Website – followthethings.com

“Sim*Sweatshop“
An online video game by Jonny Norridge (concept and game programming) & Gavin Courtney (back end development) for NOW Nottingham and The Arts Council UK.
Gameplay video by WahWahQueenMew embedded above. Available to play free of charge on the Sim*Sweatshop website here (Adobe Flash needed).

Designer Jonny Norridge creates a game to simulate the experience of the shoe factory work that he’s been reading about. You slide shoe panels into place with your mouse. It ‘pings’ when one’s made. Then you make the next one. The clock ticks. Your energy levels fall. Your pay is terrible. It’s not enough to buy the food that you and your family need. You are interrupted by your boss talking about targets. He doesn’t like it when you want to join a union. It’s a simple, repetitive game that you – as a factory worker – can’t win. The idea is to put gamers in the shoes of the people who make the things that they buy. For them, there’s a familiar task sequence and reward structure. But this is real. It’s kind of fun to play, but also sucks. It’s the kind of game that’s given to school students as a quick and vivid way to explain sweatshop production. If they hate it, the lesson has worked. For those who want to know more, its website suggests further reading. There are other examples of trade justice activism in which consumers go to work in the factories and farms where their things are made (see, for example, the TV series Blood, Sweat & Takeaways on our site here). With these, you’re invited to empathise with someone supposedly like you – the contestants are often pitched ‘as typical’ consumers – trying to do that work. In this game, you’re all doing it yourself. So how effectively can a game-based simulation of factory work can be? What can it convey of the poverty and working conditions of show factory workers? It turn out that the answer is ‘a lot’. Sim*Sweatshop catches on. German and Hungarian versions are created, and it becomes part of other mainstream anti-sweatshop campaigns. But are young consumers the ones responsible for these sweatshop conditions? Should company executives, investors and politicians be playing this game too?

Page reference: Declan Coakley, Jack Johnson, Josh Li, Georgie Mitchell, Jack Saxton & Tom Weake (2024) Pipe Trouble. followthethings.com/sim-sweatshop.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 25 minutes.

Posted on September 20, 2024January 5, 2025 by Ian Cook

Radi-Aid: Africa For Norway

followthethings.com
Home & Auto

DISTRIBUTED IN NORWAY

NGO CAMPAIGN

CHANGE ACTIVIST BEHAVIOUR

CROSS CULTURES

START SOMEWHERE DIFFERENT

FLIP THE SCRIPT

MAKE IT FAMILIAR

CHOOSE AN AUDIENCE

LIE TO TELL THE TRUTH

“Radi-aid: Africa For Norway“
NGO video campaign by and for The Norwegian Students’ & Academics International Assistance Fund (SAIH).
Video playlist embedded above. Campaign website here.

It’s unusual to find a humanitarian campaign where people in the Global South take pity on people in the Global North and send them aid in the hope that it will improve their miserable, pitiless lives. The kind citizens of many African countries, blessed with warmth that many take for granted, get together to help the people of Norway who are suffering terribly from freezing cold temperatures. What better to send them? Electric radiators. Charity workers collect and deliver them to grateful aid recipients. They even record a charity single and video to raise awareness and funds, like Band Aid’s ‘Do they know it’s Christmas?’ or USA for Africa’s ‘We are the world’. Their song is just as awful. Just as patronising. Just as one dimensional. Just an inaccurate. Just as tear-jerking. This is a campaign by a Norwegian development NGO that wants to challenge the ‘white saviour complex’ that so much European development NGO fundraising is based upon. What if the tables were turned? What if you were represented in the way that you represent others? What if you found that offensive, partial, ridiculous? Would that lead you to think differently about humanitarian aid, the way it is represented in charity ads, and the things that its NGOs send to people who it sees as needy? Like goats. This campaign, and particularly the video for its charity single ‘Africa for Norway’, went viral. This became a very public debate. Who could have imagined that a gift of radiators could have been so effective?

Page reference: Marie Conmee, Rebecca Jones, Frederic Montaner-Wills, Thomas Paulsen, James Pidding, Hannah Rusbridge & Joe Shrimpton (2016) Radi-Aid: Africa For Norway (taster). followthethings.com/radi-aid.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 9 minutes.

Posted on August 21, 2024January 26, 2025 by Mark

The True Cost

followthethings.com
Fashion

“The True Cost“
A documentary film (with website) directed Andrew Morgan & executive produced by Livia Firth for Life Is My Movie Entertainment.
Available in full on YouTube (embedded above). Website here.

American filmmaker Andrew Morgan weeps in a New York Starbucks after seeing a front page newspaper story about the collapse of the Rana Plaza factory complex in Dhaka, Bangladesh where over 1,100 garment workers were crushed to death making clothes for Western high street retailers and brands. It’s illustrated with a photos two young boys looking at photos the of missing, assumed dead, workers pinned up near the site. They are the same age as his sons and are looking for their missing mum. He is shocked to his core. How could something this atrocious be allowed to happen? He imagines making a film that will answer this question and sets up a kickstarter campaign to raise the money to finance it. He doesn’t believe that there’s an individual or organisation who, alone, could have saved those people’s lives by acting differently (like consumers, for example). So he travels to lots of places in fashion’s supply chains. He talks to workers, farmers, managers, retired executives, ethical fashion pioneers, NGO execs, journalists, doctors and academics. Viewers get to know some – like Shima Akhter the garment factory worker in Bangladesh and LaRhea Pepper the cotton farmer in the USA – better than others. He makes the argument that Rana Plaza was a systematic failure. This film’s networky trade justice activism shows how everyone in the industry could and should act differently to make things better. Some, as his film shows, are already doing so. But can it encourage more people to get involved in the systemic change that’s needed? Who needs to see it? Where? There’s a lot of detail to digest here! Maybe too much. This film generated more discussion than any example researched on our website so far.

Page reference: Olivia Dubec, Sophie Rees, Amelia Daniel, Becca Craig, Ellie Glynn, Frankie Ward & Katy Jackson (2020) The True Cost. followthethings.com/the-true-cost.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 146 minutes