Let's Play... Capitalism

Capitalism
Interactive Magic, 1995

originally played on PC

There’s a certain joy when things work right and plans can be seen appropriately to their conclusion. A leveraged predictability, as it were. Much like its namesake, Trevor Chan’s Capitalism (1995) involves the appreciation of the beauty in systems which manifest the will of their designer when adroitly administered. The North American protestants were correct: it is in money that we find God.

I’ve always had a strange relationship with capitalism, and one which I am still trying to properly navigate. For a short while as a youth, I was able to realise a small capitalist fiefdom in the comics trade, at least in my home town of Thunder Bay where the population was low enough that you could easily be the best at something if you just paid sufficient attention. Two of my friends from childhood had followed this advice all the way to the Olympics, although they didn’t end up placing in their competitions. From grade five through grade seven, one of them was in a small group of playground vengeance justice seekers with me and a girl named Brie Gibson. I loved Brie a lot, my first real crush in fact, and we were together often before she died in grade six under mysterious circumstances related to her asthma and possibly to her violently abusive father. Like every other playground, ours was one which demonstrated elements of the market dynamics we were going to learn to love as adults with tendencies toward social democracy. At times throughout our youth, especially around the fifth and sixth grades, friends and I were bullied for lunch money or the comic books we were reading or because the day was a little cloudy with a potential for rain later so what the fuck. A piece of shit two or three years older would come out of nowhere, push one of us down or catch somebody in a headlock, and make demands with insults. Being reasonably athletic ourselves, we weren’t often targets. But as with bully plots in cartoons and plenty of videogames – I’m thinking not only of The Adventures of Willy Beamish (1990) but of course Bully: Scholarship Edition (2008), Rockstar’s tenderly satirical entry into the topic – even the good guys have to face the music some of the time. Frankly almost every game with a bad guy (or girl) falls into the bully category, as bad guy behaviour often amounts to pushing the player and/or other elements of the gameworld around in order to realise some nefarious desire or other.

Not to invoke the Freud I don’t really believe in, but bullies are the manifestation of certain impulses within all of us. An id unencumbered by reason or morality, which seeks no other absolution but the realization of its own pleasure. Role-playing and strategy games often deploy the bully motif in their ultimate bad guy. Taking all of the land's resources for themselves or stealing a king's power. Theft and intimidation through force is childish and everyone knows it, but the trick involves knowing what is possible to improve the situation. In our playground days, intimidated for sport or lunch money, we decided to band together and act as a ramshackle anti-bully brigade. Trevor was learning how to box, Brie was pretty good with Judo and told us she was going to learn kickboxing next, and I was good at taunting, distraction, and hit-and-run tactics. Combined arms were impenetrable, we thought, as we patrolled the school yard looking to end trouble. We took down three of the worst people at our school, miserable metalhead fucks with long greasy hair and black leather jackets with Iron Maiden and Judas Priest patches and ripped Adidas hightops who had stayed at least a year too long past the eighth grade. That was probably what made them the angriest – seeing their friends graduate while they stayed behind. It was the Maiden and Priest patches which pissed me off the most about them, even more than having been beaten up several times. I loved those bands and hated being beaten up by those idiots.

in the virtual world, women have an equal shot at being CEO

Trevor Chan’s Capitalism is an economic simulation with a clean interface and solid game mechanics. You set up a department store and a supply chain with distribution, manufacturing, and resource extraction in place, sell the whole thing with some advertising, and hope for the best. Of course, this hope is guided by a thorough grounding in the principles of finance mathematics, and understanding the volumes of data offered to players is key to success in the game. In every way the game invokes the kind of nerdy entrepreneurial DIY aesthetic best exemplified by the small business and adult learning documentaries produced by TVOntario and PBS: the bright arpeggiated synthesizers, the clean Euclidean graphics, the friendly narrator who sounds like some unholy cross between Donald Sutherland and everyone’s Dad. Full confession: I have an inescapable nostalgia for low budget business and technology public television documentaries from the 1980s and early 1990s, such as Bits and Bytes (1983) and The Computer Chronicles (1983 – 2002); admittedly, both of these examples are computer related, as I cannot for the life of me remember the names of any of the financial shows and a five-minute search online has not allowed me to recover TVO or PBS broadcast schedules from the 1980s. Much like these shows, Capitalism presents itself functionally before it worries about its aesthetics, resulting, of course, unavoidably, in a significant and interesting aesthetic. I'm certainly not alone in loving those arpeggiated synths.

life as a modern industrialist

Capitalism has gameplay elements from strategic builders and resource exploitation games such as The Seven Cities of Gold (1984), Sim City (1989), and Sid Meier's Civilization (1991), as well as trading games such as Elite (1984), The Patrician (1992), and Merchant Prince (1993) and economic simulations such as Air Bucks (1992) and Sid Meier's Railway Tycoon (1990) – perhaps we can collect these seemingly disparate games under the generic nomenclature of ‘managerial’ games, in which the purpose and pleasure of play is the optimization of a logical system of economic administration. The system is easy: buy low, sell high. Make sure that the supply lines are economically sustainable and consistent in their operation. Advertise so that everyone knows about and buys your product. Isn’t capitalism easy? Actually, Capitalism is not at all easy, unless you cheat and keep giving yourself free millions. That being said, I was usually able to turn a steady profit in this game and other economic simulators. Kind of like how after concluding most role-playing games, you end up with far too much money to spend on yourself. Lacking charitable options in nearly every game in existence except Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar (1986), you end the game a millionaire with no power for consumption.

