Sawbuck Gamer

First Person Tutor

Graders Gonna Hate

First Person Tutor turns the humble red pen into a weapon of vengeance.

By John Teti • July 5, 2012

Sawbuck Gamer is our daily review of a free or cheap ($10 or less) game.

First Person Tutor: A Game Of Grading
Creator: Blueboo
Platforms: Browser
Price: Free

Who’s the villain in First Person Tutor? The most obvious candidate is Dr. Nathaniel Paynuss, the lazy, bitter professor who trolls Facebook for stray mentions of himself and then exacts vengeance on those who cross him. Everybody hates Prof. Paynuss—“he smells like the orifice he rhymes with,” says one Facebook update—and so everybody get an F-minus.

Yet the students don’t cover themselves in glory, either. Their essays are riddled with spelling and grammatical errors. As Paynuss’ teaching assistant, it’s your job to find those mistakes and mark the grades down accordingly, torpedoing GPAs with a few swishes of your red pen. This angry tedium constitutes the entire game. It’s hard to have sympathy for these kids, though. While everyone mispells a word from time to time, there remains the fact that these essays are glorified fourth-grade book reports, exploring subjects like the “Jigglypuff” monster from Pokémon. Somehow, after writing such pap, these inbred simpletons of privilege have the temerity to whine on Facebook about the derelictions of their professor?

In the end, perhaps you’re the true villain. You can make excuses for the things you do in the name of Paynuss—you have student loans to pay off, after all—but the reality is that you’re a tool of spite. As the game advances and the time to grade each paper grows shorter, it’s not practical to attempt even a cursory reading anymore—instead, you have to just skim for mistakes. So in your hands, the words lose their final vestige of meaning, and academia completes its slide into petty warfare. Of course, maybe you won’t try to finish the game. Maybe you’ll take a stand, put down your red pen, and declare that “just following orders” is no excuse for sacrificing your dignity. If so, you’re a better person than I. Forgive me, readers, for I have graded.

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