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?

The Hunger Games, or wither poverty not sports

i'm going to invent a new sports team, but instead of running around a field chasing a ball, we're going to run around capitalism chasing poverty and hunger. locally, you're going to give us $150 million for a new building so we can do our work. you're going to give us 100% of the revenues generated by the building, even when other people are working there and we're not. and no, we won't let you use the building for free for any reason. and even though you paid for the building, we get to name it as we see fit by selling naming rights to a corporate partner. and year after year, our tax subsidies will let us keep doing what we do in that expensive building you paid for

every two years, you're going to give me tens of billions of dollars for my summer and winter games projects to end hunger and poverty internationally, and you're going to watch. you're going to interrupt work at your job to watch organized debates in which the important issues of today's economy are solved, focusing on the twilight of labour. televised anti-poverty campaigns are integrated into the 'normal' shows on television, and everybody talks about how good it is to end poverty and hunger. you're going to convince your governments to spend billions to improve the effectiveness of their anti-poverty activists and encourage more children to eat, and so that we can all do better next time

then i woke up and realised that we aren't doing a thing for poverty or hunger because there isn't enough money for that, but we'll do whatever it takes to make damn sure that some dudes (and sometimes a lady) get to chase a ball around a field and we get to watch

a letter (once closed and now open) about the corporate branding of public spaces

Mr Merulla and others at Council,

Your stated interest in renaming all public spaces after corporate donors is troubling for several reasons. The most obvious is that such a move signals a dangerous encroachment of corporate advertising into the space in which the identity and politics of both the city and its residents operate. The politics of branding are not benign, and do not simply invovolve changing names. Corporate branding involves the theft of the histories and identities which constitute a given area, as local stories and historical figures are painted over in favour of the corporate image. Corporate branding signals the erasure of history and local specificity in favour of a universal and timeless corporate-sponsored immediacy or “now-ness” which serves to remind people who use that public space that the corporation in question has the solutions they need for the problems of the “now”: if thirsty, Coke is available in every store; if hungry, McDonald’s is always open; WalMart provides the important experience of “playing in the park with one’s children” just as it provides low prices for the consumer goods necessary for participation in modern disposable consumer society. Presently, we name public spaces after important political, historical, or cultural figures, or we use the long-standing tradition of placenames mirroring natural elements of that place: Churchill Park in Westdale, Confederation Park in the north east, Gage Park in the city’s centre. The people and events chosen as namesakes have contributed to building the community, and the history of a place is folded neatly within its name. In other words, we use the naming of public spaces to mark our history but more importantly to mark the values and dreams we have for our communities: peace, freedom, the rule of law and the granting of rights to all people, and the intellectual tradition of cultural development.

Corporate branding is a quick infusion of cash, and for municipalities increasingly under fiscal pressure from provincial downloading of social services, that cash infusion may indeed represent the importance of corporate money for the process of community building. However, that reality of desperation and dependency does not account for the history of North American economic development or the new trend in corporate branding of public spaces, which began during the last major recession of the early 1990s. Why is corporate branding happening now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, and not at the beginning of the twentieth, when most of the public spaces with which we presently live were mandated and named?  When the economic development of the twentieth century brought middle-class wealth to tens of millions of people and the economic output of nearly all North American communities flourished, we named public spaces in the public interest. Now that such economic activity within communities is in decline (due to globalisation, multinational corporations and investors not tied to specific regions or communities, resource decline, etc.) and has been threatened with recession and depression, municipalities struggling to find funding for public spaces are increasingly turning to corporate naming rights of public spaces. Instead of allowing corporations to insert their will into every aspect of human life, we should be asking questions such as why does the corporate world have the money to pay for “community”, while the community , whose members were ostensibly the recipients of that economic activity, does not, and furthermore, what is the point of using corporations to build community wealth if that wealth is to be used for corporate gain?

