PrimeEvil

Your role is that of a new employee at an Amazon warehouse.  Your job is sorting  packages.  You are paid by commission.   Money earnt is spent on life's essentials.

The aim of the game is to try and last a week in the workplace  -  if you are successful you are furloughed and earn a rest.   There are pitfalls along the way - you can fail to earn enough money for food or rent and therefore face eviction or hunger.

Profit is the company's main aim and time is money.  Workers are fined for any mistakes made on the production line and are even expected to take bathroom breaks at their work station.

As an extra stress your co-worker is taken ill, and you must either help him or take over and do his job for him.  This doubles your workload and pressure.

Once your shift is over it's time to return home,  and with the money earned at the warehouse, you must pay your rent and purchase basic items such as food.

I was drawn to developing a project like this to highlight Amazon's poor treatment of their workforce and generally bad in-house practices .  Ranging from calling their warehouses ' fulfillment centers' - a deceptively friendly term for a brutal production line, to examples of employees being to afraid to leave their station to visit the bathroom.  

More recently, when coronavirus became a pandemic,  Amazon risked their workers health many times over to fulfill Amazon Prime orders.  An example given here is of German warehouse workers striking due to poor health provisions during the pandemic https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=newssearch&cd=&cad=rja&ua...)  Or Amazon's punishment of any employee that speaks out against its labour practices (https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/17/amazon-worker-claims-company-wrote-her-up-for-to...).

I took inspiration from the game Papers Please by Lucas Pope (https://papersplea.se/) as he expressed his frustrations with immigration and countries foreign policies. With a simple gameplay loop of checking people and their documents. PrimEvil is very much inspired by the gameplay as well as events to make the user question their morality in certain situations.  The monotony of the tasks in both Papers Please and PrimEvil - are both repetitive and challenging.  In this way they are reflecting the reality workers and immigrants experience in the real world.

I think PrimeEvil illustrates just how pressurised and stressful working in this type of environment can be.  I have tried to show how much repetitive, physical labour is needed to provide for just the most basic items needed to live.

My aspirations for this game would be to implement more events and dialogue to further illustrate the difficulties of the workplace and give the player more to think about .   For example pay deductions for being late to work or time off for medical treatment.   Also I could  work on an actual pricing structure of  pay and real prices of food items and basic necessities.  In addition I could develop more true to life outcomes for the workers actions ie breakages and mistakes , giving the player a greater sense of the reality of working in this type of environment.

Music is quite grating though.