This game appears to have been released last month, but I've just recently come across it via Infosthetics. The game, Torrent Raiders is Aaron Meyers' MFA project at USC's Division of Interactive Media, and it's a space-themed shooter based on the real-time content of a torrent. In it, you play as a copyright mercenary, flying among the packets of a torrent and shooting them to gather evidence about the IP addresses it moves through. Ultimately, when you gain enough evidence targeting a specific IP address, you can fire a bomb that collects a bounty -- apparently this signifies something like a lawsuit. The game is fascinating for its visualization of torrent information, and I really appreciate how smoothly the whole thing works, but the fact that you play as a bounty hunter (working, essentially, for those whom many would consider to be the bad guys) reflects an interesting design choice that reveals the game's rhetorical content.
I didn't read the instructions before I played, but overall I found Torrent Raiders pretty easy to figure out. What I didn't at first get, though, was the significance of all of the colors and shapes. For that I had to read the FAQ, which I probably should have done to begin with. Probably the most striking thing about the game, though, is that it depicts a torrent in real time, and you play the game by loading an actual torrent from your computer. In other words, Torrent Raiders is a functional bittorrent client that uses a game as its GUI.
Raiding a torrent. This is an episode of Lost, and the player is gathering evidence against the IP addresses connected to it.
Torrent Raiders contains a message, and though it is possible to get that across by explaining how it works, I think the significance of that message really only comes across if you play it. Basically, its about surveillance, and the game communicates that effectively and interestingly by placing the player in the position of the voyeur. This communicates how awkward or unethical the situation is because it invites you to feel guilty about the access you're granted to other people's information. Of course, the information is not private -- IP addresses can be traced to geographic locations easily enough -- but the fact that the game brings together three things about an actual person (their IP address, where they live, what they're doing) really communicates how exposed we are on a public network. Even if names are not attached, one can well imagine that it's the next step. The fact that the game play of Torrent Raiders connects to intellectual property raises some other important considerations.
A legal but less visually impressive torrent of
Façade. The crosshairs are centered on my actual location, even though the torrent is legal.
First, though bit torrent technology can be used for plenty of legal downloads, positioning torrent access as something to be monitored prefigures torrents as illicit. The one I used for the example above happens to be illegal, but did I download enough of someone else's IP to violate the law? Torrent Raiders suggests that I did, since one gains "bounties" on violators after collecting enough evidence against them. This is visualized as intercepted packets, suggesting that a handful of packets (a tiny fragment of the total property) counts as an infringement. Again, the point seems to be to criticize this practice and justification of surveillance, but moreover, the point is to make torrent users aware of the kind of surveillance that is already going on. Connecting it all with a visual, playable series of metaphors makes it an interesting and persuasive experience.
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