How to Rob a Bank annoyed me in the way things that remind you too keenly of yourself can irk someone. To quote the kids, it made me feel “cringey”. The games exploration of “how to” culture was the most compelling way in which the interactive story toyed with the technological pitfalls of our present moment, wherein the abundance of information plays surrogate to individual agency. The disastrous lack of self-reliance, problem solving, and dynamic thinking in today’s age where seemingly there is a literal manual for most things (including, as we’re shown by Elizabeth’s searches, a manual for raising children) became the fundamental crux of the story. Ted Armstrong, the protagonist, relies on his phone to tell him anything from robbing a bank to how he should feel about someone. The identities of the characters, Elizabeth, ted, and Deb, materialize through their mediated presences. If you could read a persons life, could you do it through their search history? The game seems to say so in a tongue in cheek sort of way. There’s a quasi-epistolary nature to story that aids in this. If we were to track the evolutions of “journaling” as a historical through-line, “How to Rob a Bank” seems to be a false archive of a current propensity to search first, and think later.
The game provides a seemingly unresolved discourse regarding criminality and morality. Deborah’s self aggrandizing and proselytizing personality, position Ted and Elizabeth in the right. However all characters seem to function like pixelations–they’re cartoon-like, lending the piece to a kind of satire of modern crime dramas that’s borderline unbelievable. Elizabeth’s frivolity I think bothered me the most in this respect: from her baby journaling, to her ditsy diatribe, she was barely a character. The parodic nature of the game left its reader in a kind of ethical purgatory–made more so apparent by Ted’s incessant use of the “morality” app.
However, while the individual human characters fell flat on the page (err. phone), the game seems to offer that it’s the ease of technology, the unlimited access of information, that’s the true criminal mastermind behind the bank robberies.