Humour

Vendor bender games

T A Balasubramanian on the games that give a CIO great delight—how to ward off persistent IT sales vendors

While you have enjoyed all the ups and downs of playing the Top 5 CIO games and then settled for some idealistic dreaming as you waded through the Fantasy User games, there is probably a nagging suspicion that you would have been harboring by now in the back of your mind. What could be missing?

With a flash of insight, you realize that your gaming instincts have not yet been unleashed upon the world of slick IT product vendors and their devilish strategies to part you from your budget. Yes, these are the same persistent, relentless gangs of polished marketing mavens in their neat suits and colorful ties who try to persuade you that your life is incomplete without their latest generation of gizmo or the most current ‘solution,’ to transform your humdrum corporate existence.

You have always wanted to find weapons and retaliatory moves to counter the sales samurai warriors as they bombarded you with their presentations and pitches, chirpy hype and endless sermons. Now, you have the means to fight back.

These are the marketing one-upmanship games that let you take charge of the remote and control the selling and bickering cycle as you always wished you could. As you play these thrilling games, you get to be the mythical CTO who actually decides what the IT environment should be in your little corner of the corporate galaxy. So stretch your feet and lean back as you power up your system, put all the vendor calls on hold for the day and tune in to the Vendor Bender Games of 2007.

Vanishing Vendor

As a CIO or CTO, you are subjected to an array of vendor assault strategies, and it is only fair that you should be able to fight back, and what better way can you do that than by equipping yourself with maneuvers and weapons that make vendors vanish?

Using your Hype Resistance engine, gravity and force is accurately portrayed in this addictive game that involves confronting waves of slimy IT vendors (in the form of cartoons) and putting them back into their own briefcases. The objective is to throw as many briefcases (stuffed with vendors) out of your office as you can. While it sounds easy, there are also obstacles, such as revolving platforms and vaporware sellers—who look normal, but are difficult to pin down. Touching any of these ghostly vendors results in damage and the eventual freezing of your IT resources.

The story is basically that you are assaulted by vendors in IT space and are desperate to get out. To do this, you have to lure the pesky vendors stealthily back into their respective briefcases even as they continue with their sales pitching, one after the other. You use a green beam to hook into one of the vendor’s arms and try to push him (or her) towards a briefcase. If you are not careful, you might not be able to hold the vendor down, and if you move him too fast, his momentum can actually start to pull you into the zone of seduction and you will end up buying his product.

There are a variety of obstacles to prevent you from getting to the exit, such as giant advertising blobs that either rotate or move back and forth, and freebies and discounts that pop up randomly on your screen. There are also fans (hyper-users) who walk in and blow you towards the walls, and exploding vendors who can blast a way into your office through walls. They can immobilize your Hype Resistance engine, either by hitting your directly or by blasting you towards a wall. There are three difficulty levels, Suspect, Prospect, and Red Hot. Some of the levels allow you to get three hits before being frozen, but some levels allow unlimited hits.

The Survivor

This is a high-octane shooter game for CIOs, combining non-stop action with great visuals. The story is about collecting brochures and CDs (which are actually concealed weapons for self-defence) to escape from an IT exhibition called TOGGLE (Techno Over-exposition of Geeks and Gizmos for Lazy Enterprises) and a hall full of alien mutant IT vendors.

As a desperate CIO looking for the exit gate, you must defeat a certain quota of alien vendors in Firing Range mode. As the stages progress, more vendors keep getting added from nearby booths. The Firing Range is a blend of the Campaign mode and Survival mode. In Campaign mode, you are exposed to a series of marketing pitches which gets you running around for cover. In Survival mode, you are button-holed by a mutant vendor, and you wait until he pauses in his talk to clobber him with your brochure collection. Certain stages contain certain hidden weapons and you have to skillfully use them to survive. In one stage, there is a tea-trolley that goes back and forth across some tracks—you can use the tea to distract vendors while you run.

Speaking of enemies, the alien mutants in this game range from mutant gizmo girls with flash drive gifts to hulking beasts with gigabytes of presentations strapped to their fronts. There are also demo dragons breathing fire in corners and video-guns to contend with. The best tool to defeat an alien mutant vendor is to flap a brochure in the face—but all brochures do not work the same way.

Silicon Raja

Every CTO dreams of being the monarch of his domain, and the last thing he wants is to be subject to hegemony from any IT vendor, right? As Silicon Raja, you play the role of a princely CIO defending your data center, Open Source Island, from becoming a banana republic under the domination of the Godzilla-size vendor called Microshop Corporation and its army of Mista Monkeys—who try to conk you on the head with coconuts.

As we all know, a ‘banana republic’ is a small country which has been monopolized by an international corporation, so that the whole country is geared to use that company’s product, often a tropical fruit crop such as bananas. You do not want this to happen to your island.

So, you must defend your home from this corporate takeover at all costs. Smack those monkeys before they smack you! Fortunately you have a unique weapon—a bull-dozer called Leanox—and several helpful friends such as Gnu, the coconut eating beast, and Hacker, the friendly coconut cracker.

When the monkey attacks intensify, Hacker and Gnu form a team that sets up a series of defence towers on your island. Thereafter, you issue a proclamation of freedom from the monkeys that touches on four aspects: the freedom to run Open Source island as a playground for any purpose; the freedom to study how the island works, and adapt it to your needs; the freedom to make copies of your island so you can help your neighbors; and the freedom to improve your island, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits.

Each of these becomes a tower that the monkeys cannot climb into, even as they desperately try to bring it down by pelting it with coconuts. It is wishful thinking again, but then, isn’t that what games are all about?