It was only a matter of time until someone came up with a game based around the Strait of Hormuz, the waterway that has spent the last couple of months in a perpetual quantum superposition of “open” and “closed.” In fairness, Bottleneck isn’t the first Hormuz-themed game—Sweep the Strait, a Minesweeper clone played on a Straits-shaped board, appeared within a couple of weeks of the first attacks on Iran in late February—but it’s probably the most in-depth such game we’ve seen so far.
Given that it’s a free, browser-based game, you might expect Bottleneck to be something light-hearted and silly—like the aforementioned Sweep the Strait or the immortal GETSADAM, surely the first ever ripped-from-the-headlines game. But no. This game is serious, both in tone and in subject matter.
The game places you in the shoes of the Strait’s maritime coordinator at the start of a hypothetical 10-day closure. As your tenure begins, you’re greeted by 2000 ships backed up and waiting for passage. Only a handful can run the gauntlet from the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Oman each day, and you’re the one who gets to decide which ships these will be.
Each day, you’re presented with a roster of potential candidates, containing information about their cargo, capacity, destination, and how long it’s been waiting, along with an analysis of what’ll happen if you authorize its passage. Letting an oil tanker through might knock down the global price of crude oil and improve your relationship with the USA, but it might also mean that a ship carrying a bunch of food to India has to wait another day, increasing the risk of famine and upsetting the UN.
As the game progresses, more obstacles present themselves: mines appear in the strait, and getting rid of them isn’t as easy as planting a little 8-bit flag on them and moving on. Ships with perishable cargo left to wait too long will become humanitarian disasters. Someone has to find the money to pay Iran’s $2m-per-ship toll. Washington and Tehran trade insults, and the “Escalation” meter rises.
You soon realize that you’re not going to solve this crisis—all you can really do is try to ameliorate its effects as best you can. In this respect, Bottleneck reminds me a little of Frostpunk, another game where the best you can accomplish is making the best bad decision. But, of course, Frostpunk’s setting—a post-apocalyptic nuclear winter where starving and/or freezing to death are one mistake away—is fictional. Bottleneck’s is not, and its real-life roots are emphasized throughout. Clicking on one of the in-game stakeholder factions, for instance, takes you to a dossier of real-life information. The game’s news feed is populated with real articles on the US–Iran war and its results.
The focus on IRL journalism is perhaps no surprise given that the game’s creator is himself a journalist: Polish reporter Jakub Górnicki, whose work has taken him to Ukraine, Rojava, and the US-Mexican border. Górnicki’s blog post about the game makes for fascinating reading. He explains, “The point [of Bottleneck] is not to win. The point is to understand what kind of problem this is, and why the word ‘chokepoint’ is not just a metaphor. It is a physical condition with political, economic, and human consequences.” More generally, he discusses how the project is part of a larger focus in his work, which is to find new “containers” for journalism: “What other containers can reporting live inside? Sometimes the answer is a stage. Sometimes it is an exhibition. Sometimes it is a wall in the city. This time it is a browser game.”
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