New Delhi: A 27-year-old IT professional has built a new game — Jantar Mantar Chalo — after watching news coverage of the recent calls for “Jantar Mantar 2.0”. He wanted to build a 3D game in which players would have to dodge the police and find their way to the protest site.
A plate of golgappas can restore your stamina. A gamchha can help you evade CCTV cameras. And if the media crew you encounter turns out to be “Godi media”, members of your protest march might get brainwashed and leave.
These are some of the obstacles in Jantar Mantar Chalo, a video game that turns the struggle to reach Delhi’s protest site into a satirical exercise in dodging the police, building a crowd and avoiding detention. Its creator, Suraj Kushwah, spent two sleepless nights developing the game.
“I was watching news of current protests. A lot of people were trying to reach Jantar Mantar and they were finding different ways,” Kushwah said. “I had this concept and it’s kind of like a dark humour for me, so I thought let’s just build a game.”
Based in Bareilly, Kushwah, goes by the instagram username bugswriter, works as a DevOps engineer at oneplay.in and runs a Linux-focused YouTube channel. Although he had studied game design in college, he used AI tools for some of the coding and other tools for art design. The gameplay concept and design, he said, were his own, inspired by the game Slither.
After initially wondering whether it would take off, Kushwah posted a reel that went viral, followed by shares from influencers. The number of players online was consistently exceeding 1,500 when he spoke to ThePrint, he said.
Players can choose to be an andolankari (protester) or the Delhi Police. For protesters, the goal is to reach Jantar Mantar, build a large enough kafila (procession), break through barricades and stage a dharna at the centre of the site for as long as possible. Players click on people to recruit them, with a larger procession making it easier to advance.
The police have a different objective: prevent the protesters from getting there. Players can use lathis and tear gas, detain protesters and load them into police buses.
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A gamified image of the protest
The obstacles are not limited to police personnel. Pop-up notifications announce that DMRC gates have been closed or a lathi charge has taken place. Internet connectivity can disappear, adding another complication to the march. Players can be detained and transported to locations such as Narela or the Kapeshera border, forcing them to find their way back.
The game also draws attention to the infrastructure surrounding protests, including temporary detention centres. Its streets are littered with potholes and garbage spilling out of dustbins, while cows obstruct the way. A chai stall offers a brief pause, and stopping at a golgappa stall restores the player’s stamina.
At the bottom of the screen, a ticker carries its own running commentary on the absurdities surrounding a protest. One update reads: “Tear gas shells found past expiry date, protesters file consumer complaint.” Another says: “paper leak probe report also leaked, officials confirm..”
Then there are the smaller jokes that players might miss on a first attempt. CCTV cameras in the game do a terrible job of identifying people. Pick up a gamchha, and they will fail to recognise you. A Gurudwara offers a safe space, just as it did during the protests.
Media organisations are another part of the gameplay. When players encounter a media house, there is a 50 per cent chance it will be independent media and a 50 per cent chance it will be what Kushwah calls “Godi media”. The latter causes some members of the kafila to become “brainwashed” and leave; independent media, on the other hand, brings more people into the procession.
These details, Kushwah said, are the small jokes he wanted players to discover as they spend more time in the game.
Kushwah said he was not present at the protests himself, although he supported them. He described the game as politically neutral, even as its mechanics draw on debates about policing, media coverage and the right to protest.
He is already testing an update with further gameplay changes. One proposed addition would allow players who have built a sufficiently large kafila to take control of police vans and use them to rescue detained protesters. Other changes include additional characters and new details.
The unexpected response has left Kushwah juggling the technical side of the game, increasing server capacity as more players arrive and keeping an eye on the comments. He said he had not slept the night the game launched. Initially, when there was little response, he thought the project might not work. Then the reel took off. Before launching it, however, he had already told a friend what he expected to happen.
“I was damn sure this will go viral,” he said.