Humour

Undiscovered CIO games

T A Balasubramanian discloses a few off-beat, original, and carefully crafted games

While the Top 5 CIO games have hogged all the limelight in 2007, there have been many others, lurking in the wings that have not gained much mainstream exposure. Their popularity can be assessed by the volume of discourse you find in the CIO blogs, buzzing like an undercurrent of whispers on the Web. This ‘silent’ majority of games have remained undetected by our sleuths.

Undetected, until now, that is. Each of these off-beat, original, and carefully crafted games is a winner in its own right, an undiscovered gem that has been plumbed from the murky depths of IT. So dim the lights and warm up your mice, as we present the Undiscovered CIO Games of 2007.

Mental Warfare

Somewhere between tactical and real-time strategy for the savvy CIO, there exists a perfect blend. Mental Warfare is this exact sweet spot in corporate gaming. It takes core game play elements from role-playing games and combines them into a game that is laughably easy to pick up and play without committing your entire work life to it.

Played out in the fantasy realm of Data Centaur, you, the CIO of Baffle Corporation, take on the heroic role of the ‘data guy’ as you chase the user beasties back into the realm of the shadowy Memo Pads. You pick out a small army of programmers (your own favorites like Brooke Bond), and place the units on the board like a tactical game, and then like a real-time strategy title, the army will engage the enemy—such as those infuriating folk in the marketing department who keep making demands for a new CRM update every week.

Most of the intrigue in the play comes from the ability to pause the game and make fresh assault plans—exactly what you do in your office conferences. When you issue commands to each programming soldier, you can make use of the special abilities of each unit. Between rounds you can unlock points gained in the previous round to release new recruits or add special weapons—like a Java gun—for existing soldiers.

Firewall

Most people get really tired of brick-breaking games because they do not like to break bricks eternally. So now, Firewall does away with the brick-breaking monotony that you have found so boring in the past million taps on your keypad. You do not have to break a single one ... and you even get achievements if you do not.

You, the vigilant CIO, take to the tracks in this game with a rocket-powered contraption that has a rounded barrier that will bounce a bubble called The Firewall Ball. What really makes this game different is that instead of trying to break things, you try to save them in your bubble. You start with the smaller ‘creatures’ on the network—such as damaged files. As more of them are collected, the bubble becomes larger and you can then pick up the larger ones, like entire directories. By the time you have completed the level, your bubble is huge and full of all the data creatures on the board. The graphics of each of the ‘creatures’ twirling inside the ball is something to behold—it shows your boss exactly what you do to keep his corporate assets protected.

You progress through the levels by collecting all the ‘creatures’ you find, and you don’t have to break a single box (or brick). Achievements can be won by succeeding in different ways, such as simply passing multiple levels or collecting the ‘chicken’ (folder) before you collect its ‘egg’ (file). The game has an up-beat sense of humor that makes it fun to play—hitting the creatures, for example, when they are too large to be collected into your Firewall Ball will cause a reaction—such as the hopping of a ‘frog’ (a zip file), or the yelp of a ‘dog’ (an audio file).

Demo-crazy

In Demo-crazy, your goal, as CIO, is to play the role of a crafty politician in charge of a modern data gathering corporation called, appropriately, Demonia. The object of the game is to stay in power as long as possible, by hook or by crook.

Your challenge is to constantly adjust different business factors in order to best please the users at large—who are the ‘voters’ in your constituency, by giving them promises (or ‘demos’) of what you can do for them. Each demo involves a crazy level of push and pull across a multitude of subversive lobbies in Baffle Corporation. The game really gives you an eerie feeling of déjà vu, what with all the mucking around that you do in real life—just like a politician might, to make everyone happy.

Demo-crazy is a detailed simulation where each ‘version’ of the game represents three months, with elections held every four years. The game has a complex internal model to represent the mixed population of your corporation. A large number of different ‘voter groups’ are modeled, such as Finance, Marketing, Production and HR, people, as well as Members of the Board, of the Worker’s Association, and so on. The simulation allows people to be in several groups at once, so for example, a worker in Production will be influenced by the opinions of two groups when it comes to election day.

Demo-crazy is an engrossing corporate game that slyly pulls you in and forces you to imagine what you might do if you were to be playing Machiavelli—as indeed, you might already be doing.

Escape from Windoves

Escape from Windoves is based, as one might expect, on Homer’s classic Greek epic, the Odyssey. Here, we find the journey of Leanox [originally Odysseus] who is attempting to return home after the legendary Anti-Monopoly [originally Trojan] War—which his crafty mind brought an end to. After this long confrontation, Leanox wants to go back home. But Grill Bates [originally Poseidon], the master of Windoves, however, is less than pleased with Leanox and engineers a nightmare return voyage for our beleaguered hero.

Escape from Windoves is filled with endless adventure and imagination. Each level consists of attempting to get a requisite number of Leanox’s ships (known as desktops) and men from the gruesome Windoves island to the vast expanse called Open Sea. Along the way are many obstacles and villains that attempt to stop the men from returning home.

Sounds familiar? Well, so far, it is. The real magic of ‘Escape from Windoves’ comes in the way the game is controlled. You, the CIO, are a God with a top-down omniscient view and with the power to influence the floating desktop armadas below ... but you can only influence. Clicking and dragging your mouse through the Open Sea, you can create swirling currents and great winds. But these moves have their perils, as currents react in a surprisingly realistic and capricious way—they may form vortexes that might send your desktops whipping back in the opposite direction.

It is simple and wickedly challenging at the same time. CIOs frequently take logical motion for granted. Press left, move left. Press jump, then jump. Escape from Windoves drives you to take care and plan not just their moves, but also the way in which they make those moves. Too much wind and your desktops may crash into a deadly reef. And this is to say nothing of the enemies. The need to continually abandon navigation efforts to do battle with the forces that face the desktops leads to some truly manic and awesome gameplay. As the game designers say, ‘No CIO will find it easy to Escape from Windoves.’