of stealing from or deceiving other players in the game world. Thus, the purpose and intent of the cheating are important for these players [ref].

Griefing

It is interesting to note that no gamer in Consalvo’s survey said that they supported cheating, but real world game experience prove otherwise. There is a growing phenomenon of “griefing” that does exist within game culture.

Griefing is defined as ‘play styles where the player . . . purposefully engages in activities to disrupt the gaming experience of other players’, the motivation for which stems from a desire ‘to demonstrate power and superiority over weaker participants’ [ref].

Griefing should most certainly be considered cheating even under the most lenient definitions because of the purely negative effect it has on the game experience for the targeted players.

Cheating in video games is defined as “Any behavior that a player may use to get an unfair advantage or achieve a target that he is not supposed to . . .” [pdf]. As we have seen, for some players, “unfair behavior” requires manually hacking the game files to maliciously harm another player. For other players, even reading strategy guides and getting tips from friends can be considered gaining an unfair advantage in the game experience. The range of opinions is extremely broad.

Rules

Other definitions of video game cheating take into account the importance of rules to the gaming experience. Consalvo argues that successful gameplay is dependent on rules. If these predetermined game rules are broken, she argues, then “the whole play world collapses. The game is over.”

Another video game researcher, Julian Kücklich, also recognized the connection between rules and cheats when he argued that cheats “give the player an advantage that the rules of the game do not allow for . . .” [pdf]. In this definition, the key act that makes a player’s behavior cross the line and become cheating is the act of breaking the pre-determined game rules that all players agree upon before starting to play. Oftentimes, the game developers create these rules to promote a certain style of play within the game and shape the player experience. However, there are still other types of video game cheating which don’t fit under either definition.

Social Customs

In some cases, players can be accused of cheating for violating the social customs and implicit rules of a game world, even if they don’t actually break any rules or gain an unfair advantage. This can happen when players make creative, original game decisions that the developers do not anticipate.

Despite the quibbling about what constitutes video game cheating by academics, the game industry, and players on message boards, there still does not exist a universal definition of video game cheating accepted by most people. Yet, most players in a game community can easily recognize cheating when they see it.

Like Porn?

Perhaps the best definition of cheating provided by the academic and research community thus far is Consalvo’s pithy and humorous definition: “Cheating is like porn – hard to define but we know when we see it” [ref]. Her definition reminds us that what constitutes cheating is often highly dependent on the gaming community’s social customs and implicit rules. Offending behavior stands out to players in a game community because it usually flies in the face of the accepted game customs and implicit social rules.

Why Cheat?

Not all cheaters are the same. It’s impossible to fit all cheaters – or gamers, for that matter – into a single stereotype or definition. The variety and differences among today’s gamer population is simply too great to allow such a blanket categorization. Everyone cheats for different reasons.

Cheat Codes & Cheat Devices

Some players cheat to make games easier during solo play by using cheat codes that generate extra lives, allow players to skip levels, or grant God mode (invulnerability). Other players use cheating devices like the Game Genie or GameShark to manipulate the game code in ways that the original developers did not intend – often to generate extra lives, unlock secrets, or “activate unreleased levels, weapons, or items that may not have been available normally, and some even have codes to access debug menus used by programmers” [ref].

Cheat codes and cheat devices are common examples of “harmless cheats” or cheats that only affect the cheater’s copy of the game – often used by gamers to modify their game experience.

Cheat to Beat

Still other players cheat so that they can complete a video game in its entirety. They use strategy guides and walkthroughs that are produced professionally by companies like Prima Games and Brady Games or unprofessionally by fans on websites like GameFAQs.com.

Far from ruining the experience for players, these strategy guides and walkthroughs are often a fanatical player’s best friend, offering in-depth strategies, detailed character statistics, and high resolution maps of game levels. For players who get stuck during the process of playing a game, cheats that alter the difficulty of the game or allow them to skip a difficult level in the game certainly don’t ruin the game experience, but rather, enhance it by allowing the player to complete the game when they otherwise would have given up and moved on to something else.

Hacking for Fun

Still other players cheat for the technical challenge of hacking the game and discovering holes in the game programming. For these players, there is nothing more exciting than the challenge of defeating the latest anti-cheating mechanisms built into a game. These gamers, of whom I am one, view hacking as a metagame – a game within a game – and a legitimate form of play and a normal expression of social behavior in the gaming world.

However, certain hackers take their cheating too far and ruin the game experience for other players. This typically occurs online in the form of aimbots (software that assists the player in aiming), twinking (passing on powerful items to players who would not typically have such items), and the illicit sale of in-game currency.

