Humour

Top five CIO games

T A Balasubramanian lists the most significant games played by CIOs in the last one year

At last, here is the final line-up of the most audacious corporate games played by CIOs in 2007, the year just gone by. In retrospect, these are the best games of diplomacy, deviousness and daredevil action, not to mention diligence and drollness. Ian Fleming or Dame Agatha Christie would have marvelled at the stylish ingenuity or the mysteries of plot that these CIO games exude. So load up your CDs and settle back for a romp through the best of the CIO adventures.

Hackdown Genre: Fantasy flight

Hackdown is a CIO’s ultimate fantasy of getting back at those vile hackers who keep trying to break into enterprise servers—and quite often succeed, creating a trail of data destruction. As a riot cop outfitted with the future’s most awesome jumping technology, you, the crafty CIO of Baffle Corporation, can leap from data center to data center collecting ‘black hats’ that empower you ... to jump even higher. The resultant carrot-and-stick game play will leave you absolutely addicted.

This is a successor to the earlier Grand Theft Data-style game, and it is built around simple basics: shooting hackers and collecting black hats as trophies. Hackdown stimulates you into trying many, many more things than any previous Grand Theft Data game. For example, you can enrol other CIOs to become your partners in the Hackdown Grand Finale—a stunning co-operative end game—which leads to a climax as you lead your team in wreaking havoc on hackers across town after town. The CIO collaboration play against the hacker universe adds a new dimension of fine-tuned, technically-complex enjoyment.

Hackdown lets CIO gamers lose themselves completely, discarding time and priorities, hunger, and bodily functions, even ignoring natural disasters. Once you boot it up, the game’s allure—to collect hats, jump higher and wield more powerful weapons—will draw you in and leave you wanting more.

Mista Osmosis Genre: Action adventure

A next-generation project by Microshop, makers of the dazzling Windoves In-Your-Face family, this game has stunning animation effects and realistic 3D icons that are designed to make CIOs flip. You will be lured into the apparently open space, with its soothing transparency and glass effects. And the way the different powers of your avatar [called Aero] open up an even more dizzying array of game play options.

Set in 2019 after a colossal asteroid [fittingly named Osmosis] crashes to earth from corporate space on an island, the game begins in the middle of a tense enterprise standoff between the Open Source and Grill Bates governments for control of the desktop zone. Amid rising tensions, the asteroid suddenly bursts open revealing a massive alien ship called Mista, which begins freezing vast portions of the island and altering the global operating system grid. The invasion of the enterprise desktop aliens has started.

As a CIO, you can either join Ben Hur, alien captain of Mista, or make an alliance with Leanox, leader of the Open Source guerrilla team (recognized by their Red Hats) that is determined to win back the desktop from the invading aliens. If you join the Mista team, you are rewarded with gadgets such as a free nanosuit. As Ben Hur will tell you, “Thousands of hackers are struggling to break Mista, maybe millions, and that is something we are truly proud of. We are also proud of being fashionably late in this invasion. We hope you can ward off those Red Hats with all these fancy fittings on your suit.”

Mashup Band Genre: Multiplayer strategy

Mashups gives an overstretched CIO like you an easy-play way in which you can slap together a graphical, musical information interface between your key applications and their key users—who are, at all times, a demanding, vociferous lot.

Sure, Colla Borate may still be holding the fort from the past, but Mashup Band is the true evolution of collaboration games in the CIO space. As we all know, CIOs think that they have the data they need, but since they do not where it’s needed, and in what form, a game like Mashup would come as a pleasant shock to your users, especially since it is all delivered as a musical symphony. Adding in video and vocals to the network-based enterprise game play creates a collaborative, immersive and just plain addictive experience.

Some people have, and will continue to find fault in Mashup Band for being ‘just’ Colla Borate with nets and a GUI, or ‘just’ a follow-on to territory that Lotus Goats tread many years before, but what a mashup would do is to let you tune the way information is presented to the way the information would actually be used in Baffle. This is the kind of one-upmanship that you will instantly recognize as the keystone to any progress on your asteroid-hit IT highway.

Portal Combat Genre: Power strategy

Portal delivers that rare combination of innovative game play and hilarious, polished story line. Once again you play the role of a CIO, System Saver, pre-destined to save your department from the clutches of gruesome corporate gatekeepers. Extremely intelligent computer AI results in an evil CFO called Fin Fina who will diabolically block, pull apart, and nullify your actions.

If, by some strange chance, you have never played Portal before, here’s how it goes. As Saver, the hard-working CIO at Enron, you accidentally opened a portal to another dimension. After saving the world in the original Enron Debacle, you were tucked away in a bizarre form of stasis, not to be awakened until humanity needed you again. With a laser pointer in hand as your key weapon, you must now free Baffle from the extra-dimensional money squeeze known as the Budget.

What helps Portal stand out is the use of physics, which comes to life once you acquire the technology gun. With this tool in hand, you can catch any CFO grenade out of the air and shoot it back into Fin Fina’s cabin. You may unplug spreadsheets to lower barriers, and move memos to help you access new areas. While the laser pointer has long been Saver’s weapon of choice, it is the technology gun that makes you a hero.

Super Mario, CIO Genre: Mystery adventure

What has plumbing got to do with a CIO’s job? Everything, apparently. Information is fluid when it moves and storage is susceptible to spring leaks. Here we have Super Mario, the favourite jovial plumber, bent upon finding a way to keep his data center dry.

The game begins when you, as Mario, discover that a former employee has used a phishing scam, and now criminals have been using names and e-mail addresses from your customer list to conduct other highly targeted phishing attacks, including the recent round of fake e-mails apparently from Waterworld. Mario gives chase, exploring bizarre environments. Since he’s in space, Mario can perform mind-bending jumps unlike anything he’s done before.

As Mario the CIO goes around in various disguises, he ushers in a new era of video games, defying gravity across all the data centers in the galaxy. There are many stages, each set within a different space. The Storage Dust Galaxy has a variety of clues, all in ones and zeroes, while the Flash Drive Galaxy comes up with a baffling array of pen drives that you explore for clues. Each galaxy has to be ‘cleaned’ before you can go to the next one, making sure your enemies have been swept away. What better way could a CIO find to hone his skills against data theft?