While the distribution of wealth in a just socisety is somewhat of a large and complicated topic for municipal councillors to handle, the smaller issue of naming rights is one which should not be entered into lightly by the City. In allowing corporations to name (and in fact to own, in real terms) public spaces, the city hands over political and civic authority to corporate interests. One example: let’s say that a park in the north east of the city is renamed “Home Depot Park”. Now, if that park were mostly used by individuals whom the corporation deems to be undesirable to its corporate image (vagrants and the mentally ill, poor people, etc.), it seems reasonable to assume that the Home Depot Corporation would pressure the city to remove those individuals from the public space which bears its name. Similarly, if a politically controversial organization (such as those which promote religious and sexual equality) were to schedule an activity for a corporate-branded area, it seems naive to assume that such events would not face resistance from the corporate entities whose name adorns the space in which the event is to occur. Corporations do not pay for community spaces out of the goodness of their hearts or out of any sense of compassion or commitment to a community or cause. They pay for naming rights in public spaces because they have calculated economic benefits which serve their own interests, and it seems obvious to most people that when faced with threats of withholding future money, city councillors will do whatever it takes to keep happy the corporations who have paid to name public spaces.

Please consider your decision in this matter wisely. If Merulla’s intentions are taken up by council, it is likely that grassroots organizations in this city will work incessantly to un-name the public corporate spaces, legally or otherwise.

and now a word from our sponsors...

Obviously I don't have a single sponsor. It is important to support companies that are doing good work, and performing their function in a manner that doesn't cause a greater harm than good.

Fashion is the first step. It's something that most people take for granted, as in: "that shirt looks nice, it's cheap enough, i'll buy it". There is a larger framework for the manufacturing and distribution of that item of clothing that needs to be considered. Did the workers who made it get paid a fair wage? Are chemicals, such as bleach, used in the production of the fabric and/or item that do environmental harm? Will it really look cool?

Thinking about purchases is the start of an ethical life. Don't just buy whatever is most convenient.

This is becoming an even bigger issue for drinks than clothes. Coke has a history of violently intimidating its non-union production staff, most notably its bottlers in South and Central America who are trying to unionize. Every time you buy a Coke product, and they are legion, you are supporting that particular manufacturing practise, ie: violently oppressing an impoverished workforce.

That being said, when you go to a corner store or restaurant these days, it becomes apparent that Coke has a virtual monopoly on drink distribution. Many convenience stores stock only Coke products, presumably because they then get to use the drink fridge for free.

So what is a good citizen to do? Well, try moving on and finding a drink that doesn't have such attrocious political baggage. Water is free in most public places (although that will change over time I'm sure), so why not give that a try?

UPS is not UP-you

On January 24, CUPW (Canadian Union of Postal Workers) and the Council of Canadians began the legal fight against corporate rule over national law. It took a few years to prepare the arguments, but the case rests on actions taken in 2000 by United Parcel Service against the Canadian government. UPS feels that a publically funded postal system discourages the company from making more money than it currently receives doing business in this country. To repair this business impasse, UPS is seeking $160 million from Canada under Chapter 11 of NAFTA, a provision which allows corporations to sue governments who maintain legislation which allegedly limits their return on investments made in a country.

What that amounts to is UPS suing every Canadian for about $5 for not using UPS to deliver parcels, and instead choosing Canada Post to provide the service more cheaply. The Federal government would likely respond by halting Canada Post’s courier service in order to avoid incurring further financial penalties, thus leaving UPS and FedEx as the default couriers for the country.

CUPW and the Council of Canadians premise their defence on the fact that Chapter 11 of NAFTA not only violates the jurisdiction of Canadian legal practise, but also violates the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the UN Charter, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The legal defence against UPS rests on the fact that the postal service was mandated to the government as it was deemed an essential national service. This law was put in place when Canada Post was incorporated in 1981 to ensure universal postal coverage and full accessibility by the public. Our tax dollars built the infrastructure required to send mail around the country, and that this infrastructure is still owned by the public ensures cheaper rates than the private sector can provide. Profits, which from 1990 to 2001 were about $300 million, were paid to its shareholder, the Government of Canada, and used for the post as well as other social initiatives.

UPS feels that this subsidy limits their investment, or, in other words, their ability to make even more money than they are currently making from the many Canadian individuals and businesses who currently utilize their services. Again: because we decided that it was in everyone’s interest to keep our delivery services cheap and use the profits to build other elements of our society, UPS is suing every Canadian for a collective $160 million – part of the $300 million of profits which helped fund education, health care, and in general our society as a whole. There is little question as to whether UPS would be so generous with its capital. UPS cannot compete with Canada Post because the private sector does not want to do things “for free”, but must provide dividends to share holders who get to spend the money in their own interests.

