How political satirist Kris Lorischild targets titans with Twine: "In a world of Call Of Duty, be a Disco Elysium"
Elon Musk at a rally for Donald Trump's second presidential inauguration at the Capital One Arena, Washington DC, January 20, 2025
This article was originally published on April 10, 2026 - read the full issue
By Patrick Garratt
"I think billionaires shouldn't exist, point blank; their proliferation in our society is a reflection of a moral and legal breakdown."
Kris Lorischild, the sole creator of 2018's You Are Jeff Bezos (YAJB) and this year's follow-up, You Are Elon Musk (YAEM), will not be quiet. Their satirical Twine projects have become benchmark games in underlining the folly of unfettered capitalism, having for object the task of spending, and therefore contextualising, the billionaires' wealth.
The original You Are Jeff Bezos drew hundreds of user comments on Itch.io (a rarity) and significant press coverage despite being built in less than five days, even attracting mainstream media attention. Its sequel, the just-released You Are Elon Musk, holds a 4.6/5 rating on Itch.io.
Lorischild didn't expect the 2018 game to do anything, let alone end up on Newsweek.
"YAJB's success completely blindsided me," they tell Knowledge. "It was written in about five days and was intended to be enjoyed only by my immediate circle of friends."
The sequel, which Lorischild released to Itch.io in March this year, hasn't attained the same virality thus far. But Lorischild is well aware of the ephemeral nature of this type of success, especially after making the social media shift to Bluesky.
"I certainly wanted You Are Elon Musk to appeal to the same people who had helped spread You Are Jeff Bezos, so I did consciously hew close to the original in terms of the game's verbs, playtime, and overall look," they say. "I knew better than to assume I could catch lightning in a bottle again and go viral twice, but the response has been respectable, given Bluesky's much smaller audience."
The games originated from Lorischild's luckless job hunt in 2018.
"In terms of return on investment, it was an easy calculation: in the case of both games, I wasn't making any headway with job applications, so I had infinite time and incredibly limited funds," says Lorischild. "Like a lot of creatives, I suffer from low self-esteem and don't value my free time very highly, so any amount of return on an investment of time would probably feel worthwhile."
For Lorischild, the value of these projects is largely pedagogical. These games, rather obviously, are not made for financial profit.
"You Are Jeff Bezos is taught in high schools and universities around the world because it's a small, uncomplicated Twine game, the basic structure of which can be replicated by a beginner in about five minutes," they say. "It's often an object lesson in games as rhetorical tools, I would argue for the same reason: it doesn't couch itself in metaphors or try to build a 1:1 functional economy; it states its purpose and moral viewpoint quite clearly."
You Are Elon Musk (2026), Kris Lorischild
Addressing international capitalism with Twine: a cheat sheet
These projects are a form of praxis, so if you're reading this thinking, 'I'd absolutely like to use Twine and Bluesky to try build a better world in a low-budget, educational fashion,' you're in the right place. Asked how a studio might build on the concept, Lorischild is happy to give advice you can absolutely follow as an individual:
Don't be scared of "politics": "You can differentiate yourself from other creators by speaking plainly and openly about a game's intended message and not shying from that in the press. Too often I see senior developers swear up and down in interviews that a game with a clear political bent is 'not political,' and all that tells me as a consumer is that the game's message will be muddled at best, cowardly at worst. In a world of Call Of Duty, be a Disco Elysium."
Forget complexity: "The simpler, the better. No, simpler than that. No, simpler than that. Take however many verbs you're thinking of using and cut them in half, at least. Your game does not need to be a 1:1 simulation to be engrossing, it just needs to do one thing in an entertaining way. Once you've got that one thing down, you can worry about adding others."
Slow and steady wins the race: "Iteration doesn't need to take great strides to be meaningful. One of the biggest differences between You Are Jeff Bezos and You Are Elon Musk is how I handled citations, which emerged from conversations with educators who taught the game. That was a simple and straightforward change that made a material difference in how real-life sources were surfaced in the game's text."
Press on Twine's native advantages: "Twine, thankfully, is a highly visual format, so it's easy to arrange the nodemap to gauge the length and pacing of a scene even at a glance. At 210 passages, You Are Elon Musk is roughly as long as You Are Jeff Bezos – 184 passages – so I always had that as a useful model as well. I knew the 'menu' format would lead to a certain number of passages for each phase, and I knew it should only have four to five phases to roughly match the play time of the original. Twine thrives on simplicity. Most of the 210 passages are split into reaction sets which belong to one of You Are Elon Musk's phases. Very little of the game is spent on its logic, which is almost exclusively booleans and a tiny bit of JavaScript. Quite frankly, the reason for this is that I'm not much of a programmer and I have little interest in complexity that doesn't advance a story."
When it comes to satire, less is more: "Within brevity lies humour. Twine lends itself to humour automatically. I never thought consciously about balancing satire with systemic clarity because if you ask me they emerge from the same point."
This article was originally published on April 10, 2026 - read the full issue