Hacking for Hacking’s Sake

Certainly, harmful hacking that targets other players should be discouraged, but what about hacking for hacking’s sake? A research study conducted by Talmadge Wright on creative player actions in the popular first-person shooter Counter-Strike had some interesting conclusions about the nature of gaming. After playing for 70 hours on 50 different servers, the researchers came to the conclusion that play, broadly defined, is not just “playing the game,” but “playing with the rules of the game.”

In fact, they argued that playing with a game’s technical features marks the development of creative responses to the rules created by the developer. This has significant implications on our definition of gaming. Increasingly, we find examples in modern games where creative innovation of game action that was not intended by the producers is possible in the game and actively exploited by users for competitive and creative advantage.

Games that Require Cheating

The phenomenon of cheating in video games is not new. Some of the earliest games, like Contra for the NES, actually required cheating to beat, because the game was so difficult. The game designers recognized this, and programmed cheat codes into the game to assist players with the difficult task of making it through the entire game.

Cheat codes are unique because unlike other methods of cheating they are knowingly created and inserted into games by the developers themselves. Developers use these cheat codes to playtest certain aspects of games more easily, but often “forget” to take the cheat codes out of the final game, much to the delight of video game fans.

Konami Code

One cheat code in particular, famously known as the Konami Code, is the most widely recognized cheat code in the gaming world and has even made its way into popular culture. When entered on the title or pause screen of the game Contra, the Konami Code would instantly give players 30 extra lives.

The popularity of Contra combined with the widespread usage of this cheat code (because of the game’s difficulty) embedded the button sequence Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A into the minds of many gamers. This specific cheat code sequence is still used in many modern Konami games as homage to the cheat code that made video game cheating famous.

The developer responsible for the Konami Code, Kazuhisa Hashimoto, was interviewed about his role in popularizing cheat codes during his work on the 1985 arcade game Gradius, where the Konami Code first appeared. Hashimoto said:

The arcade version of Gradius is really difficult, right? I never played it that much, and there was no way I could finish the game, so I inserted the so-called Konami code.

Creative Cheating as a Tool of Self-Expression

Cheating has a natural place in gaming culture and has had an exalted function in the history of gaming. The ethos of the gamer predisposes him to cheating.

The gamer is by nature – and indeed by nurture – a subversive creature. He hunts for shortcuts and trapdoors. He looks for ways to bend the rules. It has been this way for as long as mischievous designers have written software for rebellious kids. Which is to say: forever. [ref]

Cheating has been ingrained in gaming culture since the very beginning – gamers themselves are natural cheaters and hackers, and this type of mentality is cultivated by video games that require exploration, puzzle solving, and critical thinking to solve unique and unusual problems.

Will Wright

Will Wright, creator of SimCity, The Sims, and Spore – more than any other game producer in the industry today – recognizes that cheating and hacking can be positive outlets for creativity and self-expression.

Wright recently visited Stanford University on May 22, 2009, to discuss Human-Computer Interaction and the design process of Spore. During his presentation, Wright discussed the importance of user-generated content to the Spore universe – a universe populated by over 100 million unique, user-generated creatures.

Wright designed Spore with the intention of giving players a larger range of expressiveness than any previous game. With a set of highly sophisticated design tools in the Spore Creature Creator, players are capable of creating highly original creatures and sharing them with a worldwide audience.

The Spore Creature Creator

Yet even within this environment of sophisticated design tools and nearly limitless design freedom, players still found ways to cheat the system to create even more original, unique creatures. Will Wright described his surprise at Spore users’ artistic “exploits”:

We knew they’d be making things like creatures, but they also did things like robots that we didn’t expect at all. In fact, we decided early on that we weren’t going to put robot parts in the game because we didn’t think they would look very good. The players didn’t seem to care. They used existing parts to make robots, when our artists couldn’t even do that . . . A lot of the things were very artistic and interesting. They found a lot of exploits. They found a way to make disconnected bones and parts work together in a single skeleton by making limbs invisible. So they were actually finding exploits in our system and sharing those exploits with each other.

In this example, Wright is describing the obsessive tendency for video game fans to spend time discovering every last secret, exploit, and cheat in a given game. This special class of game fans – which I will dub “uber fans” – is especially valuable for a game where users create all of the content.

An airplane, a cave man, WALL-E, and a creature with disconnected bones:

These are examples of Spore creatures created by zealous fans. Some fans actually petitioned EA Games to not remove the bug which allowed transparent body parts because they didn’t want to lose their creatures.

