Sweatshop, a game sponsored by the UK's Channel 4, is one of the most interesting things to come out of gaming I've seen in a while. A simple premise: you're the foreman of a sweatshop, and have to meet quotas the owner imposes on you by hiring and hard-driving your laborers. You want to keep your job, right? And after all, they need the money too.
Uses very typical game mechanics simply but cleverly, in a way that makes things very uncomfortable to play. Hiring and firing various classes of employees, even kids, is from within a game-mechanics universe purely a calculation of how much they cost versus their output (hmm...). Gets even more uncomfortable as it gets into the higher levels and you're treating "worker loses a limb" as merely some negative points, a bump on the factory-management road to be contingency-managed.
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