I didn't think I'd make for a good NSA agent until I played TouchTone. The iOS puzzle game had me looking for enemies of the state by scouring text messages and emails, and it didn't faze me one bit. It's absolutely unlike how I am in real life. I'm not a voyeur in any sense of the word, nor am I nosy. To this day, if my dad asks me to grab his debit card, I just bring him his wallet because I'd rather not snoop through people's stuff. The allure of invading someone's privacy isn't my bag whatsoever. And frankly, how quickly that all fell away once I started TouchTone shocked me.
"It is very voyeuristic and creepy once you start thinking about that after you play it," says co-creator Mike Boxleiter. "You should take a step back and think about what you're doing and how weird it is."
It doesn't take long to get weird. My first task was a simple enough training exercise: Identify whether or not an email chain between a bookstore employee and a potential customer was worth further monitoring. "Does any part of this message pose a potential threat to national security?" the game asks at the bottom of every transcript. Given that the would-be patron was looking for a copy of The Anarchist Cookbook, and I was role-playing as a spy security agent, the answer was pretty easy. In my character's mind, anyone who needs a tome containing instructions for crafting homemade bombs is worth keeping an eye on. And then the game took a turn.
Immediately after that, my handler, Patriot, scolded me for saying that a couple of students emailing about smoking weed after a test wasn't a security threat. In his eyes, the kids were drug traffickers who warranted further monitoring. I mistakenly flagged a thread between Jordan "Wolf of Wall Street" Belfort and an associate about certifying bad investment bonds as worth watching. Patriot wasn't happy about that either because I was thinking like a rational human and that wasn't acceptable. These guys were fleecing shareholders, but because it wasn't a matter of national security Patriot wasn't concerned
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