OpenRoad + Mod7
Two pioneering organizations, together at last.
OpenRoad is pleased to announce the acquisition of creative agency Mod7.
Read the letter from our Principal Using games as a medium for sparking ideas and social debate.
We made this project for the most-demanding, chintziest, least-emphatic client we've ever had to work with—ourselves.
Challenges
It was close to Christmas and time once again for Mod7 to release our annual holiday initiative. And, since we're usually pretty busy with clients and projects, once again we left things to the very last minute, with only a couple weeks left to pull something great together and get the distribution machine working. But what to make? All we knew was it had to be funny, original, and maybe a little irreverent. Oh, and good. Ready? Go!
Process
After rehashing the typical holiday brainstorm ideas that we seem to come up with every season—a pop-up card, a clever Twitter experiment, a snowball-throwing game, maybe something involving bad Christmas sweaters and a certain box store photography studio—we decided to draw inspiration from world events at the time. And our love of 8-bit game graphics.
The Occupy movement was in full swing, colliding with the consumerist frenzy of the holiday season. So naturally, we created a game that celebrated first-world consumerism at Christmas time, allowing players to acquire wealth by any means necessary so they could join the "1%". (Because, really, what could be a better gift than the means to skyrocket into a new tax bracket?)
We knew our audience—mainly our clients and partners—was busy. So we designed the game to be moderately challenging—but not too challenging—and playable from start-to-finish in about three-to-five minutes. Low-skill players could get the gist and the laugh, but those with a competitive streak could improve their skills to rise up the ranks.
The real-time leaderboard calculated the player's wealth and percentage-ranking based on the total "gross domestic product" of the game's rudimentary ecosystem. Put simply: the more you played, the more you made, the more you made, and the harder it became for others to share in the growing wealth. We called it a "Corporate Greed Simulator".
Results
While the impetus for the game was blatant self-promotion for our business (oh, the irony), we were proud to add to the discourse around consumption and fairness at a time when it would resonate most. Most of our clients loved it, a few decided to refrain from comment, but in the end we did what we set out to do: spark some intelligent thought and conversation around the issues of the day using the digital medium.
And, by the way, it's a pretty fun game, too. Happy Holidays.
