Candide with the ENO

This game is slightly weird througout. It’s to support Candide at the ENO and for the life of me I can’t work out why three presidential candidates are in the home page of the game. What does Barack, Hilary and John have to do with the story, except perhaps optimism and disillusionment are part and parcel of politics and these three are all after their own slice of happiness.

The game itself is fun – six screens to go through various environments jumping over obstacles. Perhaps the fact you only need to use one button means I can actually play it. There’s a competition involved, to win a trip to Paris, but here’s where bad design comes in, as I can’t enter unless I send it to three people. Does writing a blog post count? Competitions should not be designed this way – if they are good and people enjoy them, they will want to spread them. Make it easy to do, not put in barriers that means they have no choice but to spam their friends.