You already know how to play this game. You probably played it when it was one of the free games included with Windows back in the shitty dial-up days. This week, a mysterious online platform is using the classic game to make a political statement.
If politics is lakorn for nerds, then a game of Minesweeper about the Thai parliament could be the geekiest thing right now. Published by online pro-democracy site Election.in.th, the game is meant to be an easy and (debatably) fun way to explore the deep threads of nepotism linking the kingdom’s 250 unelected senators.
“Let’s end the [junta’s] stay in power by identifying our senators,” read the description of the browser game published Sunday. It’s unclear who is behind the game or site. Its domain registration information is set to private.
Gameplay is simple. Choose from a grid of undifferentiated seats to see which senator it represents. Like Minesweeper, they can then be marked for later or opened: Hope they don’t blow up!
What makes someone a mine is their history serving at the pleasure of military administrations. The relationships and their nepo-tastic baggage explode across three progressively difficult levels.
Once you click on a seat, the identity of who it represents appears.
Like the classic game, she can be marked for later consideration if the player thinks she might have held previous position under the junta aka the National Council for Peace and Order. Click open to take a chance that they don’t have a history as a reliable junta ally. Numbers appear to indicate how many adjacent seats are “mines.”
The easiest level of “Old NCPO,” which harks back to the previous military government, contains 20 mines. The next level is set in the post-coup assembly of junta appointees and contains 89 mines. The third level, “Choosing Prayuth,” represents the parliament today and is all but impossible as it contains 249 mines. Finding the one seat without a nepotism “bomb” means only one try before “Game Over.”
Winning pretty much requires knowing all the senators and lawmakers very, very well.
The point of the game seems to be to scrutinize how the military government selected senators to help secure a democratic veneer to junta leader Prayuth Chan-o-cha’s stay in power. Reality stepped in to further illustrate the point yesterday with the government disclosure that six of the people who chose the 250 senators — a who’s who list of military-aligned characters — ended up becoming senators themselves.
Through a simple, classic and inevitably infuriating guessing game – it asks players to consider who really comes out on top in our current political reality.
Attempts to reach the makers of the game – who seem to avoid taking any credit – were unsuccessful Thursday.
