The Westport Independent is played through a series of simple menus with plenty of text to read, and not much else. This works well to create a post-World War II look. The game has a very vintage feel to it, thanks to a sepia-ish theme to the art.

If your paper is very popular in a district, you can influence public opinion. Choice of news reports combined with marketing spend will determine how much your paper sells in each district. This involves choosing how much of your marketing budget you want to spend on the four districts of Westport.

Since you are in the shoes of the editor-in-chief of The Westport Independent, you'll be choosing the stories to be published, and making decisions on whether to take a pro-Loyalist or a pro-rebel stance in your coverage, while balancing that against the news your readers are interested in, to keep the circulation up.Īfter you clear the first stage in the game, your marketing agency will be shut down by the government so you will also have to do the marketing of the paper on your own. Your goal is to ensure that your publication doesn't get shut down in the meantime. The party passes a law that promotes censorship, which is to come into effect in 12 weeks. The game is set in the fictional town of Westport in 1949, under the fascist rule of the Loyalist Party. If you've ever wanted to experience the constant struggle between publishing the truth and fighting censorship, you should play The Westport Independent. Market forces and currying favour can lead to a situation where companies take the path of self-censorship, where a media house chooses not to air or publish content that may be deemed offensive or obscene. For the media, censorship has long been a contentious issue and not just top down censorship by a government that wants to curtail free speech.

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