Even sculling peaceably through the backwaters of the Internet, though, I began to realise that Witnessed was breaking out, that people were talking about it. Then when I turned around it was a huge success, and then a phenomenon, and then this year’s breakout thing. Paper magazines began to talk about it, schools and parents objected to it, and then an MP denounced it in the House of Commons, which in turn required that another MP come to the game’s defence. In the United States it was denounced as un-American, which was nothing more than the truth because none of us was remotely American, but for some reason the assertion stirred up a controversy and we got more and more coverage. Was the game sensationalist or simply sensational? Something about it spoke to people, certainly, and it gave them pause. You could explore Witnessed , fight in it, sneak in it, survive in it, or turn the tables on the game and become the oppressor. The protagonist and her nemesis duelled against the Orwellian backdrop of a nation not merely under surveillance but composed of it, a democracy where everything the citizenry did was totally transparent. The ostensible enemy was a mysterious group called—inevitably and humorously—the Fire Judges. One fought them, the other unknowingly served them, and it was hard to tell which of them was good and which evil, or whether such distinctions still made sense in the maze of missions and quests, right up until the Minotaur was revealed. It resonated with a population increasingly aware that "liberty" does not in fact mean "micro-policing" and that they had bartered away their historical legal rights in the name of keeping out a fifth columnist jihadi Muslim army that did not exist in the way they had been told. Then, too, here was a fantasy world which discreetly inverted the established conventions of such creations. White people looked subtly wrong in the game, sickly and slick. It was an elegant political prank, especially in a medium not widely known for progressive nuance, and it advanced the notion of games as art, and that in turn created comment, and comment—well, you already know what comment is.