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That's a common approach to using gameplay for rhetorical purposes; the fact that you can code causal processes as you want is one of the main ways you can get

by mjn 14y ago

That's a common approach to using gameplay for rhetorical purposes; the fact that you can code causal processes as you want is one of the main ways you can get videogames to push a point. As a more overt example, in the game Bacteria Salad [1], created after one of the E.coli scares, profits trade off directly against food safety: bigger farms are more profitable but also spread contamination more quickly. This may or may not be an accurate explanation of the causal mechanism (at the very least it's an oversimplification), but it's the causal mechanism the game's author has chosen to implement in an attempt to make a point. The author of that particular game also wrote a book about the use of games to make points like that [2], which this piracy mode seems like a good example of. [1] http://www.persuasivegames.com/games/game.aspx?game=arcadewireecoli http://www.persuasivegames.com/games/game.aspx?game=arcadewi... [2] http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0262514885/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0262514885&linkCode=as2&tag=kmjn-20 http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0262514885/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...

vidarh 14y ago
Sim City is another good example of this. Even as a child when I first played the original, I remember reacting to the tax model in the game and how it affects net migration, as it was nothing like what I knew from Norway (and indeed, it bears little resemblance to how things works in most of Europe). A newspaper in Norway recently had to social economists play the most recent Sim City game to review the economic model, and their response was pretty much that they saw it as what in Norway would be considered a far right populist fantasy based on a range of economic assumptions that pretty much only the furthest right party in our parliament believes in. So to successfully play the game, you will need to accept a range of economic theories far outside the European mainstream, that to a certain extent is directly contradicted by real-life experience. I found that unsettling even at an age when I didn't know much of the politics, given that the manual even of the original presented it as a simulation and went into great detail about the techniques they'd applied to make the simulation more realistic...
- mjn 14y ago
  That's pretty interesting; I knew there was some criticism of SimCity's simplified tax model in the U.S. some years ago (a simple inverse relationship between tax rates and business growth), but the Norwegian analysis sounds quite interesting. Any idea where I might dig up a reference to the article? I think in SimCity's case it was probably not intentional, at least originally. The first version of the game seems to have just been Will Wright coding up some ad-hoc city-simulation rules to make a fun sandbox game, not him trying to make a point about urban planning or economics on purpose. But nonetheless these interesting assumptions end up in there.
  - AnthonyMouse 14y ago
    >I knew there was some criticism of SimCity's simplified tax model in the U.S. some years ago (a simple inverse relationship between tax rates and business growth) Isn't that pretty much accurate? I'm not aware of any serious theory postulating that raising taxes will have any non-negative effect on economic growth in and of itself. Where it breaks down is once you account for what the tax dollars buy. If government takes $5000 from you but provides $6000-equivalent worth of health services (which it may be able to do through economies of scale or reduced transaction costs or solving a collective action problem etc.) then you have a net gain of $1000 rather than a net loss of $5000. Imagine bifurcating the result: In one scenario, your country is the beneficiary of the efforts of a large international charity, you get $6000/citizen worth of health services without collecting any tax dollars from your population. Second, your country collects $5000 in taxes from each citizen and then sets the money on fire, or gifts the money to an international banking cartel in exchange for nothing whatsoever. Does anyone care to argue that the second could somehow be preferable to the first? Which brings it back to the conservative position, which is that governments through incompetence or corruption will tend to convert $5000 of tax revenue to something less than $5000 worth of services to the population, resulting in a net loss to the economy and the country's people. What so happens to be true as a factual matter is that a) governments can strike the balance in either direction depending on how well they're managed, but b) that the larger a government is, the more likely it is to allocate resources inefficiently, because as size increases economies of scale reach diminishing returns while the attention of legislators and their ability to perform due diligence is spread ever thinner over an expanding scope of government projects, leaving more opportunities for mistakes and corruption. I always thought it would be an interesting experiment to eliminate 90% of federal spending but not lower federal taxes whatsoever, just give the money to the states whose residents paid the taxes, with no strings attached (i.e. the feds serving only to enforce uniform taxation and inhibit jurisdiction shopping), and letting the states individually decide how to spend the money. You can imagine a significant reduction in corruption: California residents would no longer be paying a pro rata share of the cost of boondoggles in Massachusetts (or vice versa), and Massachusetts residents may decide they don't want them either if they have to pay the entire cost out of their own pockets.
hosh 14y ago
If so, then what about conflict and violence in video games? I'm speaking less about the use of games as a rhetorical device and more about creating and reinforcing deeply held assumptions and worldviews. I used to strongly object to rhetoric about how video game violence induces violent behavior in people; I thought that was bullshit coming from people who were scared of video games or did not understand them. It's been years now, and I have deeper (relatively speaking) understanding of the nature of conflict and violence. There are relatively few RPGs or shooters that give you the option of completing the game without killing vast numbers of monsters. And I haven't seen any where you can do things like, actively spend experience points or sacrifice your powerups to resolve conflict. People want to feel more powerful by beating up bigger and bigger monsters. There are other interesting deep beliefs such as the notion of fairness. People get very, very upset when the game seem to cheat. People have gotten upset at games like Corrypt, when things don't seem to work the way they think it should.
- gyom 14y ago
  It's a good point to raise because we are used to accepting violence (it was in movies and television that existed before modern video games). I remember listening to a video online where the person explained how the american army had problems with the use of torture on TV because it always worked on TV when Jack Bauer needs it. New officers came in with these preconceived notions about torture because they had "learned" from TV that it worked (without saying it was moral or not).