From this one case, we can see that corporations are in fact finding it difficult to compete against the public sector. Public sector institutions such as the postal service, social security, education, health care, law and policing, and (ostensibly) power and water are intended to monopolize or otherwise dominate their respective markets, keeping profits internal to ensure technological development and a low price for consumers. This allowable hegemony ensures the most universal application of the service by reaching as many individuals as it can, mostly regardless of geographical or socioeconomic situation. Furthermore, while certainly not impervious to scandal, the public sector provides a degree of economic and ethical accountability which the once-a-decade Enron scandals cannot match.

And maybe this is a bit of a hypothetical aside, but if profits from every important sector of our industries were tied to general governmental revenues, then all kinds of social programs could be realized as the fruits of our productivity. Maybe the big Canadian banks could use their $7 billion in profits from just one year to fund the construction of subsidized housing for poor Canadians, and that would just be asking the Banks for a one-time investment. Some of the profits from Nike, Coke, and McDonalds could be used to improve recycling programs, for example.

Corporations are seeking their own monopolies against the monopoly which is owned by the public and representing the well-being of the public. This is in fact the most emerging market in corporate ideology today. All sectors of government are currently being privatized in America, from payment of residential bills and tickets to water service, and from the military to the voting process itself. The sense of market legitimacy which has indeed allowed a great deal of business expansion is being imposed on the last remaining non-corporate revenue streams.

The most recent wave of this attack on the public purse in the US is the Bush government’s desire to release the vast monetary holdings of the country’s social security as marketplace investments. Financial hawks in Washington believe this to be the only manner in which the pool of money representing social security will grow to meet the current and future demands of the nation’s population. This is not to say that the current pool of wealth in social security is just sitting there doing nothing; in fact, Social Security is invested in the US treasury, which ensures a slow and steady growth. The working people of the country, apparently, are not paying enough into the system to keep it afloat, and thus gaps in the bottom line will be filled by rising stock prices. This assumes of course that the market will continue to rise steadily and not burst like it has done many times over the past few decades.

Something as important to a society’s future as a reliable social security program should not be invested in the whims of the marketplace, an area of virtual economics where the slightest flutter of absurd gossip about a company can affect actual material wealth. Slow growth is reasonable growth, just like your RRSP salesman will tell you. It seems more reasonable to assume that the financial hawks in Washington want access to the pool of wealth in social security in order to keep other companies afloat by injecting outside cash into them, thus focussing the governments interests on the needs of those other companies rather than the needs of the social security process itself. Microsoft, IBM, Standard Oil, Halliburton, et al will surely be the largest recipients of these investments, and tying the future welfare of a country’s workers to corporate concerns is a good way to sway a population’s ideologies closer towards those of corporations.

The public purse in Canada is the next logical step for many in Washington who see the billions in yearly expenditures on health care, postal service, and education, as a vast untapped market ready for expansion. The Missile Defence project can be interpreted as a means to divert taxpayer money into the coffers of American defence contractors. And yet, this market of “untapped public money” is indeed being fully utilized, since it is controlled by the government representing the people and using such funds to ensure fundamental rights are enjoyed by all who utilize the service. The legal process defending Canadian citizens from the legal team of UPS is one step among many required to ensure that corporations do not get to foster their agendas against the interests of the population. The money which they are after is owned and controlled by the public and invested in the public, and we should interpret this case, like most others involving the use of Chapter 11, as the imposition of an extra-national taxation upon a national citizenry.

Privatization transfers funds from the public coffers to companies which are legally obligated to make money without regard for any other consideration. In the case of Canada Post, you can be guaranteed that if UPS takes over services in Canada then Canadians will pay the company more for service equal to what is currently legally mandated for all Canadians. More important than higher prices for postal service and a $160 million hit to the national economy, a win for UPS will mean that the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms – which ensures things like health care, education, and personal security – will have less legal standing than a corporation’s ability to make a buck in whichever manner it is able.