Data Dealer is an award winning online game about collecting and selling personal data - full of irony and gleeful sarcasm. It´s about surveillance, privacy, the social impact of technology, and fun. What if you had control over millions of Internet users' personal data? Ever wanted to run your own Smoogle & Tracebook, track your users & ruthlessly collect loads of detailed personal profiles? Now you can! Data Dealer lets you 'play god' with personal data. It's a browser game, 100% free to play and released under Creative Commons. Let's call it a bastard offspring of certain shiny 2010 Facebook Games and the 1990 TV simulation game Mad TV, reborn with the souls of South Park and Bruce Schneier. Or simply: PRISM. The Game.

The good news: Data Dealer is not just an idea. Which already has a nice playable demo online (check it out on datadealer.com!), received lots of awesome feedback from the online community & media, and: the full-featured multiplayer version is already 80% finished!

The bad news: They've been working really hard for the past two years to reach this point. But: Without a final budget injection we won't make it.

The really good news: If Cuteacute succeed with their Kickstarter we can finish the full-featured version of Data Dealer within 2 or 3 months!

A few days before the NSA/Snowden fiasco, we released the first English version of Data Dealer, a game to provoke conversation about surveillance, personal data & online privacy in a really new, clever and fun way. It's a browser game about running your own Smoogle & Tracebook, tracking people, collecting millions of personal profiles and selling them to health insurance companies or governmental agencies. Play 'god' with other people's data! Or simply: PRISM, the Game. It's a nonprofit project, based on extensive research and offers a simple but important perspective on the personal data ecosystem of today's digital age. In the last couple of weeks we have been mentioned in The New Yorker, ProPublica, Fast Company, Guardian, Mashable, Washington Post, Le Monde and many more. Recently we won the prominent "Games for Change Award" in NYC and other awards in the fields of serious gaming and digital literacy in Austria, Germany and France. We've also been featured by leading privacy & consumer rights organizations. The game is 100% free to play and even licensed under Creative Commons. But a project like this isn't free to create. Two years in the making, and we've been working hard on it. There are several future partnerships in preparation, but to realize them, we'll have to survive the next couple months. That's why we have launched a Kickstarter for a funding injection. Deadline is on Thursday July 11th:

Data Dealer has been created by a small group of developers, game designers, open source advocates, researchers and digital rights activists hailing mainly from Vienna, Austria. We're assisted by wonderful US supporters like Nick Farr, Alli Treman and Heather Kelley (one of the "five most powerful women in gaming," we're told).

Selbstverständlich muss auf diesem Tumblr auch das großartige Spiel eines unserer Stargäste beim diesjährigen Bended Realities Festival erwähnt werden. Der kleine Text dazu erschien bereits auf unserem Bend it!-Blog, passt aber natürlich auch hierhin und trägt den schönen Titel:

Vergesst den laschen Mafia-Scheiß!

Denn hier kommt Data-Dealer! Eben so wie es eine Hochzeit des politischen Films gab, scheint diese Hochzeit für das politische Spiel grade erst in Schwung zu kommen: Ein Social Game, bei dem man selbst zum Datenhändler wird und dabei lernt wie und wo die eigenen Daten abgefischt und weiterverkauft werden. Außerdem eines, das richtig Spaß macht, die Mafia-Spiele im sozialen Netzwerk könnten in Sachen Gewissenlosigkeit kaum härter sein..

Das Spiel soll es bald auf Facebook geben, was ja endlich Arsch und Eimer in ansprechendster Weise zusammenbringt. -So Facebook das tatsächlich durchgehen lässt. Das wäre aber unwahrscheinlich, deutlicher könnte man seine Kritikunfähigkeit schließlich kaum demonstrieren. Vermutlich ist „gründe ein soziales Netzwerk und beute es aus“ sowieso das höchste erreichbare Level. Immerhin wird es das erste Social Network-Game sein, dass es dann doch geschafft hat mich zum mitspielen zu bringen. Für entsprechende Meldungen und Spielanfragen möchte ich mich jetzt schon -beiallenwomichkennen- entschuldigen:

https://www.facebook.com/datadealer