Phone Story: Un Mobile Game Discute La Mobile Phone Industry

Gabriele Ferri's essay examines Phone Story, a satirical mobile game created by Paolo Pedercini of the Molleindustria collective in collaboration with the Yes Lab, which is associated with the activist group the Yes Men. The piece opens with the September 2011 removal of the game from Apple's App Store after only four days, an event that drew media attention focused mainly on whether the removal amounted to censorship rather than on the game's design and critical content. The author argues that the work deserves analysis as a critical object in its own right, and frames it as a combination of a narrated story about the smartphone's supply chain and a set of four mini-games.

The game is structured in four parts covering coltan mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo, suicides at a Chinese electronics factory, consumer marketing, and electronic waste, with the player controlling characters in each segment. Ferri's central thesis is that the game's rhetorical strategy is distinctive because it ties its critique to the device on which it is played. The ambiguous narrator, who shifts between objective description, addressing the player as complicit, and mimicking the brand's own voice, is read as an application of the identity-correction tactics long used by the Yes Men and the practice of subvertising.

The essay compares Phone Story with Molleindustria's earlier McDonald's Video Game, arguing that the earlier work makes its case through a corporate simulation, whereas Phone Story implicates the player more directly by staging the critique on the smartphone itself. The author acknowledges that its gameplay is simpler, more linear and less challenging than other titles, but concludes that it represents an experimental step toward what he calls the platform-specific satirical game, a form with considerable potential despite unresolved design weaknesses.