“Uber Fans”

Uber fans are valuable because they are the most creative content producers and the most vocal promoters of a game within their peer groups. Uber fans are highly motivated, spending time finding game exploits, writing cheat software, and pushing the game to its creative limits – and beyond.

As Wright put it:

Looking at what players do in my games, more and more they want to be expressive. [Game developers] need to give them larger and larger areas within the game to do weird, surprising, shocking, [and] funny things – especially things they can share with other people.

This creative behavior is the player’s way of getting more ownership over the gaming experience, of stepping outside the limits set by the game developer, of turning the game into a tool of self-expression. Developers should provide positive outlets for player creativity to assist players in expressing their creative desires. Tools like level editors, character skins, and cheat codes enhance the player’s creativity and help to make the player feel like she is playing with a toy rather than a game.

The Bartle Test of Gamer Psychology

According to the Bartle Test of Gamer Psychology, a significant chunk of the gaming population is looking for a free form gaming experience from their games, which might explain the prevalence of cheating, especially in rigidly structured and rule-driven games.

The Bartle Test, a 30-question test based on the research of Richard Bartle, classifies players of MMOGs into one of four distinct player types: Explorer, Killer, Achiever, and Socializer, each with their own distinct tendencies, likes, and dislikes.

Since the test was launched in 1996, over 570,000 players have taken the test and to discover their classification. According to Bartle, Explorers – more than any of the other player types – enjoy gaming activities that might lead them to be classified as cheaters by the gaming community.

Explorers = Cheaters?

Explorers like to dig around and explore the details of a game, searching for game glitches and hidden surprises left by developers, known as “easter eggs.” In especially restrictive games, Explorers like to see if they can “get the game to do something its programmers probably didn’t intend for it to do”.

Explorers are looking for free exploration and creative play from their game experience. If developers don’t provide positive creative outlets and opportunities for free exploration within their games – and sometimes even if they do – uber fans will still manage to express their latent creativity, often through cheats, exploits, and hacks.

Anti-cheat efforts

Some gaming companies like Valve, creator of Counter-Strike, Half-Life, and Portal, spend millions of dollars each year to combating cheating – resources that would certainly be better spent developing new games.

Since When Were Rules Fun?

Anti-cheat advocates argue that game rules are put in place for a reason – namely, they make the game fun. They argue that cheaters who break these rules ultimately ruin the experience for other players; this makes cheating and hacking – despite their disputed status as unique forms of “gaming” – unethical.

Certainly this viewpoint does have merit. Cheating at other players’ expenses is unfair for players who pay $50 for a video game in the hopes of a balanced, fair game experience. Critics of video game cheating sometimes argue that video games could not exist without explicit rules, structure, and storyline to frame the gameplay and give it purpose.

However, this definition of video games is much too shallow and fails to take into account the recent trend towards open-ended and sandbox gameplay – games largely without rules or objectives. Games like Electroplankton, SimCity, and Little Big Planet are examples of emergent games that stretch the traditional definition of video games by proving players with gameplay free of rules, missions, or clearly defined goals. Are these not games?

Valve Anti-Cheat

Most online gaming companies – Valve included – have a no tolerance policy towards cheating, which they view as undesirable, disruptive, and harmful to the online gaming experience. In 2002, Valve developed a system called VAC (Valve Anti-Cheat) to stop the cheating which was running rampant on Counter-Strike servers.

Today, most Counter-Strike gamers who play on VAC-protected servers are essentially guaranteed a cheater-free gaming experience. From my own investigation, I discovered that over 90% of Counter-Strike servers are protected by VAC, so most players are assured a cheater-free experience.

Valve’s automated cheat detection system will catch anyone using aimbots, nospread, norecoil, wallhacks, speedhacks, and an array of other unauthorized cheat aids [ref]. Cheaters will receive a permanent ban and will be greeted with the following error when connecting to a server:

Your connection to this secure server has been rejected. Because of past cheating violations, you have been banned from playing on all secure servers.

Mini military apk game cheat download. Valve claims that this hard-liner policy is an incredible deterrent to would-be cheaters and that their policy has helped to successfully stamp out cheating from their online games. However, one cannot help but wonder if banning large percentages of customers is the wrong approach to dealing with the cheating problem.

