Orwell: Keeping an Eye One You’s centrism recklessly justifies surveillance

Orwell: Keeping an Eye On You (Osmotic Studios, 2016) should not have to prove that mass surveillance is a public danger. Lifting the name of one of the 20th century’s most enduring authors, Orwell reverses the traditional dystopian power dynamic by casting the player as an investigator utilizing government software to snoop on anyone deemed potentially dangerous to the state. The setup is almost too clean to be proper satire, too on the nose to spark the outrage necessary to criticize what is fast becoming a common aspect of life.

Across the globe, authoritarian and democratic governments alike have begun adopting surveillance technology under the premise of reducing crime. Few of these programs have detailed exactly what data is being collected and how it is being used, but journalists have exposed many of the ways surveillance programs are only further stratifying power along class and racial lines. The dystopia is here. The role of fiction is no longer to provide warnings and speculation, it’s to interrogate our current reality.

Orwell released less than five years ago, but it is shocking how tame its surveillance state looks compared to how corporations and governments are currently operating (and in all likelihood, how they were spying in years prior). For starters, its system is structured to rely on human intuition rather than artificial intelligence. Data points are only considered after they’ve been entered by the investigator, after which supervisors are required to act upon them even to the point of self-incrimination.

Orwell, the program, is portrayed as an equalizing arbiter of justice. Only late in the game is the idea floated that the investigators are being watched too. But by that time the system has already been a resounding success. Lives have been saved and poorly coordinating terrorists are behind bars. If Orwell intended to question the merit of a nationwide police state, it accidentally proved the other side’s point. In this reality, the only reason to oppose surveillance is that it feels icky to have your phones tapped and your computers bugged.

But this isn’t how surveillance functions, or how these systems are run. Almost universally, modern surveillance technology is autonomous, relying on millions of data points to infer what the system believes a crime to be. This has enormous ramifications when the criminal justice system disproportionally targets people of color and the poor. Facial recognition has already been proven to possess the same biases as the system utilizing it, which is to say nothing of the exceptions granted to the wealthy and other members of power.

In Orwell, the terrorists are strictly ideological. They are educated, wealthy, white, heterosexual philosophers waging a war of ideas that almost by accident turns violent. These people exist, sure, but they are not the ones targeted by surveillance systems. That Orwell utterly ignores any possibility of racial and ethnic biases or the role history plays in policing, renders the whole game hollow and borderline optimistic. None of the characters the player investigates are innocent. Orwell is infallible, even if its implementation is unnerving.

The final bizarre and revealing element Orwell is how little it allows the player to deviate from what the system believes to be relevant. Play involves parsing documents and dragging relevant information over to profiles, but the only pieces of data which can be included are ones the game has highlighted in advance.

This begs the question as to why the player is there. Is it to catch the extremely rare instance of irrelevant data being entered into the system (ie. a person’s favorite color)? If so, why does the supervisor ultimately decide what is and isn’t relevant? Are they meant to be an impartial judge of the people being investigated? Why, then, does the system decide what information can be considered in a case?

Orwell tries to introduce safeguards into the surveillance operation but in doing so further highlights how futile these measures are in protecting from false imprisonment and machine bias. If we are beginning the conversation at “how do we ethically implement a mass surveillance system” we have already lost. It is not a question of how it can be done, it is a question of how we could allow it to happen. These systems exist. They are being used. Hell, even Facebook operates in ways indistinguishable from police surveillance and might be more successful for it.

Games like Orwell recklessly attempt to work backward from the lies used to justify surveillance, rather than recognizing that we have to fight the concept itself. It is a game decades too late to matter and does more to legitimize its target than it does to take them down.

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I reviewed Orwell on PC. It’s available via Steam for PC, Mac, and Linux.