Packets, Please! – Game Jam Build

Packets, Please! Gives players a glimpse of Ajit Pai’s post-Net Neutrality future as you take control of a data throttler at ‘CosmoCast’ – throttling, boosting and disconnecting users connection as per your companies nefarious policies.

Packets, Please! take place in a (very) near future where Net Neutrality has been successfully repealed and bandwidth throttling runs rampant. You take control of a data throttler who works for CosmoCast and must review your customers packages and data usage then decide whether to throttle them, boost them or disconnect them.

The game starts off fairly easily, with you throttling all customers who are reaching their bandwidth limits, but soon more and more policies are put in place for you to enforce and things get a whole lot trickier. You need to boost connections for new customers, boost connections to favored services that have paid off CosmoCast (such as TWatch and Facezine), throttle other services (such as streaming services or Tremblr) and disconnect prohibited services or customers from certain parts of the world.

It’s a well made and addictive little game that can infuriate you as you play – not due to the game design in any way, but due to the fact that this is the sort of stuff that could actually happen now that the FCC have repealed Net Neutrality. Fortunately it is still possible to stop the FCC via Congress. For more information on how you can help, please visit battlefortheinternet.com.

Play Packets, Please! Here (Browser)