Dive Inside a Retro World in FACEMINER
Wristwork, the experimental game studio has released a demo of their 90s software thriller titled FACEMINER on Steam and Itch.io. The demo offers 45 minutes of gameplay of the dystopian narrative-driven simulation game. The developers also dropped a new trailer along with it, so go ahead and take a look right below.
FACEMINER is a thriller clicker narrative-driven management simulator that takes place in the techno-optimism era of the 90s. In the game, players have to build a biometric processing empire from scratch from vintage corporate software. All the while managing the hardware and software upgrades, warehouse, infrastructure, and crooked carbon offsetting schemes.
The game illustrates the mechanisms of data harvesting and machine learning model creation. The players must jump between internal bureaucracy and external market forces as they become a facial classification tycoon. Dive into a world of planetary-scale data management; storage shortages, server meltdowns, and global climate catastrophe. It also represents various ways the game can end on the road to data supremacy.
Alex Taylor, the studio lead wrote, “FACEMINER is the result of a research project examining the ecological impact of planetary-scale cloud computing, particularly when used for training AI models. The game incorporates exponential growth as a game mechanic to highlight the winner-takes-all nature of cloud computing, where datasets and the server farms housing them grow dramatically year-on-year in both their size and value. The game is an exploration of how the simulation game format can be used to simplify a complex topic that covers surveillance, AI, and the deployment of physical infrastructure at extreme scales.”