Not For Broadcast

Not For Broadcast is a propaganda simulation set in the control room of a 1980s-styled TV studio, where a new political party has just won a landslide election and the regular editor of the National Nightly News has, conspicuously, done a runner. You are the studio janitor, suddenly promoted to the editing booth, and the country's tumultuous descent into totalitarianism will be broadcast through whichever camera angles and ad breaks you choose to send live.

The gameplay loop is busy and tactile. You pick the live shot from multiple cameras, censor troublesome content with a beep button, adjust the audio, slot in ad breaks, juggle a broadcast room that is occasionally trying to electrocute you or overheat, and steer the public's perception of whatever's happening on screen — sportsmen with drinking problems, scientists trapped in Dante's Taint, suspicious new corporate executives, and a brand-new government that very much wants you to make them look benevolent. Your editorial decisions translate directly into the country's political trajectory.

A parallel domestic storyline runs alongside the broadcast work. You and your spouse navigate the consequences of the country's political shift on your own family — whether to help a sibling flee the country illegally, how to feel about your son spending time with the activist group Disrupt, whether to afford grandmother's life-saving treatment or take advantage of the government's new Transition Centres. Fourteen distinct endings respond to the cumulative weight of these decisions. The game features over 42 hours of full-motion video — a Guinness World Record — and the live-action footage carries the absurd-yet-uncomfortable tonal balance that the script is doing.