Britain’s housing crisis has been turned into a spoof arcade game where players have to dodge second-home owners and foreign investors to “buy a house or die trying”.
The Housing Ladder slot machine, by the Suffolk-based cartoonist and inventor Tim Hunkin, uses treadmill steps on an actual ladder to move an automated figure towards the prize of a house encrusted in fake diamonds.
If players take a step when a housing villain appears, the automated climber slides to the bottom. Villains include a developer clasping a mobile phone, and a buy-to-let landlord with a tenancy agreement.
The game has three skill levels depending on resources: hard for no savings, quite easy for “bank of mummy and daddy” and “easy peasy” for offshore funds. And there’s an age gauge that signals “game over” if you don’t reach the house by the time you are 80.
The Housing Ladder will be unveiled at Hunkin’s London alternative arcade, Novelty Automation, on Thursday.
It will eventually be installed at his Under the Pier show in Southwold on the Suffolk coast where Hunkin says it was “battle hardened” this summer to “iron out problems”. Other games on the pier include his “whack a banker game” and a mobility masterclass where players try to cross a motorway using a zimmer frame.
The pier also includes Hunkin’s scatological water clock where metal figures spit and urinate at each other every 15 minutes.
Hunkin’s latest game takes a swipe at affluent incomers who have priced locals out of the Suffolk housing market. One of the baddies in the game is a second-home owner clasping a “I love Southwold” bag.
He said The Housing Ladder was inspired by the plight of young people trying to find a home in London. “I employ several part-timers to man Novelty Automation and their tales of trying to find somewhere to live are crazy. They have to move out of London because of it,” he told the Guardian.
“I don’t think political art has an enormous effect, but in the short term it is satisfying to reinforce people’s disrespect of the villains.”
Hunkin’s grandchildren tested prototypes of the machine.
In a blog post about the project he said: “The press is curiously quiet about second homes, maybe because so many journalists own one.”
He added: “Large developments are supposed to include a proportion of ‘affordable’ homes. Not only are the ‘affordable’ homes still unaffordable, but developers frequently mange to reduce the proportion on appeal.
“Entire London squares are now dark at night because no one lives there. London property has become a magnet for money laundering.”
Speaking to the Guardian he added: “It is in the tradition of popular art. As a cartoonist it is important that people get the joke. I’m not trying to be subtle. London has a wonderful tradition of popular entertainment going back to the 1600s, and it’s all got a bit corporate.
“I love all that Hogarth stuff. If the 18th-century cartoonists were alive now they might be doing something a bit like Novelty Automation. That’s what I aspire to. It is very rich territory, I don’t know why more people don’t explore it.”
Hunkin rose to prominence in the 1980s in the television series the Secret Life of Machines for Channel 4 in which he explained the workings of household appliances with animations.
Hunkin’s London arcade, which has been running for more than two years, is funded from the proceeds of customers paying to play the satirical slot machines.
He said: “Its an amusement arcade to entertain people, it just about breaks even. You put tokens in to make the machines work, and the tokens cost one or two pounds each. But its expensive having a place in central London.”
He gave a preview of future attractions: “I’m making a machine about phone obsession at the moment called iZombie, and I’ve got an idea about Airbnb as well, and immigration. There is so much potential out there.”