by mjn 14y ago

vidarh 14y ago

Sim City is another good example of this. Even as a child when I first played the original, I remember reacting to the tax model in the game and how it affects net migration, as it was nothing like what I knew from Norway (and indeed, it bears little resemblance to how things works in most of Europe). A newspaper in Norway recently had to social economists play the most recent Sim City game to review the economic model, and their response was pretty much that they saw it as what in Norway would be considered a far right populist fantasy based on a range of economic assumptions that pretty much only the furthest right party in our parliament believes in. So to successfully play the game, you will need to accept a range of economic theories far outside the European mainstream, that to a certain extent is directly contradicted by real-life experience. I found that unsettling even at an age when I didn't know much of the politics, given that the manual even of the original presented it as a simulation and went into great detail about the techniques they'd applied to make the simulation more realistic...

mjn 14y ago
That's pretty interesting; I knew there was some criticism of SimCity's simplified tax model in the U.S. some years ago (a simple inverse relationship between tax rates and business growth), but the Norwegian analysis sounds quite interesting. Any idea where I might dig up a reference to the article? I think in SimCity's case it was probably not intentional, at least originally. The first version of the game seems to have just been Will Wright coding up some ad-hoc city-simulation rules to make a fun sandbox game, not him trying to make a point about urban planning or economics on purpose. But nonetheless these interesting assumptions end up in there.
- AnthonyMouse 14y ago
  >I knew there was some criticism of SimCity's simplified tax model in the U.S. some years ago (a simple inverse relationship between tax rates and business growth) Isn't that pretty much accurate? I'm not aware of any serious theory postulating that raising taxes will have any non-negative effect on economic growth in and of itself. Where it breaks down is once you account for what the tax dollars buy. If government takes $5000 from you but provides $6000-equivalent worth of health services (which it may be able to do through economies of scale or reduced transaction costs or solving a collective action problem etc.) then you have a net gain of $1000 rather than a net loss of $5000. Imagine bifurcating the result: In one scenario, your country is the beneficiary of the efforts of a large international charity, you get $6000/citizen worth of health services without collecting any tax dollars from your population. Second, your country collects $5000 in taxes from each citizen and then sets the money on fire, or gifts the money to an international banking cartel in exchange for nothing whatsoever. Does anyone care to argue that the second could somehow be preferable to the first? Which brings it back to the conservative position, which is that governments through incompetence or corruption will tend to convert $5000 of tax revenue to something less than $5000 worth of services to the population, resulting in a net loss to the economy and the country's people. What so happens to be true as a factual matter is that a) governments can strike the balance in either direction depending on how well they're managed, but b) that the larger a government is, the more likely it is to allocate resources inefficiently, because as size increases economies of scale reach diminishing returns while the attention of legislators and their ability to perform due diligence is spread ever thinner over an expanding scope of government projects, leaving more opportunities for mistakes and corruption. I always thought it would be an interesting experiment to eliminate 90% of federal spending but not lower federal taxes whatsoever, just give the money to the states whose residents paid the taxes, with no strings attached (i.e. the feds serving only to enforce uniform taxation and inhibit jurisdiction shopping), and letting the states individually decide how to spend the money. You can imagine a significant reduction in corruption: California residents would no longer be paying a pro rata share of the cost of boondoggles in Massachusetts (or vice versa), and Massachusetts residents may decide they don't want them either if they have to pay the entire cost out of their own pockets.

hosh 14y ago

If so, then what about conflict and violence in video games? I'm speaking less about the use of games as a rhetorical device and more about creating and reinforcing deeply held assumptions and worldviews. I used to strongly object to rhetoric about how video game violence induces violent behavior in people; I thought that was bullshit coming from people who were scared of video games or did not understand them. It's been years now, and I have deeper (relatively speaking) understanding of the nature of conflict and violence. There are relatively few RPGs or shooters that give you the option of completing the game without killing vast numbers of monsters. And I haven't seen any where you can do things like, actively spend experience points or sacrifice your powerups to resolve conflict. People want to feel more powerful by beating up bigger and bigger monsters. There are other interesting deep beliefs such as the notion of fairness. People get very, very upset when the game seem to cheat. People have gotten upset at games like Corrypt, when things don't seem to work the way they think it should.

gyom 14y ago
It's a good point to raise because we are used to accepting violence (it was in movies and television that existed before modern video games). I remember listening to a video online where the person explained how the american army had problems with the use of torture on TV because it always worked on TV when Jack Bauer needs it. New officers came in with these preconceived notions about torture because they had "learned" from TV that it worked (without saying it was moral or not).