Carabella Goes to College

Like most new college students, Carabella will spend the week before the start of classes doing routine tasks that we take for granted: opening a bank account, receiving new checks, using a credit card, and shopping at a grocery store that has a “club card”. She will learn how such simple activities can have major consequences for her privacy. —Carabella Goes to College (Privacy Activism)

In this game, you’re a young woman during her first week of college campus life. What choices will you make, and how will they affect your privacy?

Part of me wants to compare this to grade-school pageants in honor of tooth decay prevention… but maybe this is a good way to teach this particular subject. And a good primary document to use in a study on gaming as propaganda.

I’ve half-remembered a science fiction game that I read in some anthology… some government agents were charged with protecting Earth from the culturally dangerous messages that might be in imported toys. The story starts off with the governmnet dudes playing a board game like Monopoly, but they are really more concerned with a game that has little robot soldiers scurrying around a play fortress of some sort. Gradually, the soldiers start disappearing, and it turns out that they insert themselves into the fortress for some reason. Anyway, the whole soldier/fortress thing turns out to be a distraction — the offworld cartel that has produced the toys is only importing the soldier toy as a smoke screen for the strategy board game. Had the government agents read the rules to that board game, they would have learned that the game rewarded players who made bad business choices (that would, the story suggests, leave Earth open to financial take-over from the outside). I’m pretty sure I read the story during the late 80s, when Japanese technology was displacing the U.S. auto industry.