Chloé Wake and Paul Wake (Frank and Alex Games). Self-published, 2024. Free to download.
3+ players | 20–40 minutes | Adult
Happy Shoppers: A New and Most Disgusting Game for Consumers of All Ages is a free, print-and-play card game designed for the Fuck Capitalism Game Jam (2024), with a revised edition available to download from the Manchester Game Centre. The game is a critical adaptation of Happy Families, the Victorian card game created by John Jacques & Son in 1861. Like its source, Happy Shoppers uses a simple set-collection mechanic: players deal a deck of cards and take turns asking one another for specific cards by name, building complete ‘product families’. There are eleven families — smartphone, cola, coffee, cosmetics, fast food burger, online delivery, trainers, gaming console, AI image generation, fast fashion, and weekend getaway by air — each consisting of four cards: one naming the consumer product, and three naming harms caused by its production or consumption. When a player completes a family, they must lay the cards out and name each harm card aloud before naming the product, in the form: ‘I have… started a war in the Congo, leached cyanide into the earth, given a poor person cancer, AND… upgraded my gaming console.’ The player with the most complete families wins. The game is accompanied by extensive design notes and sourced factual information for each card, including references to academic and journalistic sources that document the harms depicted.
Happy Shoppers operates squarely within the tradition of what Mary Flanagan (2009) calls ‘critical play’, or the design of games as instruments for political, aesthetic, and social critique. The game’s central innovation is to make the completion of each round of play a forced act of narration: players cannot claim their consumer prize without first verbalising the supply chain harms attached to it. This information must be spoken aloud, at the table, by the winning player, in first person. The effect is to make complicity performative and communal rather than private and abstract. The game’s product families span ecological and social harms simultaneously (deforestation, conflict minerals, water depletion, plastic pollution, labour exploitation, greenwashing, and animal testing are all present) consistently framing environmental damage as inseparable from global economic inequality, colonial extraction, and corporate impunity. The design notes explicitly resist both the individualisation of blame and its easy deflection: drawing on Timothy Morton’s concept of hyperobjects (2013) and Mark Fisher’s analysis of ‘capitalist realism’ (2009), the game insists that consumers in the Global North are part of the system, while also acknowledging that systemic change requires action beyond individual consumer choices. The game’s deliberate refusal to name specific brands is also a political choice: it prevents players from externalising the problem onto ‘bad’ companies while positioning their own preferred products as somehow cleaner. The game is notably self-aware about its own affective strategy, asking in its design notes: ‘Shouldn’t games be fun?’ and answering that the association of games with diversion and pleasure is itself a constraint the game wants to break. Happy Shoppers is designed to be uncomfortable, and to generate conversation about what that discomfort means and what might follow from it. As a free, print-and-play game, it also models a low-footprint distribution approach.
References
Fisher, M. 2013. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Winchester: Zero Books.
Flanagan, M. 2009. Critical Play: Radical Game Design. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Morton, T. 2013. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.