channel surfing
Channel Surfing
by Mike Vollmer
Channel Surfing is a satire of a manipulative, dumbed-down
corporate media and its effect on political discourse. After some parser
struggles, the player is sucked into a TV and forced to take part in a
stupid quiz show ("Cat or Dead Cat"), a jungle-island "reality" show
("Ultimate Island"), and a political press conference. In the latter, he
is wired up to a machine that reveals the effect of his soundbites on
his approval ratings in real-time. Then the world ends, or something.
As a satire, it sounds a lot better than it is. To be honest, this is
a pretty weak effort. The writing needs at least one more pass to
include some inventiveness, and another to include some jokes. Contrary
to
what you might have heard, the current world situation does not satirise
itself. It's not sufficient merely to point out, as one character does,
that media companies make money off shit TV &mdash you have to
illustrate this idea in a funny and interesting way, and "Ultimate
Island" just won't do. Too often, such as in the strategist's speech,
the game turns into a kind of preachy blog entry, leaving the impression
that the author is trying to foist his essays on a
captive audience. And as for the jokes that appear: stuff like "a
Republican congressman is lobbying for the use of the Flinstones as
educational material" is filler, not a punchline; and the idea of "Cat
or Dead Cat" might work as a skit in something more substantial, but as
the meat of a work, no.
More fatal than all these problems is that the satire is too
self-satisfied. It begins from the conviction that the author is right
about everything, and proceeds from there.
The author hasn't really engaged with the issues at hand: to be blunt,
he doesn't know enough about reality TV, and the mechanisms it uses, to
satirise it effectively. The TV director claims that
"All this is just a haphazardly stitched together attempt at
entertainment by someone unable to express himself in an understandable
way."
but the scary thing about reality TV is that precisely the opposite is
true. Reality and other trash shows and serials are very carefully
composed by people who are masters at manipulating their audience; with
a few edits, they can bring out whatever emotional response they like;
they can turn days of dull footage into an hour of compulsive viewing.
Trash TV, whatever one might say about it, is much more sophisticated
and compelling than its satirised version here. It sucks in a lot of
people who are well aware of how they are being manipulated, but still
can't draw their eyes away. A better satire might have played with this
fact, instead of sneering at "people who watch anything as long as it
distracts them from their miserable existence". Mike Vollmer, it is to
be
supposed, does not count himself among the latter group of people, and this is the
game's key problem. Real satire is animated by rage at the world the
author lives in, but Channel Surfing is animated by contempt for
a world the author feels comfortably superior to. This leaves an
unfunny taste, which only adds to the unfunniness of the material.
So much for the writing. The gameplay of Channel Surfing is
simply unacceptable: I'm not the only one to have had severe problems
getting the remote control to work, and that isn't the only
guess-the-verb instance in the game. These problems would have been
found by any proper beta tester. It's not sufficient to give a
walkthrough to 3 guys on 4chan and let them play the game. Before you
release something in the comp, get some testers who know what they're
doing.
Rating: 2
Comp08 index