“Hacker Havens”

Could there perhaps be a better way to harness the creative energy of cheaters and put it to good use? It turns out that whether it was an intentional act or not, Valve’s decision to explicitly create cheat-free servers also had the unintended consequences of creating cheater-only servers. This actually had the positive effect of creating “hacker havens” – servers where hackers are free to play against other hackers on a level playing field, without the fear of being banned.

Concluding Thoughts

Video Game Cheat Code Side Effect Bad Storming Effects

Cheaters are often looked down upon in the gaming community as “spoil sports” and troublemakers because they dare to push the limits of the video games they play. But, it is essential to recognize that cheating is an integral part of the gamer psyche.

As game producer, Gordon Walton points out (with regard to The Sims Online): ‘If you leave a cheat long enough, it becomes part of the culture of the game’ . . . In other words, far from contributing to the ‘corruption’ of games, cheats are part of the definition of the game genre. (Kucklich)

Games should not be limited by the game developer’s creativity but instead by the creativity of each individual player. Research in this area is still ongoing, and the definition of gaming is still up for debate. Yet, I hope that one day in the not-too-distant-future cheaters might be looked up to as the most creative gamers of us all.

(If you liked this, you might like Freedom of Speech on the Internet.)

Contents

Appendix: Events
Economic model source code (actionscript .txt)

The game

Oiligarchy is a playable commentary on the oil industry. The player takes the role of an 'oiligarch' managing the extraction business in the homeland and overseas and lobbies the government to keep the carbon-fossil based economy as profitable as possible. Oiligarchy can be considered an extended business sim/tycoon game since the player makes decisions and performs actions that are not always in the domain of business. This mixed gameplay is meant to highlight the intricate relations between war, politics, and energy corporations. The purely economical activities range from finding new oil fields to building extraction plants and managing resources. As domestic resources decline, the player is forced to expand their business in foreign countries to meet the demands of the market. The overseas operations could require the political or military support from the government and various crisis management actions.

Transparency

This document, written after the release of Oiligarchy, attempts to outline the major game design choices we faced and provide footnotes and additional documentation to the parts that reference real-world situations or events. Since the inception of the Molleindustria project we argue that game design is never an ideologically neutral process: games, as every other cultural product, reflect the designers' beliefs and value systems. And this is particularly visible in games that claim to “simulate” actual non-deterministic situations.
We want to stress this idea by proposing a sort of politically informed post-mortem in which we describe the odd challenges of producing social commentary into a playable form.
Video games are intrinsically opaque texts due to their double nature of source code and playable software. Certainly the source code is the strictest manifestation of the algorithm, but it is generally unavailable or unintelligible to the player. On the other hand, the executable software which is “activated” by the player's performance cannot be fully grasped due to the potentially infinite texts that can be generated by the same algorithm (see Lev Manovich principle of variability in The language of new media p.55) and the complexity of the software's hidden computations. There is no definitive way for the player to assess that a certain output is triggered by a certain input. Because of this opacity we feel committed to breaking apart and explaining in natural language the components of the game that constitute the socio-economic engine. We hope in this way to facilitate the textual analysis and the critique of the game, and, possibly push other producers of activist/political games to do the same.

Dealing with realism

Games referencing real-world elements and historical events are problematic cultural artifacts. Software does not constitute a document itself as a documentary footage or a journalistic report. Games often feature carefully reproduced elements such as characters, vehicles, and weapons, however the way these elements operate and relate to each other via the gameplay is always dictated by an algorithm that cannot be directly related to any actual entity (in the way, for example, a picture or a film have and direct, indexical relationship with objects in time and space). It is possible to create credible representations of phenomena that are already formalized into sets of rules (e.g. physical models), but when it comes to social systems or, more in general, human behavior our programming languages seem to be inappropriate tools.
Despite that, mathematical models constituting the core of a game can be based on documents or derived from well-informed theories. Obviously the goal has not been to produce some kind of scientific, objective representation, but to outline a web of cause-and-effect-relations that can arguably share strong qualitative similarities with the mess we call reality.

Peak oil

Oiligarchy’s main mechanic is loosely based on the Hubbert peak theory. The theory can be summarized as follows. For any given geographical area the rate of petroleum production tends to follow a bell-shaped curve. Early in the curve the production rate increases due to the discovery rate and the addition of infrastructure. Late in the curve the production declines due to resource depletion. Peak oil activists (sometimes called depletionists) argue that if global oil consumption is not mitigated before the peak, the availability of conventional oil will drop and prices will rise causing catastrophic chain reactions on the whole economy.

