Can a video game teach you to hate capitalism?

 

 

Can a video game teach people to reject capitalism in favor of more progressive (aka “socialist”) values? 

That’s a question posed by a recent article from a writer from The Guardian.

farmvilleThe article proposes a game devoid of any capitalism, eschewing a selfish ‘slash-and-grab economy’ found in typical games for something the author describes as actually less fun than Farmville, which also gets painted with the “all video games are free market propaganda” brush.

I never thought of Mario as an evil Ayn Rand character-type, stealing mushrooms from community property in order to steal back Princess Peach from a dragon-turtle beast instead of simply negotiating to share her, until I read this ridiculous article.

I can definitely understand why central planning fetishists might stay awake at night fantasizing about a videogame dreamland.  A videogame is a completely self-contained ecosystem that only allows liberty in limited doses as prescribed by a planning committee and every single activity in the game is controlled by the game’s makers.  It’s largely devoid of free will, allowing developers to constrain all human action to a range of pre-defined options.  In other words, it’s a progressive utopia.

What really gets me about this particular article is that the author either didn’t play the actual games he uses as examples, or really goes to great length to ignore their central narratives.

For instance, did the author even play through THE FIRST SCENE in Skyrim, where the player’s character is apprehended by government thugs (the “imperials”) for the crime of . . . “crossing the border” to return to his homeland.  When brought before imperial officers, one NPC (non-player character) concedes he is not a wanted criminal and asks a higher ranking officer what to do with him.  The officer says it doesn’t matter if he’s a wanted criminal or not, he’ll be beheaded anyways cause, you know, who needs due process when you have absolute rule over the people?

Ironically, this is a pretty accurate recreation of where the type of socialist government the author seems to be advocating usually ends up, especially if they start with the premises that the government needs to tightly control human action in order to create a more ‘perfect society’.

Moments later, a dragon attacks the town killing nearly everyone.  The player embarks on a mission to gain a magic power so that he can find and kill the dragon.

So what part of this narrative exactly, rubs our would-be socialist game developer the wrong way?  Is it that someone would spend his own labor to improve his condition, resist a government mandate against traveling to your home or killing a dragon that’s slaughtering innocent townsfolk in the land?

"I used to be a socialist, until I took an arrow to the knee."
“I used to be a socialist, until I took an arrow to the knee.”

The major point of contention the author has with gaming in general, however, is with their economies. 

Like all progressives sympathetic to the occupy crowd, any system that allows free and fair mutual exchange among willing participants is an intolerable evil for reasons I can’t understand.  While he does seem to misunderstand a great deal about how basic economics works (it seems like a core requirement for acceptance on the left), at least he understands that these economies are inherently bizarre because they are digital and therefore nearly everything is in infinite supply except for what items are made artificially scarce.

Economics 101 – without scarcity of things people want or have to trade (sweat, gold, currency, etc), then no market can appropriately gauge the relative value of those things among its participants.  The market doesn’t represent the real value of commodities at its inception because rare items are created with a keystroke instead of requiring sweat to earn so it should surprise no one that these economies can be manipulated.

And here is where these games teach much more important lessons than what the author has in mind – and they are not helpful to his cause.

The popular online game, Diablo 3, experienced an insane run of hyperinflation caused by a collision of economics decisions made by the developers and some tools they’d put into the game to create a more stable economy, namely an auction house that would allow real money (as in US Dollar) transactions.  The theory was to rob gold farmers the opportunity to offer these real money transactions in unsanctioned 3rd party marketplaces.

Diablo-3-Gold-No-RMAHIt’s a sound idea – move what can’t be controlled on the outside to where it can be (partially) controlled on the inside – but in this case it functioned more to give the appearance of control than having much practical benefit.  Gold farmers soon figured out how to program bots to mine virtual gold (again in unlimited supply) and sell it for real money.  This flood of gold caused the prices of everything in the virtual world to skyrocket.

Now, what lesson do you think a logical person could derive from studying this?  That tinkering with the currency of an economy (like, oh I don’t know, the Federal Reserve does) can cause bizarre effects that allow some to become wealthy by gaming the system while everyone else who doesn’t know how to exploit the system is left paying higher prices for it?  Not the progressive thinker.  Oh no.  As Hayek explained, the lesson the statist learns is that the system wasn’t centrally planned enough.  That even in a system where these activities result in the equivalent of the death penalty (permanent bans from the game), somehow the system wasn’t tightly regulated enough.

