i-am-loving-look-of-no-pineapple-left

I love games that use satire to make some social commentary. No Pineapple Left Behind is certainly shaping up to be one of those games.

It has been developed by Seth Alter, a former educator turned developer, and while the game is nominally a simulation/ strategy game in which you need to manage a school so the students can get the best eduction possible, it’s equally interested in being a deconstruction and satire on how modern education systems work.

Through the game you’ll need to invest in school curriculums, students and staff without going bankrupt. The quirk here is you’ll have the option of turning students into pineapples (no, really), or instead sallow them to remain as humans, which takes more work, but might result in better grades (and thus a better outcome for the school you’re manage).

There’s a new trailer live, which shows off more of the game’s features and how it plays. It’s a very simple looking game, to be sure, but the theme behind it is truly compelling, and it’s a subject that we need to talk about more, as modern education systems are not up to scratch, so why not use a game to do so? This game is being designed specifically around US education systems, but it will apply on many levels for the education systems of many other western cultures, we suspect.

The game will be released on PC in spring (winter for Aussies), 2016. That leaves many months for the rough edges to be smoothed out.