Original prediction of domestic production peak by M. King Hubbert

Oiligarchy is meant to popularize Peak oil as a key issue to understand present and future crisis and to contribute to the re-framing of the vague and deceptive argument of 'dependency of foreign oil' that is dominating the current political discourse in the US.
We choose to focus on the United States because it is the most oil dependent country, where the relations between politics and the oil industry played a major role in recent times and despite the relative decline of the American global influence, US policies are going to affect the rest of the world for many years to come.
Sources: Peak Oil

Being the bad guys

As Molleindustria's McDonalds' video game, Oiligarchy places the player in the shoes of the 'bad guys' in order to articulate the critique. Our belief is that power structures can be understood more clearly if represented from a privileged position. The player tends to perform actions with both positive outcomes (profits, advancement in the game) and social or environmental costs (a.k.a. negative externalities) dealing with responsibilities in a system that does not really punish unethical choices. The unethical gameplay is designed to reflect the free market system, which is ultimately, the object of the critique.
Moreover, a mirrored point of view can avoid the trap of the “simulated activism”, a cathartic illusion of empowerment and normative “do the right thing” enunciates. Games do not work as Skinnerian conditioning devices: games rewarding (virtual) social change do not produce activists for the same reasons games rewarding (virtual) violence do not produce violent players. As a result of taking a look at the players’ feedback, it is apparent that pushing the people to explore the dark side, especially if done with abundant irony, does not undermine the overarching game objectives.

Management

Although the player is intended to lead a big vertically integrated oil company, the game only shows the beginning of the production chain, as well as exploration and extraction, which is the relevant part for addressing the issue. The visual representation of drilling and extraction is grossly simplified, but on the other hand, an important and not broadly known technical detail is taken into account: the extraction rate of every single oilfield tends to gradually decline when the reservoir is half depleted. This is one of the factors that determines the typical bell shaped curve of oil production.

Hubbert curve, regional Vs Individual Wells. Source ASPO

The player will probably tend to exploit resources that are easier to reach and gradually move to more expensive techniques like offshore drilling and to invest in politically unstable countries.
The bell shaped curve of production is the most counter-intuitive part of the Peak Oil theory: unlike a car that suddenly stops working when the tank is empty, the global crude extraction (in a business as usual scenario) reaches the peak when half of the oil underground remains. Then it declines gradually, but at progressively increasing speed like a roller coaster slope.
This factor deeply affects a typical game session that will have an expanding phase (as in all the mainstream strategy and business simulation games) followed by a contracting phase marked by the struggle to keep up with the demand and the convulsions of the economic system.

Early Oiligarchy prototype representing the peak dynamic. Click to start and click on the black fields to build wells. The red line is the demand the black one is the maximum production.

Demand and supply crisis

The player's primary objective is to match the market demand of crude. The demand is a function of two variables: the Gross Domestic Product (representing the size of the economy) and an umbrella value called “oil addiction”.
GDP tends to grow at a rate of 3% per year, which is a reasonable rate for the game's time frame.
The figure can be lower or even negative (recession) in case of serious oil supply crisis or event-generated crisis (see events in Events Appendix).
The “Oil addiction” variable is as homage to George W. Bush ghost-writers, who popularized the expression in a rare moment of honesty, and represents the dependency of the entire economy to fossil fuels. This takes into account a wide range of factors such as agriculture, public transportation, car-centered urban planning and so on.
When at the beginning of the turn/year, the oil production is lower than the demand a supply crisis algorithm is triggered. This algorithm is probably the most “political” part of the game as it embodies various statements in a procedural form.

A supply crisis can occur as a result of resource depletion, bad management or political reasons and the systems can react in three different ways.

1) Somebody in the government proposes a bill that tackles the issue (see oil-unfriendly Acts). Oil-unfriendly Acts generally tend to moderate the demand by reducing the oil addiction. The probability for these types of acts to be approved, depends on the government “oiliness” (see politics): with a fully oiled government all the “good” acts are basically blocked, while with a fully green government, every year of crisis a new act should be approved. Every act has a degree of “boldness” that also plays a part in the approval. For instance, an act that promotes electric cars is bolder and less likely to be approved by an ideologically mixed administration than an act which simply reduces speed limits to save gas.

2) If the bill is not approved or the act is not sufficient to solve the oil deficit, the government popularity decreases and the social body tries to react with initiatives that in the game are classified as grassroot (see grassroot). These initiatives are more likely to happen if the society has a high of environmental awareness (greenness).

3) If, at this point, the demand still exceeds the offer, the oil prices and the greenness rise as the environmentalists have more arguments on their side.
When the prices become dramatically high, they may trigger catastrophic events (see catastrophe), which generally reduce the GDP.

