What is "BURN THE UCCAEP"?

This game got me in trouble with the CEO of a Costa Rican game company.

The UCCAEP is a spanish acronym for “The Costa Rican Union of Chambers and Associations of the Private Business Sector”. It is an org representing the interests of the wealthiest private companies in the country.

At the height of the 2020 COVID-19 crisis, the UCCAEP urged the government to halt quarantine completely to reduce their profit losses. This would obviously mean increasing the number of infections, hospital saturation with patients, and obviously a lot of death. This short zine was my response.

It was made in eight hours, using a lot of borrowed assets and music. The game simply depicts the building of the UCCAEP burning in flames, and then shortly falling down rumbling. Pretty tame reaction in my opinion. At the time of this game being released, I was getting gamedev consulting from a CEO of a videogame company, a big one. Mostly about how to form a business, how to get well known, etc. This person responded privately to my social media publication of the game. They expressed how they could never work with such violent and hateful views, and terminated our profesional and personal relationship.

After picking myself up I realised that this was just another bridge burnt with a specific type of people. Costa Rican based developers who desperately want to run a profitable business in the industry to prove their country (and their parents I suppose) that game dev is a respectful and ADULT job with REAL money. I’m not just playing games dad, I promise I’m not wasting my CS degree!!

These types of bridges, as the UCCAEP building in the game, have no value for me. I’m not in the money business, I’m in the propaganda business. The good one. The one that inspires and empowers a new wave of effective political agents.

These events. These happenings. They’re like a face tattoos. Face tattoos close a lot of doors in professional careers, but they also narrow you to the doors you really want to get into. If it helps me connect with like-minded people in the global scale, then for me this is a net gain.