I’d also like to point out how the author completely misses the beauty of free markets and voluntary collaboration to be found in online games everywhere.  I’m intimately familiar with the MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game) Guild Wars 2, having played it since its launch in September 2012.  I spend hours a week playing with my friends there and it’s an amazing ecosystem of thoughtful players, all pursuing fun on their own terms but often collaborating with others to reach mutual goals. You want to buy some fancy armor but haven’t spent the time and money to learn the crafting skills required to make it?  No problem – someone else has a character that cranks out fancy armor and they’ll happily sell it to you on the trading post. They get your gold and you get the armor – everyone wins.  You can even buy the most outrageously rare items in the game (Legendary Weapons) but be prepared to pay equally outrageous prices reflecting the piles of gold and tons of time it actually takes someone to craft one.  You want to run the latest dungeon but don’t have enough people to make a 5 man group?  No problem –  there’s a “Looking for group” tool that lets you find other people who want to run that same dungeon.

Guild Wars 2 has also had their own comical failures in centrally planned economics.  One special event in the summer ended up paying out higher amounts of gold for people who failed a group activity than if they had “won” by beating the main boss.  As nearly everyone but liberals could have predicted, failure became a much more attractive option so the community got bummed because very few people were actually interested in completely the events successfully, although making a lot of gold instead of saying you beat a mythical boss certainly felt like success to a lot of people.  Luckily, the developers caught on and changed the gold and item drops (goodies left behind after a successful battle) so that beating the event was way more profitable and VOILA – all of a sudden success became much more common than failure.

Hey, I wonder if there are any real world examples of bizarre incentives paying people more for the wrong outcomes than for the preferred outcomes? Hmmmmm . . . .

I’m not saying there aren’t jerks to be found in online games.  Heck, I run into jerks at the grocery store.  But games like Guild Wars 2 allow you to block people who are being jerks to you and a group can even have a democratic vote to kick someone from a team to replace them for someone without a “+100 Ring of Grief Making”, although that’s very rare.  It wastes everyone’s time when a group has to start over in a dungeon so generally everyone gets along til they get to the end goal.  You don’t have to send these guys Xmas cards, after all, just kill a giant Zombie Troll.

Imagine that – free people working together towards a common goal even though all participants are pursuing their own selfish interests. [contextly_sidebar id=”ae808cadd7c1b6c7dface6f9161caf3b”]

Look, I’m glad to see progressives look for different ways of sharing their values than simply codifying them in law books, especially when it takes the form of something as brazenly capitalist as making a game.  After all, you’ll have to pay those developers outrageous sums of money (the kind of 6-figure salaries the occupy crowd generally decries as the root of society’s ills) and you’ll either have to sell it consumers or find investors to fund you so you can give it away.  That system of trading your values for money is called “capitalism”, lefties, and just cause you have different values doesn’t mean that it’s somehow different than what every other capitalist does.

The left’s underlying problem with games (and everything else) is that when people are allowed to express what is valuable to them, it’s not necessarily what progressives think they should value and THAT’S what causes them grief.  Almost all liberal arguments can be reduced to the statement, “If I could only get people to value the things I value . . . “ (education, the environment, etc) so it’s not surprising that their proposals entail constraining free will so in order to move “free people” into making the same value judgments as their central planners.  But I don’t WANT to do a farming simulator – I want to go kill an evil dragon.  The same problem with correlation and causation that plagues liberals lives on here.  Gamers don’t kill dragons because that’s all some evil capitalist allows them to do, dragon-killing games get made because that’s what consumers want.

Now, I have to get back to expressing my love for capitalism in my own way – smashing an axe in an Ogre’s face so I can eventually buy a nicer axe to smash in something else’s face.

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Authors Bio: Nick Nero is a tech genius and a strong man who has worked for major film production studios and developed incredible technologies that you don’t even know how awesome they are. Nick can beat anyone at Mario Kart.

 

 

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