Surveillance capitalism collides with white-collar crime in this narrative strategy sim

How much is your data worth? Do any digging and it’s not long before what at first seems a simple, straightforward question explodes into a pointillist web of factors well beyond the scope of common knowledge. The answer, however complex, can be made simple: It all depends on who wants to pay for it, and ultimately what it is meant to be used for. 

Faceminer, an experimental narrative-driven management sim, implicates players in the high-stakes, high-reward world of mass data harvesting, having them pore over a seemingly endless swath of faces in the pursuit of nigh-unimaginable wealth. But just how much is wealth worth in a world on fire?

Developed by Wristwork, a U.K.-based interactive media studio with a focus on cerebral short-form games, Faceminer is a desktop management game where players assume the role of a contract employee for a biometric data brokerage. Set in an alternate pre-Y2K universe, players are tasked with using a proprietary software suite to refine biometric datasets by clicking on photos in a three-by-three window tool. For every face harvested, you’re rewarded with money based on your accuracy and the level of “purity” each dataset has. Datasets can be purchased through third-party sellers, and the higher the purity, the higher they cost.

At its core, Faceminer is an infinite clicker game not unlike Cookie Clicker and Universal Paperclips. Players purchase datasets, manually click through CAPTCHA-like collages of faces, and strategize how to maximize their profits. The difference, however, is that Faceminer requires players to maintain the delicate balancing act between maximizing their profits and reducing their operating costs by upgrading and occasionally downgrading their hardware, infrastructure, and software while reacting swiftly to unforeseen hiccups along the way.

Another aspect that separates Faceminer from similar infinite clicker games is its emergent narrative system. As you maintain your data mining operations, you’ll receive occasional emails in your inbox from supervisors, co-workers, and outside parties, including journalists and activist groups commenting on your work. You’ll unlock different certification levels as the number of datasets you complete grows, which in turn unlock incremental upgrades that can be paid for out of your ever-growing digital coffers.

In the game’s press release, Wristwork said that Faceminer originally began as a research project to explore the mechanisms and ethics behind planetary-scale data hoarding. “The digital landscapes where these technologies are constructed, and the virtual clouds from which they are deployed, often obscure their connection to the physical realities of raw computational power. Faceminer is an attempt to make these connections feel tangible.”

It’s not long before the game’s prevailing themes regarding data privacy, AI ethics, labor rights, and the dangers of environmental collapse begin to slowly but surely insinuate themselves through Faceminer’s mechanics.

It all began with a simple question I asked myself early on during my playthrough: Where exactly does all this biometric data come from? As you click through datasets, you’ll steadily begin to notice them taking on an increasingly sinister tone, from “Filtered Shared Profile Images” and “Obtained Faces in the Wild” to “Sanitized Unsolved Cases” and “Suspected Activist Profiles.” Eventually, third-party datasets won’t cut it anymore, resulting in you resorting to harvesting your own by installing spyware onto unsuspecting cellphones and desktop computers provided by your supervisors.

Things only become more ethically murky and downright insidious from there. From leeching processing power off your fellow employees to automating your operation to mass sift through datasets at breakneck speed, the consequences of your actions — and your complicity — become more and more apparent. You’ll be closing out pop-out videos of climate refugees scavenging through the wreckage of their former homes while pouring your ill-gotten assets into “strategic partnerships” to obfuscate the direct correlation between your work and its effects on the climate. It’s a dark reflection of the absurd logic of infinite growth, a game that ruthlessly proves and critiques the amorality of the AI industry by implicating the player as one of its chief beneficiaries.

In her 2019 book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff described surveillance capitalism as “a new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction, and sales,” as well as “a parasitic economic logic in which the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new global architecture of behavioral modification.” In Faceminer, you are the vector by which this parasitic logic insinuates itself across the planet, touching and impacting the lives of everyone in it. It’s not the end of the world, but you can see it from here.

Faceminer was released Feb. 27 on Mac, Linux, and Windows PC. The game was reviewed on PC using a copy purchased by the author. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, though Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased via affiliate links. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.