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Aug 31st, 2018 at 00:57:50 - This is the Police (PC) |
At this point I've been given the choice between siding with Varga or Sand, which means working with a mafia family regardless. I already made the choice to work with Sand towards the beginning of the game, when it seemed I could either work off Jack's friend's debt to them or let the friend and his family die. At the time, this seemed like an obvious choice. Protect the friend, pay off the mafia somehow. Jack's already into some shady dealings, so throwing a little side business with the mafia in there didn't seem like anything crazy. Never have I been so wrong. The Sands want me to use the station's resources and officers to help them with some of their shady business. I figured maybe they just wanted some money or some influence in the government, but they ask me to turn a blind eye to crimes and help them out with their own criminal dealings. I've ignored these demands when it seems like civilians may be at risk, and so far I've only received disappointed calls from Mr. Sand, but I worry that he'll soon make me decide between putting Jack and his family in danger or refusing to send officers to protect civilians. And now, to make matters worse, I've got a whole other mafia family in the mix. Yet, somehow, Varga seems worse than Sand. Varga hasn't done anything to me or put me in any tight spots yet, but he still seems less trustworthy. Maybe it's the way he broke social norms to speak with Jack when they met, interrupting Jack when he was about to be sick. Maybe it's the way that Varga sent a basket of oranges to Jack's house the next day with no note, which seemed like almost a threat - A warning that he knows where Jack lives and won't hesitate to track him down. Either way, something about Varga's behavior makes him seem worse than Sand. I guess I'll find out soon enough if either of them is really more immoral of a mafia leader, though.
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Aug 30th, 2018 at 01:09:41 - This is the Police (PC) |
It's impressive to me that I'm so invested in this game now despite some obvious flaws in its UI. It's already been well worth the $3.74 (Thanks, Steam) for the moral dilemmas it provides. Tonight, the decision to send some cops to a low-level incident left the station short-staffed when two major incidents occurred. This resulted in the first police deaths I've seen in the game. They're presented factually - Offender escaped. Officers dead. Civilians dead. And then, without any time for the guilt to set in (Had I not sent so many officers to the simple crime these ones may still be alive) I'm given the choice to file the paperwork for their deaths or mislead city hall and keep their paychecks for myself. Nobody's going to miss those paychecks, but it's my own fault they died, so it still feels wrong to keep their money. I know full well that I'm too attached to these characters. Despite just being a name and a photograph to me, these were higher level officers who had been at my station since the beginning of the game. I had carefully selected which calls they should go on to safely level them up. One of them had earned 2 stripes. Neither had so much as called in sick. Working to improve them for so long and losing them both on one bad call made their modest death announcement hold more guilt than I had thought it would. And, of course, I wonder how much of this emotional attachment can be attributed to how much I relate to Jack as the chief of police. I, too, manage a very understaffed, underrated group. I also have to call people in on their free days and reject requests for time off and put pressure on people who have already pulled more than their weight. Fortunately for me, my situation is temporary and I'll soon have more employees to take the pressure off of the group, while Jack experiences increasingly regular decreases in funding and mandatory layoffs. I'm pushing his small staff beyond their limits while expecting them to put their lives on the line, making uncomfortable decisions and being the bearer of bad news when other forces make demands for various things at the station. Though I don't get to interact with the officers much, there are small cues to indicate that morale is low at the station. Officers are tired, they're going into dangerous situations without enough backup, they're being asked to do questionable or downright immoral things to appease City Hall and the local mob, and it's taking its toll. The more officer the officers are put through, the more their performance suffers. This lowers approval of the station, which causes City Hall to take away funding and lay off officers, which in turn puts officers under more pressure and restarts the cycle. The ethical dilemmas are piling up. Do I put the staff under pressure and let the community down by following City Hall's demands to suppress peaceful protests and fire all officers of color, or risk losing funding and laying off more officers and leaving the community unprotected by disregarding my orders? Do I allow or even facilitate crimes for the Sand family or do I put Jack's family at risk by refusing their demands? Do I risk getting Jack in trouble by engaging in theft, bribery, and embezzlement, and more than that, does it depend at all if a civilian will be hurt by my actions or if it will only affect greedy City Hall? Does that change depending on whether I use that money to protect Jack, possibly by throwing innocents under the bus instead, or use it to try and improve the resources available for the station?
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Aug 29th, 2018 at 21:21:04 - This is the Police (PC) |
This game was a little tough to start because, as much as I love a good narrative experience, there's a lot of sitting around waiting for the characters to finish speaking in all of the cutscenes and I wasn't really catching all of the context of their conversations at first. I'm glad I stuck with it, though, because once I finally got into the gameplay the ratio of play:cutscene made things very interesting. In fact, I got so caught up that checked my phone and realized I only had 6 hours before I needed to wake up and go to class! It's not often that a game with mechanics this simple engages me so quickly, but the moral choices really got me interested. The main character experiences a lot of dilemmas in his daily life, figuring out how to assign cops to various cases or emergencies all while dealing with hiring and firing and all the other difficulties of running a police station. So far I'm still in the early stages and the UI clearly indicates that more daily tasks will interrupt me in the future, creating further issues of where to allocate my attention and resources given a limited amount of time. This doesn't feel forced or anything, it just highlights what seems like the daily struggle of being a police chief and the kinds of decisions they might have to make. I currently have a lot of less experienced officers, for example, and a lot of my decisions about which officers I can send on a call revolve around the tradeoffs between sending an inexperienced cop because they'll gain experience and overall become a better officer, but by sending them instead of someone more equipped to handle emergencies I'm putting them and any other officers with them in danger. This only gets more complicated when I have a very limited number of officers on duty and right after deciding to send my only free experienced officers on one call another more urgent one comes in and I'm left with only inexperienced cops. Do I send them and have them get hurt, die, or quit? Do I protect them but ignore the call and let the citizens suffer? Yet, in reality, this situation seems to me like the false dilemma situation we discussed in class. If my higher level officers are heading out to a crime and a worse one occurs, would I really not call them and ask them to go handle the more dangerous issue? It hardly seems that to send or not to send my inexperienced officers is my only option. There are other experienced officers out there, too - Maybe whatever they're dealing with is low priority enough that they can let someone off with a warning, hurry it up, or let the less experienced officers relieve them so they can leave for the more dangerous crime. There's more than two options, but having those complex options would increase the difficulty of playing (and of creating the game!) and probably would make it more like work and less like fun. There's a reason we enjoy sims - They take the hardest or most mundane aspects out of the game and leave us with fun challenges. A sim without false dilemmas and other methods of simplification wouldn't be a fun sim, it would just be reality.
This entry has been edited 1 time. It was last edited on Aug 31st, 2018 at 00:58:55.
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