Can You Save the Economy? Play The Bailout Game

This entire thing was stupid. We could have either taken the economic crash because the banks were stupid, or fed their stupidity.

What pisses me off is soon after the bailout, there was a huge huge huge huge banquet held at a really expensive resort. The table cloths had gold all over them, everything. Think of cindarella got greedy, then that would have been a small corner of it. It cost them something like 50 million for that one night.

When confronted about it, the answer was 'we always do this, we'd had it planned for awhile. It's a business tradition'.

To quote a celebrity unlicensed doctor: "How's that workin' for ya!?"

Should have jailed the executives responsible for this.

<i>The game itself is a repetitive and seemingly meaningless trudge from square to square (bank to bank), each offering the same basic question: Do you bail out: YES or NO? No matter your answer, you'll get an animation or video with some vaguely related news bit or textual riff...</i>

Kinda like reality, lol

But us taxpayers do the 'meaningless trudge' - moving from day to day paying taxes. The Government has a system where the members of certain banks (friends) get the bailout and banks who haven't "played the game" with politicians - get a 'no'.

Then afterwards, there's some vauge news on how the bailout's helping the citizens of the country, but oddly spending all the tax money to bailout corporations isn't hurting anything.

I didn't like the game because of a few things.

These bailouts are going to hurt us in the long run, the more money we put into these failing companies the worse off we are going to be later down the road.  I let all of them fail and there was a zombie depression where in reality things would be bad for a while and then finally get better assuming we continued to make wise choices regarding the economy(such as abolishing the federal reserve and ending the empire).  I kind of think the designers got their economists hats on backwards, as does most of the government and media.  But enough about my political opinions.

From a design perspective I agree with Bogost.  It was a very dull experience.  You move forward, you say yes or no and then continue on.  Sometimes you land on a square in which you have no control over.  I was hoping for an intelligent, fun and informative game but this game failed make any intelligent statements on the economy, it wasn't fun and definitely wasn't informative.  The music is cool and the graphics are pretty but it is still incredibly dull and full of failure.