Rise of Industry, Tropico, Surviving Mars and the ghost of capitalism
So I’ve been playing Rise of Industry.
If I was going to review it, I might describe it as a competent but hyperfocused tycoon style game. You create industries to first extract raw resources, then to refine those resources into more expensive components, always trying to make as much money as possible. I would point out how it’s a game that’s absolutely in love with logistics, to the point that mastering them is kind of the main point of the game; everything is cheap to build but expensive to maintain, meaning it’s easy to expand into bankruptcy, and the greatest money sink are delivery routes, which cost massive amounts of money every time your cute wee lorry goes out to deliver oranges to a cute lil’ diner. And then, I’d eventually get to the vibe.
This is not a review, so let’s skip to the vibe: it can be described as “twee capitalism”.
It definitively flows from the can-do attitude you’d might find in the US during the middle of the 20th century, a sense that anyone can accomplish anything with enough elbow grease. The gameplay loop is basic tychoon stuff: buy low, sell high, and build a vast logistics network so you can buy even lower and sell even higher. Your actions make cities grow, which (this is the important part) makes them open business that buy more complex products that give you better margins. One of the first things you’re asked to do is building a sawmill next to a forest. Pollution is shown as an evil aura straight out of Ferngully that creeps out of certain buildings and turns the cheerful hills into blasted wastelands – but place a single “pollution collector” next to your six-smokestack industrial building, and all danger is neutralized.
This is not, on its own, alarming. One might say it’s par for the course for the tycoon genre. But this twee vision of happy capitalism and infinite growth hits differently when we stand at the precipice of the anthropocene abyss. It’s not only that it presents such an uncut view of full-bore capitalism, it’s that it’s so peppy that the idea that this is the elbow grease that smoothed our slide into carbon hell is not merely hidden, it appears unconceivable. This is not capitalism disguising its evils, it's capitalist triumphant, having erased the idea that there can be anything else.
Behold the cute wee buildings, and witness the face of thy doom!
The devs seem to have discovered this alternate view of events, though, if you look at the game’s only DLC, Rise of Industry 2130. It’s an absolutely perfect response to the first game, simply by repeating most of its mechanics in a different setting, a blasted post-apocalyptic cyberpunk wasteland. You are still setting up extractors and industries, you’re still managing logistics and supply lines, but now the world’s already gone to shit, and you’re just smearing it a little more. The pollution collectors still exist, but now the entire world is covered in pollution, so you don’t need to set them next to your heavy industries – you need to set them next to your farms, since they’re the ones that are harmed by pollution. (Which, of course, reveals this was a valid strategy in the base game all along.) Possibly the most brilliant change are the basic extractors. Instead of sawmills that need to be placed near forests to create wood, you create junkyards that need to be placed near ruins to create metal. And instead of extracting sand from beaches, you create polymer extractors that create plastic from… thin air. Well, very thick air. Turns out the world is so polluted that you can just refine plastic from it. This change draws the distinction of this world so dramatically – we no longer have wood or sand, but plastic, despite not being a renewable resource, is so ubiquously present that you can create it infinitely from the deadly air you breathe.
The devs said the game will not be getting any more DLC, because 2130 sold very poorly. And I can understand why. Who was it made for? Make a Venn diagram of people who enjoy this kind of games and people who took umbrage at its depiction of capitalism, and I strongly believe it’d just be two separate circles. (Maybe it’d be more successful as a standalone game, though. Then again, the DLC keeps the same harsh logistics as the base game.)
But Rise of Industry made me think, as I was frowning at the screen, trying to will the little green number that represented my monies to go up instead of down. Because it is all well and good to sit on our comfortable chairs and tut-tut at capitalism, but if it does no harm to the gameplay, it's just a thing you don't like. And yet, I feel this game opened my eyes. I was there, feeling like I was playing a spreadsheet that somehow was very difficult, spending money to make money so I could spend money, and I realized that this is what most tycoon/management games are like - they just put more stuff between me and the money. Parkitect, Open Transport, Sim Tower - I may play these games to make cool theme parks, impressive train structures and really big buildings (respectively, except when not) but these games are all about making money. Make the little green number become greener and not red.
