I sat down at a laptop to try my hand at running a sweatshop. To a bouncy techno soundtrack, the boss floor manager, who keenly evoked Hitler, spewed insults and directions—”Lazybones! How are you today? Shh-h-h-h. I don’t care!”—and the orders started pouring in for shoes, shirts, hats, and bags. I selected an adult worker, rather than a child, to box up hats on the assembly line, and asked the volunteer, “Do you find that most people choose children to work?” “By the end, you have to,” she said. “You get to the point where child workers are the only way to make money.” “So, are you supposed to feel a sense of accomplishment in this game? Or is the point for you to just feel terrible about yourself?” “You feel good when you complete a level. But then you feel bad when your workers start to die and lose their limbs.” When I reached the third level, I sent out too many unfinished orders, and my contract was ripped in half. The boss lambasted me—“I should belt you, moron!”—and, as I continued to play, I began to skip past his angry monologues, as well as the interjections of a child worker who popped up at the bottom of the screen to plead for decent treatment. My workers kept dying of dehydration, so I begrudgingly had to invest in a water fountain. The longer I played, the more each moving part—workers, children, hats—became abstracted into the image of one big machine. When playing a game, one always takes on a role (banker, shortstop, sword-bearing elf), which involves both identifying with that character and maintaining an awareness of yourself as the player. You’re simultaneously a participant and an observer. From a parallel stance, anthropologists have studied the way games teach members of a society to follow cultural rules—often a difficult, stressful undertaking—by establishing play as the safe environment for instruction. Each of these anthropological video games raises the stakes of that dynamic—because you, the player, are playing a game that has been modelled after conditions of the real world.