Wednesday 29 August, 2018

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.

Good job Morgan! While you touch on a lot of aspects of the game one common theme throughout your gamelogs was the players ethical dilemma of favoring the public, the station, or the player character themselves. You’ve got a lot of good stuff here to explore with your OPA.