The overlap in intended audience between Empire and The Hunger Games Adventures is probably vanishingly small. Both are found on Facebook but, in tone and in content, aim themselves completely different ways. It seems unlikely that very many players would approach both for long enough to realize that the two are, in every way that counts, the same game.
The former is a semi-autobiographical game following the life story of Jay-Z, from poor kid in the projects to successful rapper to wealthy mogul with a wide array of profitable investments. The latter is a book and movie tie-in, bringing a dystopic future out from the pages of YA literature and out onto the screen. One is about creating an empire; the other is about tearing one down. And yet, despite their stated differences, the two play out in extraordinarily similar ways.
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On top of the microtransaction-friendly mechanics, in each game, lies the skin of a story. One takes place in a primarily black, poor neighborhood of Brooklyn. The other takes place in a heavily white, rural, Appalachian-inspired future. The two environments are as disparate as possible and yet in many ways, present exactly the same challenge: daily survival, and a rise beyond it, as a member of an underprivileged class.
Sadly, however, the most glaring similarity between the two games is this: they are terrible at telling their stories.
Neither Empire nor The Hunger Games Adventures can put the player character into a compelling position. We are not Jay-Z; we are not Katniss Everdeen. We are not the singular hero on whom the story is modeled, and we can never climb our way to a satisfying climax. We are a side character, modeled after our own real-world person and clumsily inserted into someone elseâs story.
Games on Facebook are, by necessity, always about you. They are about your avatar, and more importantly they are about your purchases, your score, your accumulated items, your achievements, and your friends. And, in order to succeed, the game needs the player to be exploiting that very âself.â
They need you to be you. They need you to be telling your friends. They need you posting to your wall, bringing in new blood, and wanting upgrades. They need to you to want to come back, to feel comfortable, to feel participatory.
But the best and most challenging art, art that would make a player truly aware of how socioeconomic factors and race truly influenced Shawn Carterâs life, isnât comfortable. A meaningful story about Katnissâs complex relationship to violence and survival isnât something you can easily level up and share in incremental stages with your buddies.
The games that tell stories about a single character, by necessity and by definition, focus on a single character. The Hunger Games, as books and as a film, draw our attention because we follow Katniss and the people that matter to her. The real-life biography of Jay-Z is interesting because of his unlikely rise to a position of fame and fortune. Dropping us into a world in the role of nameless sidekick could be interesting if the games were about the worlds, but they arenât. Both Empire and The Hunger Games Adventures are built and sold on the premise of following in an iconâs pre-established footsteps.
There are ways that a game could tell a compelling, meaningful story about the world in which The Hunger Games takes place, but Facebook isnât it. A modular, fragmented social experience designed to keep drawing in more players over time isnât it.
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Our narrative game franchises, the games that tell the deepest, richest stories, donât always succeed as well as theyâd like. But an Assassinâs Creed, Uncharted, or Mass Effect still puts us in control of the most interesting character on the screen, the character whose story the game is designed to tell. And in many ways, we give ourselves over to the character as we play. If Commander Shepard visited Ilos, I visited Ilos. If Ezio explored Constantinople, I explored Constantinople. If Nathan Drake mowed down a hundred mooks today, I mowed down a hundred mooks today.
But on Facebook, we never truly inhabit another skin; we never look into another soul. We pile clothes and colors on top of ourselves and play dress-up for a while, with no true hard work required. The games arenât terrible because theyâre browser-based or low-tech; plenty of successful games are technically undemanding. Theyâre terrible because in the midst of the most personalized, self-centered corner of the world we inhabit, we are nominally pretending to be someone else. Thatâs just not a combination that works.
