I hope they’re hamburgers
It’s almost that time again. Time for the great British-and-also-Northern-Irish-people to filter in to the polling stations, tick little bits of paper, and then have no change ever come about as a result. It’s time for all of the politicians to eat a small child, whip their masks off, and join the commune of molemen buried deep underground once more. That’s right: it’s almost Election Day. You can smell the faint aroma of shit, as news channels are bricking it at the prospect of having to cover other news for once.
The folks over at the National Video Game Arcade in Nottingham are doing something kind of weird to mark the occasion. If you head over there on Thursday you’ll be able to watch Natural Election throw what I assume are hamburgers at each other, let them fight a bit, and hopefully see who’ll win the election.
The game itself is pretty clever. It uses Twitter to figure out how much people are talking about each of the parties (Conservative, Labour, Liberal Democrats, Greens, Plaid Cymru, UKIP and SNP for you not-UK people), generating a House of Commons based off of it.
The more people are tweeting about a party, the more seats that party will have in Parliament, and the more damage they can do to the other parties. More emotive tweets will result in bigger roughhousing hamburgers too, resulting in scenes that look like they’ve been ripped out of Attack on Titan when a giant descends from the heavens and utterly wreck shit.
Plus it’s all presented as a news report, with a smart camera to focus in on the chaos and make everything look a bit more hectic.
We’ve added two new parties to our #GE2015 game as well as @Abengoshis‘s smart camera. #GameDev #Unity3D pic.twitter.com/hQiccZxGY0
— Jordan Bird (@Jordan94jb) May 4, 2015
At the NVA there will also be a gavel button with which visitors can hit and call order to the proceedings, violently flinging the hamburgers-MPs to the sides of the room.
Unfortunately, Thursday at the NVA will be the only time you’ll ever have the chance to play Natural Election, as the developers Hitpoint Games aren’t planning on giving it a wider release.
But still, be glad there is a game that reads your tweets about David Cameron’s forehead and makes a hamburger out of it. I don’t think they’re meant to be hamburgers, but Hitpoint never actually explained to me what they were when I got to play a work-in-progress build of it. So until proven otherwise, they’re hamburgers.
