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Alex Jansen: The big thing was how completely it misrepresented the game we’ve made. That’s what completely shocked me, it just seemed like complete misinformation that I thought would be very quickly corrected—but then what’s frightening was how the same information was propelled further, to the point of people getting incredibly strong opinions without ever actually having played the game.The whole idea was to use satire as a tool in blatantly over the top scenarios. But then we layer in all these real world issues. The audience we’ve been engaging with—18-34—is statistically the worst engagement for voter turnout and whatnot. As you start playing, between levels, you get these radio segments that anchor back into the real world and then people are realizing, wow, this is actually going on, these pipeline issues are happening right here in Canada.I really believe that should be obvious to anyone who bothers to play it. Pipe Trouble is so accessible you don’t even need to be a gamer, per se. It’s so simplistically designed. So it’s a great vehicle to deliver the news in a creative way.
That’s exactly why we took on a very, very familiar gameplay mechanic. You can go back to puzzle board games like Water Work. Then there’s Pipe Mania, which is on every copy of Windows 3.1. That’s the formula. It’s just such a familiar mechanic that you can reach such a broad audience, and then it’s about layering real world issues onto a familiar mechanic. It’s really very simple for anyone to pick up.
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I would have loved if most coverage were: one paragraph about the game and then move directly into the real world.Yes, and there are real issues. We just ran a piece about the community censorship surrounding Enbridge’s Line 9 Reversal.
When the media storm hit, we got blindsided with completely inaccurate information about what the actual game is. Now a lot of the talk has been trying to clarify complete misinformation. It’s been brutal. The early reporting was you know, about it being a pipeline bombing game, which it’s not. The Toronto Sun called it: a “Blow up the pipeline game.”So there’s all this misinformation going out there that’s slowly being corrected. An article would be posted online at like 11:00AM with all this misinformation and then it would be edited at 7:00PM to include modifications. But no one is coming forward and addressing the modifications, so the complete misinformation that led to people having incredibly strong opinions is now very hard to have people back down off of.How do you feel about the energy industry now, compared to when you first started development?
The game looks at gas specifically. One of the things I flagged when I did a half hour long correction interview with the Sun—in which nothing was quoted, because I think what they were expecting was an extreme left wing response and that’s not what I was giving—is that I’m torn, my house is gas heated. I’m living in a country where we’re doing incredibly well because of our energy industry and our natural resources. But then you start to hear about these safety concerns and it starts to raise concerns around how we’re extracting the resources, and making sure we’re doing everything with a mind to the future. And that’s where it’s not in any way anti-industry, but it’s just making sure that all Canadians are informed with what’s going on. That was really the goal.
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It’s a feature doc called Trouble in the Peace. That's where a lot of the stuff in the game comes from. People asked: "Why are you including the bombings?" Well that's central to the film and central to the story the film explores.It looks at a fifth generation farmer in the Peace River Region who is struggling with farming as a way of life. He's subsidized by big oil and gas, he has a well on his property, so he's in this tough position because around the same time his daughter was born there was a massive leak. And then he had a two-headed calf that was born on his property. He's convinced that the leak and the cow are related, and so it starts to raise these larger concerns around safety and also around the environment and watching the community change. Then the documentary hones in on him and his response to everything. It starts to look at the community as a whole and some of their concerns, but the entire backdrop to the film is this series of bombings [that happened in B.C.]. So all the things we chose to represent in the video game are all real world issues.How do you feel about TVO pulling the game from their website?
It was very frustrating but I completely understand. I understand their decision but it was definitely frustrating. At that point it went from the Ontario Premier being kind of blindsided with a question about our game in a media scrum, to the Premier of British Columbia and Alberta also weighing in, then you had Ontario’s Minister of Education… TVO was under a lot of pressure on their side.
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