Real world social game Shadow Government gets $1 million in funding

Developer Playmatics has announced that it has received $1 million in investment funding for an intriguing upcoming game called Shadow Government. A social game with real world elements, the game will use economic and sustainability data combined with government-modeling software, to create realistic virtual governements for players to manage.

Playmatics is probably best known as the developer behind the excellent online game Breaking Bad: The Interrogation, but Shadow Government appears to be a much more ambitious project.

“We see Shadow Government advancing a future genre in gaming,” Playmatics CEO Margaret Wallace told TechCrunch. “It’s not a ‘serious game,’ really, because we aim to design an entertainment experience. People can use Shadow Government to destroy their own little country, or to wreak havoc where they can. We won’t impose ideas like you have to clean up the environment to advance a level. We want to see an array of behavior and ideas.

“We will be able to incorporate real world news and data, sometimes in real-time. We could take a different world-focus [with the game content] depending on what is going on in the world, asking players to create scenarios around the crisis in Japan, or the conflict in Libya, for example.”

Shadow Government will be coming to Facebook, but no word yet on when we can expect to run our very own virtual governments. You can follow the game’s development of the official Facebook pageor website.

Andrew Webster