Wednesday 17 August 2011

The Truth in (Mostly) Black and White



You Shall Know The Truth is a timed hidden object game developed by Jonas Kyratzes for the Wikileaks Stories project. You play a spy sent by the U.S. intelligence community to retrieve leaked documents and biometric data on an unnamed Wikileaks employee from his or her apartment. It's a difficult game, not in that it's particularly trying to find all of the mission-targeted data before the timer runs out but because it adds a dark, humorous edge to a genre of casual games that traditionally has no ideological bent. It is also contradictory and perhaps difficult to take seriously at times, but, taken as a whole, it's a complex work with a novel take on the intersection between politics and play. Check it out before reading on, because there are spoilers ahead.
You Shall Know The Truth is a twisted fantasy. The apartment where the game takes place is sparse and messy. There's a creepy tinge of voyeurism to the exploration of the space, your cursor slowly scanning back and forth over living room, office, kitchen, bedroom, and bathroom. At times the line between real-world intelligence worker and cartoonish TV spy becomes blurred; the text on non-mission-critical items constantly undercuts the competency and rationality of the CIA, and it's hard not to imagine the player-character foaming at the mouth and cackling while combing the apartment's every carpet for biological material. Because the player is sent to retrieve information that we already know to have been leaked, we understand that, in some way, our mission is doomed to fail.
The game's timer is set to 999 seconds, and, though I might be wrong here, this means that it's long enough to allow the player to process every object in the apartment without running out of time. This also means that the game is dropping hints for us that it isn't actually about finding hidden objects. Nevertheless, you don't know that the first time you play it. Every object in the room has a different progress ticker, and you feel a decent amount of pressure while waiting for the ticker to slowly count off. This waiting screen briefly describes the object you've clicked on and justifies why you'd want to look at said object. You Shall Know The Truth is currently the only Wikileaks Stories game that actually includes information about specific leaks, paraphrasing their content during the verification process of mission-targeted items.
It's a clever way to weave this information into the game, giving you something to read while the progress counter ticks off. One could criticize the game for not making this text permit any other interaction besides cold reading, and it's certainly possible to stare at the progress counter instead of engaging with the content, but we can assume that anyone who might take the time to play a Wikileaks Stories game would care enough to take a look. I'm an impatient gamer, especially when a mission clock is involved, but it worked for me--I learned about a good number of leaks that I hadn't read about in other media sources (and the cable codes are included, making it easy to Google for more information elsewhere).

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