Capitalist and communist videogames

Philippines
March 10, 2007 11:08am CST
We've got all these strategy geopolitical games, from Civilization to Tropico to Hearts of Iron, etc. In all these you get to manage a nation, decide for various parameters, agriculture, research, industry, political system, armies... You often can set your political system on "capitalist", "libertarian", "communist", "fascist" and get maluses and bonuses accordingly (research boost, army boost, etc). But actually, is there any of these games that allow you to NOT simulate a communist system? In all of them, you're one guy, taking decisions on the nation's behalf (ok, that's already a dictatorship : if you "played" a democracy, you'd just sit back and watch AI populations decide for you), you plan globally economical strategies for the good of your country, you shift ressources, you set five-years-plans, build factories, corn fields, in order to rationally maximize your production, and your population's well-being. Hey, whatever your "political button" shows, it's communism isn't it? If it was capitalism (to a high degree), all your buttons would be greyed out, while your country woulkd either develop or collapse, fragmented in auto-regulated mini-AIs caring for themselves, in micro-unmanaged internal wars. The game would cease to be interactive. Are there games that assume that, that grey out buttons, or do they all take as granted that in capitalism there could be one collective intention caring for the global entity? Or make you play the role of chance, or Adam Smith's god? I think not. I think that all these games, even if you get nifty bonuses for playing the fashionable way, are, unwillingly, by definition, founded on a communist approach of politics. Exactly like most other games (like shooters that put you alone versus billions of virtual unimportant beings, and make you crush them in order to get enough points to invest in a more efficient weapon to crush them more) are based on capitalist structures.
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aries_0325
@aries_0325 (3060)
• Philippines
10 Mar 07
I don't think it's inherently communist, though there is more of a mild socialism in games like Civilization where you decide to build public structures like hospitals and sanitation facilities. Still, the closest thing would be a dictatorship, obviously, since you're the one in control. That concept can be incorporated into a capitalist function though, at least in terms of end result. Perhaps it's not that you're building a hospital so much as offering economic incentives for healthcare to set up. The end result either way is that a hospital is built and you paid something for it. How it got there is not important from a gameplay perspective. It could be that the socialist model is simply a more straight-forward means to the same end. It did give me an odd idea though. What if there were a game like Civilization that were actually multiplayer cooperative? You would have multiple people on a board making joint decisions, voting, managing their own sections of the nation. Then there would be the multi-multiplayer co-op where every nation involved is controlled by another eight or so people. It'd introduce another whole layer of gameplay; intra-nation politics. There'd be infighting, defections, bribes, all sorts of fun stuff... Though it'd still be controlled like The Patriots a la MGS2.