Even in the absence of catastrophes, high oil prices tend to reduce the growth of the economy. After a crisis, oil prices will gradually recover to the previous stable value.

Graph linking recession and oil prices. Source: What is the Real Cause of the Global Recession?

Politics

Affecting the politics is the key to being a successful manager in Oiligarchy. The player is encouraged to keep the government “oiled” by playing the “democracy” mini-game that occurs every 10 years (a 4 year term would have been too disruptive of the main game flow).
The democracy mini-game refers to a type of election race, but it does not try to simulate the complexities of the electoral process. The donations during the race should be seen as a representation of the corporate influence on politics in a broader sense, including lobbying, revolving doors and so on.
The depiction of the two parties as interchangeable, bulimic, money-burning machines is both a satire of the overstated spectacle of the U.S. presidential campaign and an ironic response to the so-called “political games” simulations of the presidential campaigns that reinforce the widespread deceptive equation: politics=elections.
The initial speed of the two parties reflects the popularity of the last administration which is, in turn, dependent on a generic citizen satisfaction (consent) and environmental consciousness which are visualized in the Washington scenario as demonstrators.
Additionally, there are some random thrusts that can affect the race and are meant to represent variables like the effectiveness of the campaign and the typical scandals and surprises involving the two parties.
The ability of the player to affect the election outcome is very limited, but his donations have a fundamental influence on the policies of the future administration.
As a part of the satire, the two parties have no ideological features, in other words the Republican Party is not intrinsically more inclined to help the oil industry or vice-versa (observing the electoral funding by industry you can notice a general preference for Republican, but oil and gas industries are not amongst the most partisan industries.
Therefore, the experienced player would simply choose to “bet” on the winning party to obtain the most influence. These design choices loosely reflect a study by Steven D. Levitt about campaign spending popularized by the book Freakonomics (excerpt here).
As a function of the result of the elections and the donations to the two parties, the government (a stylized rendition that summarizes the many institutions in a 10 people congress) will be composed by three categories of representatives:

• Oiled: representatives that will vote for oil-friendly bills (see oil-friendly acts) every year and oppose the oil-unfriendly bills.
• Green: representatives that will vote for oil-unfriendly acts in case of supply crisis.
• Gray: representatives that will vote for both kinds of bills with a probability of 50%.

The number of green representatives is directly related to the greenness: with the emergence of the environmental awareness (due to global warming or oil crisis) the green representatives will substitute the gray ones.

Side Effect Definition

Big and “wise” donations can affect politics to elect an oil-friendly president. This will grant the player the possibility to access the secret underground room (a reference to the presidential cabinet and the Pentagon) and trigger “Special Operations”. Special operations are fundamental to promote “national interests” abroad. For instance, they will allow the player to invade Iraq and unblock its resources or to prevent or counter a potential nationalization of the industry in Venezuela (see special operations).

Toxic Effect

Imperialism

As domestic resources deplete, the player will be forced to explore and deploy wells in foreign countries. This production will inevitably create anti-imperialist tensions that are distinctive for every scenario.

Venezuela
In Venezuela the dissent will be initially led by indigenous natives, but as the exploitation continues, the whole government will struggle for economical autonomy. The path to independence is represented by various events and leads to the nationalization of oil industry, a move that blocks the player's wells and any further actions within the scenario. The nationalization can be prevented or reverted by an escalation of increasingly aggressive special operations culminating with a coup.
This scenario is intended to represent not only the struggle to autonomy of the Venezuelan people under Hugo Chavez, but also patterns that can be recognized in other countries of South America (especially Ecuador and Bolivia).
Sources: Venezuela

Nigeria
The Nigerian scenario has an extra menu representing the government which allows the player to deal with the dissent. The dissent will tend to follow a two-phase dynamic. The first phase sees the uprising of the Ogoni people and it assumes the form of peaceful blockade. The second phase is the emergence of armed groups and can either be ignited after years of exploitation, or indirectly triggered by the player's ruthless response: the government-assisted assassination of Ogoni activists (as it arguably happened in reality).
Sources: Nigeria

