In March this year, it was revealed that the British political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica had obtained data collected from tens of thousands of Facebook accounts to build a system that could create individual profiles and sway voters with personalised political advertisements. It proved to be another worrying example of the way online information is used by a system we have no knowledge of; a reminder of people’s complete lack of awareness of how their personal information is used and manipulated by powerful institutions.

Orwell, an ongoing video game series, makes obvious what is hidden: that mass surveillance and data harvesting can be used in sinister ways that go further than just advertising profiles, to regulate and govern our behaviour in ways we don’t realise. It asks players to question systems of surveillance while giving an insight into our complicity within these structures.

Under surveillance … a screenshot from Orwell: Ignorance is Strength. Photograph: Osmotic Studios

Developer Osmotic Studios has released two episodic Orwell games. The first, Orwell: Keeping an Eye on You, was released in October 2016, and the follow-up Orwell: Ignorance Is Strength began in February this year. Both take place in a country called The Nation, which has recently been the centre of a terrorist attack. As a direct reaction, the government has initiated a top secret security program, Orwell, a surveillance system designed to keep its citizens “safe”. You play as a government investigator whose job is to create personal profiles of potential terror suspects through accessing both their public and personal information.

It's up to you to decide if an online outburst is just an in-the-moment rant, or anti-government hate speech

Through the Orwell software, you must collect snippets of information called “datachunks”, found by researching a person’s social media accounts and dragging and dropping useful information into their file. But that’s not all: Orwell allows you to access bank accounts, medical records, even to delve into citizens’ personal text messages and listen in on their phone conversations. With Orwell in place, nothing is private.

As the human side of this digital system, you choose which information you discover is important to your investigation. It’s up to you to decide if a person’s online outburst is just an in-the-moment rant, or anti-government hate speech. Are these students simply activists, or could they be a terror organisation? The choices you make change the direction and conclusion of the game’s narrative. You have to make moral and ethical decisions about mass surveillance, data harvesting and personal privacy.

We’re listening … outburst or activism? Photograph: Osmotic Studios

While the first series focuses on data harvesting and reflects on the unearthed truths of Edward Snowden’s whistleblowing, the second series, Orwell: Ignorance is Strength, goes on to explore societal control. Here, the Orwell system has been upgraded and now includes an “Influencer” tool that allows you to create fabricated narratives you can leak on to social media, mainly through “Blabber”, the game’s equivalent of Twitter. Through this you can spread a story that could destroy the reputation of families and influential people who oppose the government, exposing their private life to the public. The game shows the narrative, or tweet, becoming popular, and highlights how planting a small seed of manipulated information can lead to a huge number of people changing their views.

Although Orwell is a piece of fiction, it acts as a cautionary tale about what is happening in our lives right now. Time and time again, we are informed of powerful governing forces such as Britain’s GCHQ and the United States’ NSA using our personal data in creepy and invasive ways. Fear is the instigator for introducing these invasive systems. What happens in Orwell is not far removed from what real corporations and institutions are doing: Cambridge Analytica wasn’t just focused on surface-layer data, but also used that data to create psychological profiles used in turn to create content that an individual was personally receptive to. The idea was that repeated exposure to this customised content can influence our political and ideological views.

A question of influence … Orwell: Ignorance is Strength. Photograph: Osmotic Studios

The Orwell games capture the broad implications of mass manipulation, and invite us to reflect on our own complicity with these systems. It confronts us with the question of who has the most influence: news outlets, social media, governments or corporations? And how distinct are these institutions from each other?

George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four depicted an oppressive totalitarian state where civilians had no choice but to ignorantly obey its power structures. The Orwell games highlight that in real life; ours is a self-surveillance society with willing participants. With the growth of smart technology, we continue to grow more accustomed to being surveyed. We give our personal information away to social networks, phone apps, websites – and even though the extent of this information is now common knowledge, we aren’t stopping.

Orwell is part of a growing and important genre of political video games that address contemporary issues and concerns within our society. It places the player in a position of power and puts them at the centre of moral and ethical dichotomies, making them reflect on real-life institutional abuse and manipulation of information. Most of all, they show how worryingly complicit we are within these systems.