Become an NSA Spook in This iPhone Puzzle Game

TouchTone combines puzzles with NSA-style snooping. TouchTone

If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like on the other side of the surveillance state—to be the one doing the snooping, as opposed to being the one getting snooped on—you now have the chance, in a somewhat unlikely form: A Laser Chess-style puzzle game for your iPhone.

In TouchTone, you play an NSA analyst, alternatively solving simple geometric puzzles and scanning peoples’ emails for national security threats. The puzzles are fun, but it’s the stuff in between that’s really interesting. The game presents a simple, stylized take on the job, to be sure, but it can be a powerful experience nonetheless. As you’re trying to decide whether a particular message is pertinent to national security, you can’t help but feel in a very visceral way the queasy ambiguity at the heart of state surveillance.

Intercepted emails TouchTone

The game was created by Michael Boxleiter and Greg Wohlwend, who work together under the name Mikengreg. They’re responsible for the well-known games Solipskier and Gasketball. More recently, Wohlwend illustrated the cheerful visual design of the hit puzzle game Threes.

Boxleiter had worked out the basic puzzle elements of TouchTone for a game jam in 2012, but the two were struggling to figure out the extra something needed to make the game feel complete. The answer came suddenly with Edward Snowden and the PRISM revelations.

The concept fit well with the puzzle mechanics, which the developers felt had a bit of a hacker vibe all along. Still, it took a while to figure out the right tone for the controversial issue. “At first we were going to go for a little satire, and throw in some jokes at the NSA’s expense,” Boxleiter says. “I realized after a while that maybe we could say something a little more real and a little more important.”

Boxleiter ended up writing an elaborate story centering around a American Muslim engineer, which unfolds in the form of emails intercepted over the course of the game. It took months of writing and rewriting. “Not many people have made a game like this, so it feels like uncharted territory,” Boxleiter says.

The game ends up balancing subtle satire with a vague, sinister vibe. At one point in the development process, after they’d shed the initial jokiness and embraced a straighter approach to the conceit, Boxleiter and Wohlwend took the game to a play-testing event in Chicago and claimed they were contracted by the NSA to make it. At least one beta tester believed them, a reaction Wohlwend and Boxleiter took as a job well done.