Welcome to The Censor’s Desk

To censor or not to censor, that is the question — and the game. When faced with morally or politically sensitive materials that come across your desk, what do you do?

Imagine you are a government censor working for the Japanese government in imperial Japan. Or an official in the CCD (Civil Censorship Detachment) at General Headquarters working under General Douglas MacArthur in the late 1940s during the Allied Occupation of Japan; an employee at Eirin, the self-regulatory agency for film ratings and regulation, after its establishment in 1949; or an in-house “editor” working for a literary or photography journal in the postwar period. Imagine too that you need to make a living and your pay depends on both not causing any scandals that might hit the news, but also on keeping a steady flow of content available to keep publications economically viable. Imagine also that the rules of censorship are constantly changing based on shifting political and practical considerations, and that, even from the start, these rules were never so clearcut.

The Censor’s Desk places the player in the shoes of a new bureaucrat that’s in charge of censoring papers that violate a set of rules given to them by the government.

We recommend playing the game in full screen (access full screen by clicking on the blue expand button).

The Censor’s Desk team is:

Branden Heng – Programming and Game Design

Hannah Chuang - User Experience and Game Design

Hunter Dalton – Narrative, Game Design, and Research

Fatimah Hossain - Narrative 

Danielle Harris  - Art Design

Randal Holt - Sound Design

Mentored by Kirsten Cather