Not for Broadcast review: a knowingly heavy-handed ‘propaganda simulator’

Ever wanted to get a taste of what it’s like to control a live TV news broadcast?  Probably not; switching between camera setups in real-time isn’t exactly a common fantasy. Doing so in Not for Broadcast is however an entertaining experience, intended not as a realistic representation of TV news production but a fun gameplay method involving the juggling of various elements, plus absorbing the narrative of the footage being broadcast. This narrative, mostly cobbled together through news reports and interviews, involves a newly elected government lurching into authoritarianism. 

We play a TV network employee named Alex Winston, who works by himself in a control room, making various on-the-fly decisions—actioned by pressing buttons, moving knobs, inserting tapes and fiddling with dials. Most of the story unfolds through the bulletins we broadcast, creating a fragmented picture of political and societal consequences. A vague scent of revolution, sparked by protestors rebelling against oppression and state-driven encroachment onto their liberties, becomes more tangible and dramatic as the runtime (about eight hours) progresses.

Directed by Alex Paterson and Jason Orbaum, who co-wrote the script with Andy Murray and George Vere, the game has been described as a “full motion propaganda simulator,” in reference to some of the decisions we must make. It’s not just a matter of which camera to cut to, or which commercial to play in the ad breaks; we make a range of choices that influence public perception. These include putting a positive or negative spin on particular stories including the kind of imagery used, and the extent to which we obey the government’s censorship requests or defy the party’s wishes. 

Not for Broadcast was previously released on PC, X-Box and Playstation 4 before being ported over to VR. Virtual reality feels like the right medium for it, transforming the core setting into a spatially immersive environment and joining other VR productions in which the action unfolds in a central, concentrated space—such as Job Simulator (office cubicles), Five Nights at Freddy’s (a control booth) and Area Man Lives (a radio station). 

By concentrating on a single setting, there’s no need to create navigable virtual environments: the action and drama come to us. Virtual environments based in control rooms with monitors and surveillance screens, such as Not for Broadcast and Five Nights at Freddy’s, also narratively justify the returning of frames to 360 environments. Frames have dominated previous mediums—most notably paintings and, of course, motion pictures, the cinema being, as Martin Scorsese famously put it, “a matter of what’s in the frame and what’s out.” 

Among VR’s core features is the liberation of the player or spectator’s gaze, freed from what Peter Greenaway memorably called “the tyranny of the frame.” Frames sneak into VR productions due to the ease with which they can display sculpted visual information. As theorist Jessica Brillhart put it: “the frame is a hard thing for creators to let go of.” But in Not for Broadcast the presence of the screens makes sense, with video feeds and other displays germane to this environment. 

In between scenes in the control room, which form the bulk of the experience, are text-based segments outlining Alex’s life outside work, which require the selection of various plot and dialogue paths. These bits might’ve worked in previous versions of the game, but this style of presentation and engagement (reading summaries then clicking on lines of text) feel very old-hat and extraneous in VR—leftovers from a more primitive experience.

As a political commentary and media satire, Not for Broadcast is knowingly heavy-handed, the performances having an air of self-conscious hamminess. That’s fine when satirical targets are vain, shonky celebrities, appearing on the news to spruik their latest film or album, requiring you to suffer through their swollen-headed prattling. But it takes the edge off the story’s pointier ideas, expressed by characters who need to be taken seriously—including a rebel leader who pursues favourable coverage and a newsreader who does a Howard Beale and rages against his own network, raising hell. Some of the drama gets lost in caricature. 

More compelling are the messages around media literacy and visual curation, which are implied rather than directly stated. The point is made, for instance, that journalistic truth can never be absolute, and that every choice made in the process of constructing news reportage reflects the biases and preconceptions of the decision maker(s). It’s a bit Media Studies 101, but it’s an evergreen subject in an information-saturated world. There are some flat spots across Not For Broadcast’s eight-ish hour runtime, but also enough points of dramatic inflection to keep me happily playing until the end. The developers do a good job creating a sense of high stakes, and largesse, from a small cast and a limited setting.