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maybe make some change

by Aaron A. Reed profile

2011

Web Site

(based on 13 ratings)
2 reviews

About the Story

Inspired by the Maywand district killings in Afghanistan, 'maybe make some change' explores a frozen battlefield moment from six violently conflicting perspectives.


Game Details


Awards

Nominee, Best Use of Innovation - 2011 XYZZY Awards

Editorial Reviews

Rock, Paper, Shotgun
Never Say Never: Maybe Make some Change
It’s an interactive experience about an ongoing war but while it depicts horror it doesn’t preach or make a chest-thumping political statement. Instead, it tells a brutal and frankly upsetting story about confusion: the confusion of combat, of conflicting opinions and advice, of hatred and prejudice, and, on all sides, the confusion of agendas and loyalty.
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auntie pixelante
the flashing cursor of the traditional text adventure suggests limitless possibilities. but the frustration that many players discover upon typing a few phrases is that the game will only respond to those phrases, those modes of action, that the author has prepared the game for – that the author has authorized. but there are some situations, some places where a deceptively, frustratingly limited ability to act is in fact a concrete, unarguable reality. like afghanistan, under command of american military sergeants.
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Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling
Aaron Reed’s “maybe make some change” is a more polished, web-accessible release of the work that premiered at the IF Demo Fair as “what if im the bad guy”. Aaron is releasing it today on the ten-year anniversary of the beginning of our war in Afghanistan.
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GameSetWatch
Realities of War as a Text Adventure
Maybe Make Some Change is a browser-based text adventure based on the Maywand District killings in Afghanistan, in which a group of U.S. army soldiers allegedly formed a "kill team" last year that murdered unarmed Afghans and arranged the scenes to look like insurgent attacks.
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Member Reviews

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Number of Reviews: 2
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
This Machine * Fascists, December 20, 2012

maybe make some change is a rare thing: a political game that's powerful without being preachy, a heavily-multimedia piece that doesn't feel gimmicky, a limited-action/brutalised-protagonist piece that feels justified. Dealing with the Maywand District murders, it puts you in the shoes of Adam Winfield, one of the US soldiers convicted of the premeditated killing of unarmed Afghan civilians.

PAX East 2011. At the IF Demo Fair, Aaron Reed is showcasing an early version of maybe make some change, then titled what if im the bad guy. To me, the experience of play feels like an attempt to represent post-traumatic stress disorder. The game is played with headphones: the soundtrack is a garble of radio static, yells and gunfire, through which emerge fragments of speech clips about the Afghan conflict and the War on Terror. In the screen's background, behind the text, clips play from first-person shooters set somewhere in the Middle East. The central text is terse and repetitive, the verb-set narrow; interactivity feels distant, a struggle through a haze of stressful stimuli. As a piece of multimedia IF, it's astounding, leagues in advance of anything comparable; otherwise, it feels more like a theatre-of-cruelty experiential piece than a playable story. A woman stops playing, refusing to enter the commands that she feels the game's demanding of her: Aaron gives her a hug. "That's a totally legitimate response."

maybe make some change is a more meditative creature than what if im the bad guy, less easy to read as designed primarily to shock and brutalise the audience. The voices are chosen more for calm tones, the crackle of radio and gunfire is less jarring (the predominant sound is of an eerie air-raid siren), the video more blurry and ghostlike. The game doesn't try to overwhelm you with multiple stimuli anywhere near as much. The narrators use less racist language. The overall effect is less of a hammer-blow to the face: still disturbing, but allowing more focus on the underlying content.

The game's basic conceit is a cycling Rashomon story: the same vignette is told over and over again by different narrators, military and civilian, before and after the event: sergeants, a pro-war relative, a liberal blogger, an army trainer, your prosecutor. Each retelling takes only a single action before switching to the next; the initial feeling is that this is a one-turn game like Aisle. The same sentences are used in each retelling, but as well as tenses, many of the words shift between narrators -- most significantly, the word used for the Afghan man killed by the platoon, which varies from 'civvie' to 'insurgent' to 'fuckhead'.

The game focuses on the strained and difficult positions that the protagonist faces, about situations and interpretations framed by other people. Most actions are invalid, either denied by the narrators or self-censored by the protagonist. The central thread to the piece is obviously about the conflicting pressures and limited freedom of the protagonist. But there's more to the piece than the weary The Game Is Oppressive, The Player Is A Victim dynamic.

(Spoiler - click to show)The central point of gameplay is to unlock the full suite of available verbs, then apply them to the correct narrators in ways that might conceivably have helped. For me, this successfully threaded the needle between ironic nihilism and demanding perfect-world outcomes.
There's a definite element of disassociation or derealisation about gameplay, a post-desperation feeling of 'okay, I'm fucked anyway, let's try anything'. But it avoids becoming navel-gazing; the game does an excellent job of contrasting the various American-centric fantasy wars with the man in front of you, the ghost of Mullah Adahdad who you must confront again and again from different angles (contrast De Baron). Similarly, for a piece that's about different perspectives, it does a fine job of avoiding pure-subjectivity soup.

The multimedia features are largely lost in the non-browser version; not recommended.

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
A cyclical game about war and perspective, February 3, 2016

This game contains six or so cycling scenes that all tell the story of a single moment in a war. That moment is when an Islamic man rushes towards a soldier.

The voices all have their own ideas about what you should do; your buddies, your uncle, your diversity trainer.

As you play, you unlock some more verbs you can use. Each page has a picture from a FPS in the Middle East, with a red or green bar. You can change all bars to green eventually, but I wasn't able to unlock anything.

This game has strong profanity, and depicts a PTSD-inducing type scenario. I'm told there is audio, but I haven't tried it.

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