Right Honourable: Prime Minister's Questions

The News Corp scandal of the last few weeks brought a lot more eyes to Prime Minister's Questions than would usually tune in, which in turn led to poor old Speaker John Bercow pleading with MPs to try to behave a bit better this once. But of course it was a typical rendition of the Wednesday tradition, where MPs give their scripted questions, and the PM gives his scripted answers, and only occasionally does one match the other. The rest of it is jeering and poorly delivered, pre-scripted jokes/insults, followed by more jeering. And this is something captured wonderfully, just in time to replace the real thing during the Summer recess, by Mark Richards in Prime Minister's Questions: The Game.

Mark, who creates politically themed pixel cartoons on his Tumblr, Pixel Politics, is also an indie developer for Top Notched, and the combination of these two powers leads to the AGS-created PMQ: The Game. It's somewhere between Phoenix Wright interrogation and Monkey Island's insult sword fighting, which proves to be a funny place.

It's rather clearly a satire on the complete pantomime of PMQ, and its inherent pointlessness since the purpose of the event is for no one to actually answer anyone's questions at any point. So it is for each question from Ed Milliband, you as David Cameron are required to pick the answer from a list that best sort-of-fits the question asked. None of which actually answer it, of course. Should you not have a question to match you can always try a special move, such as blaming it all on the previous Labour government.

A matching answer is one that in some way loosely references the question without answering it, while ideally insulting the opposition or boasting of your own party's superiority.

And.

In.

The.

Game.

A really clever thing, and I like to assume the first game to feature the comforting tones of Speaker John Bercow. Annoyingly it's free, so I can't do an "order!" joke. Have a play.