As a lab technician at the Orwellian megacorp Ringo, your job is to sort strangely unspecific genetic samples into four different tubes – all day, every day. Each sample is identified by a specific shape or pattern or some other rudimentary icon, but whatever it is, you need to make sure the right ones go in the correct tubes or your pay is docked. Oh, and the exact shapes and patterns, as well as other bewildering requirements, are altered on a daily basis by your faceless masters. Welcome to the world of CorpoNation.
Those spotting a similarity to the award-winning Papers, Please are not mistaken. But while that game dealt with the cruel vagaries of immigration, this is all about the dehumanisation of workers within a systemised corporate environment where the staff are quite literally prisoners in the capitalist machine. But sorting stuff isn’t all you do. Each night you get to crawl back to your pod apartment and log in to your 1990s-style computer to read banal Ringo news stories, swap bants with other workers via instant messaging and play state-sanctioned video games. There’s a catalogue to buy customisations for your room, and regular emails encourage you to put all your pay back into the economy. The vintage Mac OS-style interface and glib humour work really well to establish the sinister retro-futuristic atmosphere of the game, and, as with last year’s excellent Videoverse, discovering snippets of narrative through chats with fellow workers is a pleasing exercise in techno-nostalgia.
But this is only the beginning. As the days drift by and the arbitrary changes to your daily job grow more complex, you begin to receive illicit communications from some sort of rebel guerrilla group within the company. Should you report them? And meanwhile, where is it that badly behaved employees disappear to? And what’s in the food pills they’re giving you? All these mysteries and narrative threads are brilliantly handled through the claustrophobic medium of your computer screen and work email system, while the muted blue-and-white colour scheme and glitchy pixel art accentuate the sinister mood – there’s no escape from this monotonous grind. Or so it seems.
CorpoNation is a sharp, funny critique of late capitalism in which every second of your life as a lab worker is commodified and exploited, and where constant, insidious demands are made on your attention, even when you’re ostensibly off the clock. But with the mandatory video games it makes you play in your downtime – a point-and-click version of Street Fighter and a simple take on Solitaire – it is also a pastiche of the live-service gaming phenomenon, which has turned play into an inescapable Skinner box of fetch quests and loot hunts.
What’s really smart about CorpoNation is the way it uses industry-standard compulsion loops to trick you into becoming an unquestioning wage slave, desperate to beat the performance quotas, not only to get a better rating, but so that you can afford a nice new gaming chair or a corporate branded bedspread or some food pills. And because of this, your exposure to the menacing hacking collective at the centre of the story has extra impact. Helping them requires messing with your daily performance quota, and going too far means defaulting on your bills or having to manage without eating. As in Papers, Please, you’re lowered into a nightmarish, soulless contraption that weaponises all the tropes and devices of gaming to dark effect.
You leave this stylish, compact and clever game feeling relieved to be free, but then an hour later as you sit at your computer answering endless work emails or grinding in some identikit live-service fantasy game, you have to ask yourself – am I really?
