Video games find their political voice

[DBoon]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3604940.stm

Quoting:

For activists who cannot take to the streets, the organisation's website, Molleindustria, or "soft industry", has offered them the virtual equivalent.

There, they can take part in an online MayDay parade which allows people to add to the throng and stylise their own marching demonstrator in an avatar form.

...

Their online game, Tamatipico, gives players their very own employee whom they have to keep happy to maintain production. Fail to give your worker enough sleep or time in front of the TV and he calls in sick or goes on strike.

...

The producers of these games are developing a sort of gaming counter-culture, seeing themselves as the latest in a line of political satirists playfully poking fun at passers-by or at those in power.

I'm waiting to see "class struggle" as a video game.

[0rganism]

1. Haha, I can see it now! Sim Protest!

You have several different types of protestors, from peaceful hippies to anarchist thugs, and your mission is to deploy them around Sim City in such a way that you effectively sway public opinion. Too much violence, and people get mad at your cause. Too little resistence, and they don't take you seriously.

The computer, of course, challenges you with politicians, regulations, various types of police, and the occasional counterdemonstrator.

I think this could be the next frisbee...

[Chovexani]

3. Remember the rioters in the Sim City games?

If your approval rating sank low enough mobs of rioting protesters would pop up everywhere. It was pretty funny.

Of course that never happened to me, I was always the best mayor ever. O8)

[Chovexani]

2. Class struggle

Class struggle and corporate oligarchy were prominent themes in the plot of Final Fantasy 7. The major city in the game, Midgar, was a city built on a giant plate and ruled by a Halliburton-esque energy company called Shinra. The rich and powerful elites lived on top of the plate, while the poor and downtrodden suffered underneath in the city slums, where the plate blocked out the sky. Midgar was on paper a democratically ruled city, but the mayor was a puppet of the Shinra corporation who literally twiddled his thumbs in the Shinra HQ's library. The company owned the media and painted anyone who opposed its policies as terrorists (including the main characters of the game). They operated their own private army. Worst of all they were literally sucking the life out of the planet (they call it Mako energy) in order to line their pockets. At one point Shinra even dropped a section of the city's plate, crushing everyone in the Sector 7 slums, because Avalanche (the anti-Shinra freedom fighter group) had its base there. Tellingly, the president of Shinra used the media to turn the people of Midgar against Avalanche, blaming them for the "accident".

One of the first games I can remember that got into class struggle was another Squaresoft RPG, an old classic called Chrono Trigger. The heroes travel through time in order to save the world, and at one point they go back in time to 12,000 B.C. The kingdom of Zeal exists in an ice age, and a small, ivory tower elite of sages and scholars live in floating paradise cities while the unwashed masses huddle in frozen caves on the ground. Queen Zeal is a despot, and it turns out that the magical paradises the sky-dwellers live in are actually powered by something called the Mammon Machine (and how's that for symbolism), which Zeal created and draws its energy from a malevolent being sleeping in the earth (and Zeal's egalitarian-leaning daughter Schala, who has special powers). The interesting part comes when the heroes overthrow Zeal with the help of Schala, and the floating cities come crashing down to earth. Suddenly everyone is suffering in the cold, but strangely enough the masses aren't resentful, they extended hands of friendship towards the sky-dwellers. And the sky-dwellers themselves grew to have an appreciation for how the cave-dwellers lived all those years.

If you really want to get into class struggle though, check out PC strategy games. Tropico is a particularly interesting one...you play the ruler of a fictional banana republic in the Caribbean and basically rule the island as you see fit. If you do nothing but cater to the elite Tropicans and ignore the needs of the lower classes (build nothing but fancy, expensive restaurants for instance and make all the poor factory workers live in shacks and work in sweatshop conditions, for instance), they actually run off into the jungle and start guerilla resistance movements against you. A big chunk of the formula is the salary divide between rich and poor...the bigger it grows, the more the lower class begins to hate you. It's a fascinating game, and a lot of fun.

[DBoon]

4. Class Struggle was a board game way back in the 1970s

I never played it, but I knew some Marxists who really liked it (these were the type of Marxists who weren't so dogmatic they couldn't laugh at themselves, as opposed to the RCP type of Marxists).

I thought it would be interesting if this specific game had been adapted to computers, or at least something similar that had class struggle as the main element.

A game that deals with class struggle as a strategic thing, with different socail classes, alliances, decisions whether to go on strike, etc. would be interesting

[Chovexani]

5. That sounds neat.

Before my time, but I'll have to ask one of my old timey board game aficionado friends if they've got a copy. It sounds interesting.

[DBoon]

6. Found it online...

Google is your friend..

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/article/41342

I loved this review:

“More fun than Das Kapital” – Paul Sweezy, Monthly Review

Anything that does not put you straight to sleep is more fun than Das Kapital

and:

http://www.nyu.edu/projects/ollman/docs/bb_rev.php

"In 1978, Bertell Ollman, a professor in the Department of Politics at NYU and one of America's leading Marxist philosophers, created a board game called CLASS STRUGGLE that pits capitalists against workers in a race to ally with minor classes and win elections, general strikes and the revolution."