Here in the States it is the Monday after an extended holiday weekend. For most, it was something of a struggle to wake up this morning and get back to work, a struggle made no less unpalatable by the daily commute. If you're commuting by public transportation, however, your commute bears its own special flavor of misery: the presence of other people.
Metro Rules of Conduct, an entry in the Independent Games Festival's 2009 Student Competition from Kian Bashiri, encapsulates the public transit experience perfectly. It's a game you've most likely already played in real life, now in convenient flash game form.
Bashiri drew upon his experiences riding the metro trains in his native Stockholm, Sweden to create the game, which he calls an "accurate simulation of the Stockholm metro." The goal of the game is to make it the five stops to your final destination while obeying the metro rules of conduct, which is essentially only one rule: Do not make eye contact with other travelers. In between stops, you can rack up points by moving your viewfinder over the various accoutrements of your fellow passengers -- MP3 players, cell phones, ties, scarves and even brassieres. The longer you stare, the more points you get; but, the longer you stare, the more likely the passenger is to notice and meet your gaze. Eye contact results in an audible groan and an immediate flush of red across the screen, representing what I'm assuming to be a mixture of humiliation, shame and rage -- not that I would I know from first-hand experience.
At any rate, it's a clever, simple and fun game particularly well-suited for a short midday break. You can play it here.
Happy back-to-work day.
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