While Rob Ford occasionally made headlines for comments like saying “Oriental people work like dogs” or being arrested for drunk driving and marijuana possession, no day was more devestating to him than May 16, 2013.
That was when US site Gawker reported that its editor, John Cook, saw a video of what looked like Rob Ford smoking crack. Shortly thereafter, Toronto Star reporters Robyn Doolittle and Kevin Donovan reported that they also saw the video, three times each.
What followed was a long string of incidents in which Ford kept silent for a week, then emphatically saying “I do not use crack cocaine.” Then there were departures and firings of top city hall staff, and most recently a Toronto police raid on the house where the infamous video may have been stored, assuming it exists.
While questions about the video are unlikely to subside, there is now an Android game called “Stay Mayor,” developed by Extra! Extra! Games.
In the game, delivered in “heartbreakingly stunning 2D graphics,” you play as Toronto’s embattled mayor. The object is to collect $300,000 cash to buy the video of Ford smoking crack before “the Squawker” buys it first.
The mechanics of the game are simple. With one thumb, you move Ford up and down the field as you avoid crack pipes and camera people. With the other thumb, you can throw footballs to clear people out of your way. Every time you collide with obstacles, it slows down Ford, and too many slowdowns will lose you a life as the media tramples Ford.
The game will likely make Torontonians (and really anyone familiar with the scandal) laugh, with its references to Gawker and City TV and some of Ford’s past embarrassments caught on video.
The mechanics are a little flawed, however. Moving Ford up and down the screen is at best imprecise—it’s hard to tell how much pressure is needed when moving your thumb up and down. Several times I went up or down farther than expected and ended up colliding with an obstacle I thought I’d avoided.
The experience is also pretty repetitive—once you collect the $300,000, that’s about it in terms of fun. There’s little reason to go back, especially because you can collect all of the money and laugh at the game’s in-jokes in fewer than five minutes.
Finally, the app still has its problems. The developers have said they’re working on making it work for more smartphones and tablets, but yesterday, on my second time loading the app, the app crashed and I had to re-start it.
“Stay Mayor” is part of a trend in the last few years of what Ian Bogost calls “newsgames” in his book of the same name. Bogost explains that unlike written news stories, video games “simulate how things work by constructing models that people can interact with.” Bogost calls this “procedural rhetoric.”
Barnabas Wornoff, one of the developers at Extra! Extra! Games, previously developed a Flash game based on the Ikea monkey story.
