Conscientious Objector uses both the Doom 3 (idtech4) engine and the first three levels of the commercial game. These levels have been gutted and a new game experience built inside them.

The gameplay is very simple in concept. The shotgun will knock zombies down, but not for long. Rather than the usual FPS dynamic - the player goes around removing agents from the world by killing them, CoB deals the player an ever-increasingly complicated environment. You can outrun the zombies or blast them out of your way, but they will keep on coming, following you around the levels in larger and larget packs. The normal strategy for gameplay is dispensed with - there is no reward for succesful play in the normal sense, only a building panic as the agents stack up and the ammo runs short.

The overall aim was to fuse the kind of high-octane gameplay normally found in shooters with a totally different kind of experience. On top of that, the politics of the game are summed up by Carl, the game's NPC in one radio communication to the player: "any dickhead can fire a gun". Conscientious Objector highlights just how easy it is to get out of a sticky situation when you have a loaded weapon: it takes real brains and skill to get out without falling back on deadly force.

Besides, we wanted this to be a game that didn't compromise gameplay. We didn't want to make a mod that was academically interesting but could be written off by Doom fans as a non-game. In a sense, we're following in the footsteps of recent commercial games like Blacksite and Bioshock - on opposing ends of the quality spectrum, but both trying to push a political message along with the gameplay. Conscientious Objector is probably a little more explicit than either, but we hope is nearer the latter in terms of being an enjoyable experience.

The game wears its politics on it's sleeve. The player is a left-wing convict jailed because he wouldn't fight. Carl, the voice of the dominant politics of a normal shooter openly hates them and derides this at any given opportunity. The PDAs found around the environment are packed full of the suppression of unionisation, the abuse of the individual worker by the corporation and the petty power struggles carried out to deflect attention from the overarching oppression.

Finally, there's a second experiment in the mod. Normally, FPS games feature heroes or, at the least, anti-heroes. Players are told they are great, or powerful. Instead, Carl pours scorn and derision on the player: he criticises their ability to shoot, points out how pointless actually hitting a zombie is, and offers plenty of advice on how the player can end it all if they want to. We wanted to see how players reacted to being openly insulted, abused and belittled, on top of an increasingly hopeless situation.