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Disaffected Update, T-shirts
February 7, 2006 - by Ian Bogost

Disaffected! T-shirtsI wanted to give our readers a few useful updates on the state of Disaffected!.

First and most importantly, we've rev'd the game to v. 1.0.3 on both PC and Mac. The update fixes several bugs, changes some awkward joystick controls (not the intentionally awkward ones), and corrects a few smaller issues. Some Mac users may not have been able to play at all for various reasons, and this update should fix that. If you've already got D! on your machine, I strongly recommend reinstalling this new version. And if you haven't yet endured the trials of our simulated copy store, why wait any longer?

Next, you can now buy Disaffected! T-shirts to show your disaffection on the street, in your local Kinko's store, or even from the comfort of your own sofa. The excellent Guardian Gamesblog pointed to a recent Cnet story about anti-advergames (see below), noting that while some compare games like these to documentary, experimental satire games like Disaffected! and McDonald's Game have no distribution. That means we don't make any money, alas. This may change with new online sales channels opening up (1, 2), but for now there's always merchandising right?


Finally, a quick press update for those of you who care to follow public coverage of the game. CNet ran Games that stick it to 'The Man' on Disaffected, Molleindustria's McDonald's videogame, and the concept of anti-advergames. They even interviewed someone from Kinko's ad agency, and the quote is worth a huge laugh. French paper Libération ran an article (in French), as did Canada's Globe and Mail, Austria's Der Standard (in German), Business Online (in Italian), El País (in Spanish). But most interesting for us has been watching the response from unofficial Kinko's employee groups like this Livejournal community and the pro-labor group Kinko's Workers Unite.




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