Tag: TouchTone

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Finally, a typeface for all the words governments never say about surveillance

Surveillance has proven to be good fodder for games. In Touch Tone, a fictional yet fathomable government has deputized its citizenry to spy on their peers by solving puzzles and decoding encryption keys and codes to access private data. Nothing to Hide applies the logic to your every movement. It is a virtual Panopticon that requires your location, likeness, and actions to be visible at all times. Attempts at evasion are futile. Privacy is dead. There are no secrets anymore. These titles use video game mechanics to make the logic of surveillance explicit.  Their metaphors may even be too successful insofar as they…
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This week’s Playlist pick: TouchTone

Sign up to receive each week’s Playlist e-mail here! Also check out our full, interactive Playlist section. TOUCHTONE (iOS)  BY MIKENGREG  Greg Wohlwend and Mike Boxleiter are outraged at the erosion of privacy in the post-Snowden era. But rather than stepping up to a soapbox to rant about it, they made TouchTone: a puzzle game about a fictional government that crowd-sources surveillance of its citizens to protect the state. You bounce lasers around grids in the game’s increasingly tricky puzzles to gain access to emails and text messages that you then deem pertinent or not to the government’s fight against terrorism. It evolves…