Humour

Fantasy user games

T A Balasubramanian writes about the fantasy games that showcase a wish-fulfilling IT scenario

Even as you thought that the Top 5 CIO games have been the high point of corporate entertainment in 2007, you would be missing out on all the wonderful happenings in this space if you were to ignore or forget your ever-present, never-relenting community of users. After all they are your internal ‘customers’ and it is their right (and might) which will determine your IT success stories.

This un-silent majority of inept and persistent persuaders have invented real-life games that reflect their own sneaky strategies, special cheat routines and other murky methods—much to your never-ending consternation. But this review is not about these ingenious, cleverly plotted games, though you, of course, at the receiving end of these shenanigans, would be quick to recognize their pesky story lines.

This is about outstanding fantasy games that paint a wish-fulfilling IT scenario. As you play these engrossing games, you get to experience the relief and bliss of dealing with users you can actually control and even make more intelligent—a true fantasy. It is time, then, to reboot your system at Baffle Corporation, send out a cheery message that it is never going to crash, and log on to the Fantasy User Games of 2007.

Dream Center

Living on a remote island with a group of people who are depending on you is a Utopia that most CIOs will readily relate to—because you can only dream of such docile users. Fleeing from a recent data center fire, your tribe is stranded on a mysterious new island called Dream Center. The goal of the game is to nurture the tribe—the usually insufferable users of Baffle’s IT offerings—by coaching them on the basics of survival. They can become researchers, builders, scientists and even part-time programmers as they make decisions about unpredictable system faults.

As a solicitous, almost angelic CIO, your role is to help them explore and restore order and sanity to their new life. As the system grows and becomes more wobbly and capricious, your users become curious about their mysterious new island home and the secrets it holds. How will you lead your willing tribe?

The game is built to run in real-time, which means that your industrious users can carry on working in the background while you are busy attending seminars, making plans to get a bigger budget, or even when you are sleeping in a meeting. All you have to do is give them a push in the right direction. Don’t get too cozy, however, because leaving them alone too long without direction is sure to get Dream Center frozen when you return.

The game is designed as a series of puzzles. You must raise your users’ abilities, solve the puzzles, build up to specific tech levels and keep a watchful eye on your tribe as they become increasingly smarter (this is a fantasy, remember?).

Assigning users to do research on Dream Center will increase your tech points. This lets you unlock new abilities such as programming and junk data burial. But assigning too many users to tasks such as research may leave too few of your regular dummies to fill forms for work, and if work halts, most of the users will soon resign from boredom.

Each of the users has a personality with likes and dislikes that can be viewed from your user dashboard. Some may like damaging objects, which will be apparent as, with a watchful eye, you will notice the user pick out and delete a file for no reason. Such eccentric twists add to the attraction of the game and make each user seem annoyingly real.

As in real life, the game also has random events, such as viruses showing on the system. How you respond to these events will completely alter how the game progresses. For example, choosing to disable the ‘banana’ virus will restore a lot of data, but letting your ‘user research team’ keep it for study may increase your tribe’s brainpower level.

Neo Tinker

Neo Tinker is, as the name implies, about a quirky young user called Neo who has been making your life as a well-settled CIO quite miserable by constantly challenging your knowledge and questioning your IT policy statements. In this game (a fantasy, no less) you, the all-forgiving CIO, take control of this MTV generation creature that, frankly, is hard to categorize.

Neo is an oddball. He is madly resilient like a ball of super-rubber, but drawn with a scaly armored top. You roll Neo around each level to propel him through various obstacles—by disabling his Internet connection, for example, to make sure that an anti-virus program is run first. There is the occasional power-up to help move things along, as when you give him a new utility program as a reward for lessening your burden.

Everything has a lot of bounce in Neo, including the protagonist himself, who is in the prime of youth. When Neo is rolling, he speeds through the levels, bouncing off the department walls, like Spiderman. But to complicate matters, Neo is not always a ball—in some levels, he can begin as a star, which changes the way he moves through the environment, solving the immediate problems of nearby users and earning credits. In each of these forms, Neo can also become an air or a water version of himself, fixing data leaks or flushing out spyware. With each variant, Neo moves well through those spaces, but he must avoid sharp edges that could get him popped—such as a new retro-virus that even you cannot spot.

Playing Neo is like playing through a work of beautiful fantasy art. The objective is to make sure that Neo gets to enjoy the ride. This is your way of distracting him so that he makes his geeky presence a positive asset—and that means fewer new demands on your time and patience.

Dummy

Pure and simple, Dummy is a fun-filled game that is possibly more realistic than the others—even as a fantasy. Nearly everything about Dummy is whimsical—but sometimes eerily recognizable.

Dummy himself is a quirky and endearing protagonist—like a lemming, Dummy will walk unerringly straight ahead—and to his doom—if you, the inattentive CIO, let him. His behavior changes according to his mood—angry, happy or scared. You can alter Dummy’s moods by placing mood screens on the PC in front of Dummy. He will then assume the emotion that object confers. Scared Dummy will be too frightened to make any mistakes, and follow rules to the letter. Happy Dummy will bumble merrily along and share his password with anyone he meets. Angry Dummy storms around the network and connects to all kinds of questionable websites that may make your hair stand on end.

Dummy’s emotions—as in real life—are the key to the charm of the game. It helps that there is only one Dummy, but more importantly, you are responsible for his actions because what you do changes his emotional state. You may find that you don’t want to feed Dummy scary screens and hear his frightened yelp, but you have to get the job done.

You have to decide—would you rather have a happy or angry, but careless, Dummy, or a scared, but far safer (for you) Dummy? Timing and placement are everything, as setting up the correct chain reaction can be the difference between peace and mayhem for your users.