Even the very rudimentary toy model of an economy present in Vicky lays bare all the contradictions of Capitalism. I think one thing that breaks strategy and sim gamer’s brains is that there’s not actually any economy in most games, and so the only thing they are familiar with is the kind of unitary accounting of basic input/output that is the “economy” of most games.
Well, games tend to have incredibly low barriers to economic entry and little in the way of maintenance or upkeep. Warcraft starts you out with five peons and a gold mine, right at your doorstep. Sim City starts you with abundant lucrative-to-develop free real estate and a bunch of low-interest loans, then extracts wealth continuously from the native terrain more-or-less indefinitely. Civilization and Age of Empires plop you down into a resource rich wilderness. Everything on the Monopoly board starts out as vacant, profitable, and for-sale.
Then the conflict is primarily between Player Commanders (or AI-controlled NPC Commanders). You’re rarely struggling to “beat the board” or wrangle the restive unit tokens from whom you’re trying to extract wealth. Your big threats are always adjacent and external. Nobody in Warcraft ever experiences a coup because their pig-farms pull in a bad harvest. But also, nobody plays these games once the board’s resource pools have been exhausted. The game resolves. The End of History is reached. You win or you lose and then you start back from scratch again.
One of the “realistic” aspects of Paradox Games (and other historical 4X games) is that there is often an internal domestic struggle within your own board position. The games tend to be long and develop out over iterative cycles. Maxing out the board space comes relatively early and precipitates a higher degree of tension rather than a resolution. And players do eventually have to wrangle with soft ceilings on materials and manpower, the social ramifications of random historical changes, the politics of succession, etc.
Capitalism works great when history can just end and declare you the winner. Capitalism doesn’t work when you’re forced to keep talking about next cycle.
Monopoly should start with one player controlling 80% of the board and then be a competition between the remaining players paying rents to the one to buy one of the remaining 20%.
You could also add a mechanic where wages could be earned from a landowner by staying on one tile that equal to the rent of the tile plus $1 or something.
Honestly more in line with the original utopian socialist bent of the game where you play in reverse with progressive taxation after one player wins out and watch the redistribution of land.
The original socialist take on the game was cooperative, with the goal being to develop the board in as few turns as possible.
Even then, its just kinda a bad game. The co-op version is still heavily random. The competitive side has much of the outcome predicated on a handful of trades made halfway through, with RNG determining early position and everything after the big swap being functionally settled.
You could make it quicker and more pleasant to play by shrinking the border and offering players more decision-making agency apart from buy/sell/trade on wherever you land.
Life extension technology is when capitalism’s execesses will finally dawn on most people. Having 200 year old trillionaires is going to be a hoot.
is that ever really gonna happen though? it seems more likely it’s impossible for our time and it’s driving the existential anxiety of our octogenarian billionaires
Humans are getting really, really good at computational chemistry and all life is about balancing a system of chemical equilibria. So maybe?
Computationally, we might be close. Practically, probably going to be awhile. There are aspects common to all life about the molecular machinery of DNA/RNA/protein synthesis that biology still does not have good models for yet . Without accurate models of the entire human proteome engineering to significantly reverse or delay aging is next to impossible - it would be shooting largely in the dark.
There were many novels, comic books, TV shows, radio programs, and movies before humans actually had the Apollo program to the Moon. 100’s of years of them. No idea where we are on that time scale now. We could be in the 1950’s during the Space Race or we could be in the 1850’s before even planes were invented, and gliders were the highest technology of the time.
Hot take: Disco Elysium and Victoria 3 have done more to radicalize folks than AOC.
Neither of those games can betray you by voting to bomb a foreign country.
This teaches those paying attention about social democracy and what wing of fascism it is (objectively the moderate one)
Victoria 4 will fix this.
:michael-laugh: perfect!
