I have hacked into Samir Jilani’s network with my iPhone in order to browse a virtual dossier containing his private e-mails. My next task: deciding whether or not the tech CEO poses a terrorist threat to the U.S.
Created by Chicago-based indie developers Mike Boxleiter and Greg Wohlwend and released in April, TouchTone is designed to play like most of the innocuous fare on Apple’s App Store—at least on the surface. It casts you as a low-level agent for an unnamed NSA-like agency whose job consists of sifting through these communications and alerting your higher-ups to suspicious people. The bulk of the game is confined to a black grid filled with colorful laser beams that recalls the minimalist cybernoir of Tron. The player solves a series of visual puzzles by correctly aligning laser beams with their matching color-coded terminal, using reflector panels that can be shifted by swiping your phone’s screen with your finger. Connect all the lasers to their designated targets and you complete a “hack.” The reward for doing so isn’t a high score but unfettered access to your mark’s texts, e-mails, and phone calls.
Creating an interactive argument against the NSA isn’t what TouchTone’s developers originally had in mind. Back in 2012, Boxleiter and Wohlwend, who’ve been making games under the name Mikengreg since 2009, released a quirky sports title called Gasketball. Shortly after they finished the game, which turned out to be a financial flop, the pair took a road trip to a video game conference in Seattle. During the 48-hour journey, they managed to quickly craft a prototype for the skeleton of TouchTone. Initially there was no plot or story, just a gridlike board with laser beams that the player would be tasked with connecting to targets placed on the grid’s edges.
When writing TouchTone, Boxleiter took his cues from entertainment outside of video games, particularly the sharp political satire of Netflix’s House of Cards. He also immersed himself in coverage of the Snowden leaks in an attempt to fully grasp how the NSA operates, in hopes of conveying that in the game’s script. To get the details right, he found himself googling phrases like “What type of plutonium do you need to make a dirty bomb?” or “What kind of [damage] would a dirty bomb do at a city center?” Boxleiter suspects his research, ironically, may have landed him on a real-life NSA watch list.
It was a compelling narrative tidbit that prompted me, a few days later, to ask Boxleiter if I could speak to his friend. I initially received no reply. After repeated inquiries went unreturned for several days, Boxleiter finally replied via e-mail: “I don’t think the inspiration is important, he’s just a guy who fits a profile which leads to harassment from the government.” Later, in response to yet another request, Boxleiter said, “We talked to our friend and he’s not interested in being included in the story.”