Iraq
Iraqi relations with Western countries have always been inconstant since the end of the British mandate and the game, in its initial post-WWII state, is quite inaccurate since it reflects a more recent situation.
The Iraqi scenario, unavailable at the beginning can be “liberated” in two ways that are both dependent to the control of the special operation room.
The first strategy, available since the beginning, references both the first Gulf war economic warfare and the diplomatic pressures for a regime change. Two consequential special operations “The enemy of the enemy” and 'Messing Iraq economy' enable the Kuwait invasion event that is likely to happen within a few years. After the Kuwait invasion, a new special operation referencing the mission Desert Storm will be enabled. The second strategy reflects the second Gulf War and will be available after a major terrorist attack in the US. It requires the manufacturing of a link between terror and Iraq (that is, another special operation called 'WMD').
In case of successful war, both cases will lead to a similar outcome: the unblocking of the scenario action menu. However, after a period of relative stability the insurgency movements will start to target oil wells and occupation forces. Attack on wells can be countered by hiring mercenaries (a reference to Blackwater) to protect structures.
Attacks to the main base in Baghdad can be contained by sending more troops, and ordering a 'special operations' that, as a side effect, reduces the popularity of the administration.
Successful insurgent victories against the occupation forces will block plants and any further action in Iraq until another re-liberation.
Sources: Iraq

Pseudo history and futurology

Oiligarchy is an ambitious game: it tries to describe how the USA became addicted to oil, how it could have been different, and how a successful or a failed transition to a post-carbon society would look like. So we chose to start from the WWII aftermath, that is arguably the beginning of the golden age of oil for the combined effect of the Green Revolution, the car culture and
the suburbanization.

Since the game statements revolve around the major role of the oil industry in shaping the world we live in, we had to give the player the possibility to affect the history but, at the same time, we wanted to provide some incentives to retrace the events as they actually happened to stimulate a critical reading of history.

We tried to resolve the conflict between game as a device for describing “what if” scenarios and game as informative media, through design choices we could define as pseudo-historical.
Oiligarchy pseudo-history is based on a procedural interpretation of past. In-game events do not occur on a certain year because that is what happened in reality, but they are entangled in a web of cause and effect relations. Every event is enabled by certain conditions (game variables, players’ actions or other events) and produces certain effects. Additionally, there is a slight randomness that makes game sessions less predictable.
Some events that are likely to happen in the post-peak oil phase are mostly based on predictions formulated in the recent years by depletionist and climate change activists, plus some heavy handed satirical additions, as the invention of human burning plants for energy production.

Though they may have similar outputs, events are classified in many ways:

• Oil-friendly Acts: approved roughly every 3 years according to the oiliness of the governments and their “shameless” value.
• Oil-unfriendly Acts: proposed every year and approved according to the oiliness of the governments and their “boldness” value.
• Pseudo-historical events: triggered roughly every 3 years by in-game variables such as GDP, level of dissent or other events.
• Grassroot initiatives: activated according to the society environmental awareness and their greenness value.
• Catastrophe: triggered by high oil prices in years of unsolved supply crisis.
• Undercover Operations: enabled by in-game variables with certain “escalation” patterns, but directly triggered by the player in case of oiled President.
• Nigerian Government: triggered by the player.

For a complete list of events, how they affect the game variables and detailed documentation see the appendix Events.

Challenging Meaningful Play

The contemporary science of game design revolves around the idea of meaningful play. According to Salen & Zimmerman (see Rules of Play, unit 1), players should be given opportunities to take non-random actions and make decisions that have an immediately clear and integrated (makes 'big-picture' sense) effect on the game.
Meaningful game systems are elegant, appealing, easy to understand and internally consistent. Unfortunately, such kinds of games may be inappropriate to describe systems that are inelegant, unappealing, obscure and contradictory like the free market capitalism that is destroying the world.
Oiligarchy is full of broken connections, meaningless interaction, inverted rewards and randomness. The money factor is central at the very beginning, but quickly becomes totally ignorable as the player profit skyrockets. The administration popularity represented by the demonstrators in Washington is presented as a sort of punishment or a bad performance warning, but it does not meaningfully affect the player routines since, in the eyes of the oiligarch, the parties are interchangeable. In the late stages of the game, donating money to the parties may be a counter-productive habit because there are no more oil-friendly acts left and the prices are rising anyway. Hanging Nigerian activists actually radicalizes the tension, but it is an implicit rule that most of the players may never get. And, above all, the very same goal of the game becomes quite blurred after the peak.

Game Over?

Oiligarchy has four possible endings.

In the pre-peak phase the player can be fired for bad management if the demands exceed the offer for too many years. That is an implementation of the free competition mode of production. Competition is not directly simulated for the simple reason that it never played a major role in the history of oil industry, nevertheless if the player tries to create too much artificial scarcity or refuses the expansion imperative he/she will be kicked out of the market.

