How about Capitalism: The Video Game? Designed within the framework of Marxist social and economic theory, this game would be organized around the interplay of the state, law, morality, economy, the environment, technology, ideology, population dynamics, infrastructure, and the triad of production, distribution, and consumption, as well as the incredibly different logics of C-M-C and M-C-M and how the interplay of these two logics reinforce certain collective structures.. It would plot the point where contradictions or crises emerge within a system and how they function. The nature side wouldn’t simply look at the impact of capitalism on nature but would also include random events and crises, plotting how the relations respond to these eruptions. The game could even run from primitive accumulation to advanced capitalism and beyond. And perhaps one could play the simulation from either the point of a capitalist in pursuit of ever receding surplus-value or a worker attempting to survive this system.
April 26, 2010
April 26, 2010 at 11:24 am
We’re playing it every day. :)
More to the point: it would be difficult to create a smooth space where these logics could play themselves out without including a simulation of the entire world.
As a programmer i’ve been having similar thoughts, but it’s simply very hard to find simple enough programs to make these machines function.
Just programming the rules of marxist economy into the program would not be enough to go beyond, and might not even be enough to actually get something interesting at all, since you could never capture the Real (and it’s break-intos) underlying these rules.
Games dealing with simpler emergent economies would however be very interesting. But most strategy games are very striated (This is a tank, this is a supply building), severely limiting what machines can be made to work in it.
April 26, 2010 at 1:37 pm
I like yours a lot, Levi, though I think it may be too broad. I’d like to see one to promote an Anti-Shock Doctrine. The first player to turn the lemons of natural or man-made disaster into lemonade, wins!
April 26, 2010 at 6:10 pm
Agreed Kristoffer. It would have to be a simplified model. However I don’t know that it would be too difficult to program the logics of the pursuit of surplus value, the tendency towards the centralization of capital and the immiseration of capital. Other economic games are all about becoming uber-wealthy. This game would, by contrast, model the impact of this pursuit on the working class, geographical development, and the environment, as well as bow the processes generate certain group formations. If one played as a capitalist they would constantly deal with worker uprising, the pursuit of resources, government regulation, and competition that pushes towards technologization. If played as a worker one struggle would be how to organize to improve conditions and how phenomenon like large unemployment numbers make this difficult.
April 26, 2010 at 6:12 pm
I also think it would be really fun to set it in science fiction environments with alien species and worlds as well as alien resources.
April 26, 2010 at 6:18 pm
Additionally the capitalist would face the question of how to get goods consumed while diminishing wages in the pursuit of surplus value. Notice that most other economic games all assume readily available consumers.