By Laura Vidal
Protests against a multi-pronged national crisis in Venezuela have seen citizens pour onto the streets in their thousands, but anti-government sentiment has also found other less typical outlets.
In June and July this year a group of programmers and digital culture enthusiasts gathered to design collaboratively a series of video games focusing on the Venezuelan crisis. Thus was born#VzlaCrisisJam, a game jam brainstorming session to create computer games that reflected the nature of the crisis.
The first game jam in Venezuela took place in the capital Caracas in 2009 and around 80 online video games have been made through similar events.
The organizers of the politically-themed Crisis Game Jam said:
Among the creations of the #VzlaCrisisJam, that can be viewed here, is Faces of the Guaire (the Guaire river flows through Caracas). The setting is the day of the April 19 protest that took place on the Francisco Fajardo highway, adjacent to the river. Protesters were famously forced to jump into the water to escape from tear gas attacks on that day.
Another game created by the jam was The Economy of an Arepa, the typical Venezuelan dish, in which players run a virtual restaurant and need to deal with the rapid soaring prizes of products (due mostly to inflation) and the difficulties of finding them. Two of the games, Reality Revealed and Vzla2017?, a game that recreates the protests and the represion; and finally, Feria centers on a character: a soldier that needs to keep the order in front of a group of people asking for food and medicine:
A game prototype where you, as the military, must distribute the basic products among the population. But there are some things you most certainly cannot distribute. Click the military with the mouse and drag back to launch the product. Right click to invert the next product you’ll launch with the one after. Click on the queue to send repression.
In total, the jam produced 15 blueprints, of which six can be played online and nine can be downloaded and played on Windows. The goal is to offer different looks inside of a crisis that affects different parts of the population in a wide diversity of ways that are not always understood for the different parts in conflict.
According to one of the promoters of the project:
This article was originally published on Rafael Uzcáteguis blog but has been translated and republished by Global Voices under Creative Commons 3.0.
Featured Image Credits: MARQUINAM via VisualHunt / CC BY-NC-ND