buy low / sell high / eat well

If only my actual life reflected such financial ease and capability. My childhood comic book enterprise was successful until adult capital priced me out of the market. Having taken a tip from the uncle of a BFF (which ended up not being so F) to buy as many copies of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comics that I could, I entered the playground of capital with a small hole in my pocket but with the knowledge that would carry me through anything. The Turtles are going to be the next Cerebus, he told me, confident with a cigar and his arms crossed over stacks of porn magazines, both lines of merchandise also being sold in his book store. Buy now, hold onto them for a while, then sell when the going’s good. Like many things related to both capitalism and Capitalism, it was a supply and demand issue. The first few printings of the comics were horribly mangled by the publisher and sold at discount to retailers. As a result, these issues were limited to only a few thousand copies. Precocious and willful, I had convinced comic book stores all over the city to order copies in for me to buy. In the end, I had a copy of the 1^st print of #1, two #2s, and multiple copies of other valuable issues as well. I sold most of them for immense profit at the height of the mass popularity of the Ninja Turtles, that period when they turned from indie comic darlings into a steaming pile of mainstream shit pushing pizza and videostore coupons and appearing in costume on talk shows and printed on pyjamas and bath towels and moulded plastic in play-doh. Hyped beyond almost anything else in the comic book world, the new corporate Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were supposed to be amazing. Of course I had continued to collect the original black and white comic series and all of the spin-offs and one-shots. As DIY independent publications, indie comics were often forums for their authors to voice their opinions. Dave Sim famously went either nuts or misogynistic or both as Cerebus matured and many readers lost interest. Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird, the creators of the Ninja Turtles, spent month after month telling us about how excited they were about the coming toy lines, about how great the TV show was going to be, how there was a movie on the horizon. They never did talk about the tens or likely hundreds of millions of dollars which they were going to be making as they quite literally sold out their independent DIY comic book idea to a major corporation seeking a transmedia entertainment property on which to balance a slew of industrial properties and licensing opportunities. 

computer gaming: a nice way to relax from the horrors of the office

I was eleven when the Ninja Turtles went mainstream and I was expecting a faithful adaptation of the comic books, not an easy prospect for an exceptionally gory and violent martial arts title which often featured swearing and sexual themes not allowed in mainstream comics. The marketing machine behind the newly commodified Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles sanitised everything about them, and in the process made everything lowest-common-denominatordumb. All of their characteristics were specifically tailored to cover the entirety of commercial youth demographics, from the stoner rejects of California and midwestern jocks to the east coast elite school wannabes and videogame nerds. Everything interesting about the original Turtles had been stripped away for mass market consumption, a bastardization best reified by the turtles’ newfound focus on pizza. Even the character of April O’Neil had changed, losing her feminist self-determination and computer programmer career and becoming simply another whining female sidekick, often an obstacle or prize for the machinations of the male characters in the narrative. Girls can’t be computer programmers, says capitalism. Girls have girl jobs like news reporting and being beautiful on TV. Gross, new Ninja Turtles. I fucking hated with a passion the new Ninja Turtles brought to me by capitalism. At least the arcade games were fun.

Selling Ninja Turtles comics for so much money – $1,150 for one issue, so much money for a thirteen-year old boy that I still have never told my parents about my comic book business; they thought I was just trading issues back and forth with friends – allowed me not only to purchase some musical equipment and follow another career path (itself later decimated under capitalism, but that’s another story) [update], but also try to up my game in the comics business. I used the money I made from believing in Ninja Turtles before they became something not worth believing in to invest in other comic book series which weren’t being offered for sale in stores in Thunder Bay and try to sell those books to the stores on commission. My friend Mark's older sister – a newwave icon for my entire childhood – clued me into a book called Love and Rockets. The whole operation was dependent on my knowledge of the books coming out which might be interesting. This is what made me believe in capitalism for the short delusion which is childhood. Success comes through skill and hard work. No problem, I thought, as I knew more about comics than a lot of people in my town and I was good at working hard. Knowledge is a skill, and I knew how to work to improve knowledge and understanding. But then I learned the truth about capitalism, an argument also expressed in Thomas Piketty’s book Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century. Namely that capital wins itself. That knowledge in and of itself is meaningless in the face of capital. Those who have money earn money, while those who do not have it do not – the most simple truth in all of human creation. Once a few of the adults picked up on what I was doing, they used their significantly greater fiscal assets to entirely push me out of the market. They didn't know anything about comic books, they just had more cash than I did. Within two weeks of my most successful sale I was pushed out of the ‘industry’ completely and lost both my purchasing and my selling clients. No deals on buying, no deals on selling. Just another plebeian. Game over, as they say.

of course capitalists have taken control of the media

If only my ability to earn money IRL could begin to match the mastery I can demonstrate in virtual economies. Wall street gets to play fake, why can’t I?