FOXX KEEDZ

Competing in Prix Etudiants

Synopsis

The player is in charge of smartphone factory's productivity, which he must maintain at certain level by scrolling the factory’s assembly lines to chase the workers who is not working and bringing them back to work by various touch gestures applied to their heads.

Description

The game is a critical casual game for mobile devices. It illustrates the paradox of “a snake that bits its tail” applied to numeric goods (namely entertainment) distributed via mobile platforms, whose expansion contributes to an exponential growth of production volumes. In other words, we play games on our phones, the games grow more and more evolved demanding more and more resources, demanding on it's turn more and more frequent hardware updates (we change phones now much more often then 5 years ago). Which creates a vicious circle of the industry constantly raising manufacturing demands in terms of volumes, technology, along with decreasing manufacturing costs. So high technology companies are in permanent race for raising their profits by lowering the production costs, whatever collateral damage this may cause in our society and in the developing countries where the outsourcing is done. So the game is staged in an outsourced manufacturing facility located in China of an USA high tech giant. The workers of very young age employed at the factory suffer from poor working conditions, extremely long work hours and quasi-military surveillance. These workers become part of the machinery, and they are treated as so. Their physical and mental faculties are strained with not enough sleep, no lunch pauses and the mechanistic repetitive work, which tends to cause nervous breakdowns and different deviant behaviors. These behaviors need to be tracked down and stopped in order to maintain the augmenting productivity rhythm of the factory. Which creates a vicious cycle of potentially no-win situation: as working conditions degrade and productivity augment, the workers, are less and less capable of being efficient enough to sustain the needed level of productivity, so the goal is potentially never reached: the maximum 100% productivity with minimum cost (highest exploitation degree with minimum investment). The player must scroll horizontally three (iPad, or 2 - iPhone) assembly lines looking for not working characters. Each line contains a number of production units of five workers and a guard who collects the assembled phones. The character that is not working (manifesting a certain type of mis-behavior) blocks the smartphone production, bringing down the score of his unit, and thus the overall score. The goal is to find maximum of not working characters in one minute (a game duration), bringing them back to work by various touch gestures, each being specific for a certain mis-behavior type of the workers (sleeping, crying, spinning head, yelling, hitting his head over the assembly line), in order to maintain certain level of productivity (score - different for each level) and pass to next level. *********************************************** CREDITS : FOXX KEEDZ – Mobile game for tablets Game design: Yulia Garcia-Skrebneva Production: Geneva University of Art and Design (HEAD – Genève), Master Media Design Computer programming: Pierre Rossel *** FOXX KEEDZ is part of the selection of video games curate Swiss Game Lounge exhibition, House of Switzerland United Kingdom 2012.

Screenshots

Video