Saturday Morning Gaming: Not For Broadcast and Unintentionally Educational Games

You are a custodian in a television studio. You’re doing your job when the phone rings and the game prompts you to answer it. The administrative assistant says “Okay, David. I’m just putting this call through” and before you can say “Wait, I’m not Dave”, the phone tells you “Hey, Dave here. I can’t make it in. You have to do my job real quick. Don’t worry! I’ll walk you through it…”

And walk you through it he does.

You mount the commercials into the thingy that plays commercials, you get the feed from the news station, deal with the newsreader introducing the planned events for the show, and you are walked through two segments.

But first you have to cut from the studio to the news’s opening credits and then back to the studio. You get trained in how to deal with interference and keeping the wavelength in the good area and then you jump to an interview with an actor from a recently released movie and you get trained in pushing the buttons that jump from camera to camera. Is the actor talking? Jump to the actor. Is the interviewer talking? Jump to the interviewer. Are they jumping back and forth between each other? Go to the wide shot. Don’t hold a shot for more than 10 seconds. So if the actor is talking for 20 seconds, go from the shot of his face to the wide shot of both of them.

Whew made it to the end of the interview.

Now you go *LIVE* to a speech from the winners of tonight’s election. The Advance Party. And… well, one of the two has started drinking.

This is the “bleep” tutorial.

There are two ways to do it. You’re on a two-second delay. So you can listen to the two screens and wait one-two after you hear the live swear word and then bleep or you can put your eye on the sound feed and hold the bleep button down as the red part of the sound feed passes the line. Oh, and keep jumping between cameras!

At the end of it all, Dave tells you how you did and, points out that your incentives are to keep the audience going up, make sure that the commercials are varied, points out that your shows might have an impact on the stock prices of various corporations and, oh yeah, he’s never coming back. Good luck!

And that’s the tutorial.

What’s really cool is that, sure, you’re doing the producer thing and jumping between cameras and bleeping naughty words and all that, but you can also watch the behind-the-scenes stuff at the news. You can see the relationship that the newsreader has with his assistants. You can see the actor start yelling at the interviewer after the interview. You see the stuff that happens when the camera isn’t on.

At the same time, there’s a storyline going on with the new political party. They’re going to start raising taxes (and how!).

And you’re the person deciding what the people at home see.

On the surface, it’s a fun little game where you play the guy in the control booth. Hey, the commercials are funny. The shots of the newsreader complaining about his makeup person making fun of him is funny. If you go deeper? It’s a deconstruction of television itself. And, get this, your choices matter. You can change things.

I don’t think that I can recommend this game enough.

So…what are you playing?