Game statistics after the peak. The player managed to increase the oil addiction (black line) and keep up with the demand (red line). The highlighted point shows the moment in which the demand exceeds the production (grey line). Prices skyrocket and some grassroot initiatives are trying to reduce the addiction.

The hardcore gamer will probably see the Mutually Assured Destruction ending that represents the failed transition to a post-carbon society. This global nuclear war scenario happens when the oil prices reach the ceiling of $300 per barrel and it is usually the result of aggressive and persistent efforts to control the government. By buying off the politicians, the player essentially introduces rigidity in the system and prevents a harmonic rearrangement of the society.
An example of game ending with MAD. After the peak (grey line declines), the government is still oiled and no act reducing the oil addiction (black line) is approved. The addiction and consequently the demand is reduced by grassroot initiatives at first and then by an economic crisis (yellow line). Since the reforms are still blocked a reprise in GDP growth and the declining resources causes another spike in prices that triggers the M.A.D. end screen.

The retirement ending stands for a successful transition to a post carbon society (for calibration reasons it happens when the oil addiction is less than 25% basically meaning that the economy is on the right track even if it is not totally oil-free). Retirement usually happens when the player loosens the grip on politics around, or after the peak oil. It is basically the happy ending, though it can be reached after some major catastrophes.

• This is basically an implementation of our conclusions and hopes. In brief, we believe that the dependency on oil can be solved by a combination of different approaches:
• A series of top-down, government-lead structural policies ranging from supporting renewable energies to nation-wide infrastructural rearrangement (see oil friendly acts in the Events Appendix).
  A proliferation of bottom-top, more or less organized initiatives promoting alternative lifestyles such as the rejection of consumerism, promotion of bike transportation and organic, locally grown farming (see grassroots Events Appendix)
• A substantial downsizing of the economy on the whole and the overcoming of the GDP growth imperative.

An example of game ending with Retirement. After the peak (gray line declines) the player stop affecting politics. A series of acts and gressroots initiatives reduce the oil dependency (black line) and consequently the demand (red line). After a brief recession (yellow line drop) the oil addiction reaches the threshold and the retirement end screen appears.

The fourth possible ending is titled Farewell West and represents a mildly dystopic collapse of western civilization as we know it. It occurs when the GDP goes below a certain level, three times the initial value. Apparently the fourth ending never occurred to anyone and may be actually impossible to reach.

At the end of the day good gamers tends to get rich and blow up the world while the bad, lazy or non competitive gamers may reach a tragic end. The debasement and relativization of the binary win/lose formula seems to be the most shocking part for the habitual gamers. The online feedback shows how the players are struggling to negotiate between the ambiguous rewards and punishment system and the conventions they learned from traditional strategy/business games. Many players posted successful tips for reaching the dystopic scenario with the most money, others proposed counter-strategies about how to get to the happy ending. Some people argued that the best way to “beat” the game is to avoid any imperialist activities while others suggested building as many human burning plants as possible.
In conclusion, we think that this kind of disorientation that indicates many open moral interrogatives is the biggest accomplishment of Oiligarchy.

Selected sources

Peak Oil

ASPO, The Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas
The Oil Drum, Discussions about Energy and Our Future

Video Game Cheat Code Side Effect Bad Storming Game

More in the Event appendix

Venezuela

Amazon Watch, video and documents about Oil industry devastation in South AmericaPINR, Venezuela Moves to Nationalize its Oil Industry

Venezuela Analysis, The Nature of CIA Intervention in Venezuela

Minimizing Mischief in Venezuela, Stabilizing the U.S. Oil Supply, a proposal by the right wing think tank Heritage Foundation

Eva Golinger, The Chavez Code:Cracking U.S. Intervention in Venezuela

The Guardian, Venezuela coup linked to Bush team

More in the Event appendix

Nigeria

Democracy Now, Drilling and killing, award winning audio documentary about Chevron's role in the assassination of Nigerian people.

Human Right Watch, The ogoni Crisis, A Case-Study Of Military Repression In Southeastern Nigeria (recently removed from the official website)

Music Group Side Effect

Oil War, Nigeria, a documentary about Nigerian emancipation movements.

Iraq

Naomi Klein, Shock Doctrine, Part 6. Chapter linking free market policies and iraqui insurgency.

Cronology of relations between US and the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI)

Side Effect Synonym

Economic moves that lead to the Kuwait invasion

Video Game Cheat Code Side Effect Bad Storming Effect

Salon, Bush knew Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction

More in the Event appendix