Mary Flanagan announces a new game from her Tiltfactor lab, created in conjunction with the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) Game Design and Development program. The game, Layoff, is billed as "an examination of the current financial scandal."

The game is more or less a Bejeweled clone in which players align similar workers to lay them off. There are a few important additions, however, that makes the adoption of this common puzzle design more apt. The most striking is a little biographical blurb, presumably somewhat generative, that personalizes each of the workers. It's an effective way to characterize. Another is the unemployment office at screen bottom; workers don't disappear like jewels when laid off, they queue up, solemn, at the unemployment office.

All that notwithstanding, I found the rule preventing "suits" from being laid off to be forced. The idea that the white-collar is unaffected by the current economic downturn seems disingenuous, even if there are portions of it (AIG anyone?) who are surely acting in their own interest alone.