I remember once reading an article about a mobile game themed around a pet shop. This was over a decade ago, when mobile gaming was in its infancy, so the execs who were to fund the game had difficult grokking it. They didn't understand why one of the main activities was petting the animals. "What is going on here?", they asked. "What is the metaphor?" The article's author, one of those cynical types, responded: "This game is a fantasy of what people hope running a pet shop would be like. We're more interested in that than in presenting realistic management."
This was presented as a negative; rather than stick to the truth, the game chose to depict a simplistic, childlike idea of how a pet store works. But a traditional tycoon game about running a pet shop would, ultimately, be about making a green number more green and not red, even though the people who bought a game about a pet shop would likely be more interested in petting animals.
How does that quote go again? It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism?
The problem might be that management games, almost by definition, are about companies - and companies are ultimately about profit, despite what their mission statement might say. But even city-building games like Sim City or Cities Skylines boil down to balancing a budget, even if it comes from taxes rather than sales. What if we went even further? What if we were to run... an entire country?
Now we're getting somewhere. Tropico is a game in which you are the dictator of a tiny island in the Caribbean, originally set during the Cold War, in later games stretching to the present day. You still need money to do stuff, and creating a strong industry to get more money through exports is an important part of the game. But it's hardly the most important. You also get a lot of money through foreign aid - both as a game element, since having embassies and licking the nether parts of the super powers will increase the aid you receive, and as a safeguard, since the first time you'd lose the game for having too little money you get bailed out by your big UN friends.
(Word of warning: it's been a pretty long time since I've played Tropico, and the installments I've played, 3, 4 and 5, kind of mix up in my head. I don't even know if I've played 6. My discussions are about a vibe the series mantain, so let's assume I'm talking about an ethereal Platonic Tropico.) (Also please listen to my electrocalypso band, Platonic Tropico.)
Tropico seems to be a pastiche of Cuba made by a USian who doesn't really get what communism is; and yet, it seems to be exactly what I'm looking for. The core loop is still the same. Use money to build things that generate money. Use additional money to build things that generate even more money. The difference is that this is not the endgame. As said before, while there's a loss condition related to have too little money, you get a free pass the first time you screw up in this particular fashion. The only thing you care about in Tropico is staying in power. You can do that with an iron fist, by banning elections, jailing or murdering your enemies, flooding the isle with propaganda and terrorizing the populace. Or you can do as a benevolent dictator, caring for your people so that they actually want to vote for you. I'm a giant care bear, so guess which one I chose?
Not that even that is difficult. The election system that's required for you to remain in power is exceedingly simple. There's an approval rate, and if it's greater than half, you win the election and that's it. Sure, different factions are vying for victory, and your opponent will be an actual person in the island who not only walks around but also leads one of the factions, but - in another peculiarly USian approach - their primary platform is that they are not you. This leads to bizarre situations in which, if the faction that hates you most are the capitalists, their leader will be running against you - and if the communists are angry at you because you're not being communist enough, they will vote for the capitalist opponent. (Then again, you can't tell me nothing like this ever happened in real politics.)
You get a chance to meddle with the election every time they come around, but I never do, because I'm a goody two-shoes, and also because using the Tax Cut edict (increases your approval, costs money, the more people there are in the island the more expesive it is) is usually enough to assure I have sufficient support to win. Which is tampering with the elections, of course, just not in a way the game cares about, or at least not in a way the UN cares about (and in the game). But it does show that the most important thing is Tropico isn't money. There's no bailout if you lose an election. You can dance around the global powers so you can not have an election, you can meddle with the election or spring it early or use tax cuts to bribe the populace, but lose the election and there's no bailout, like there is when your treasury is low. You lose the game. The people's voice can be muffled, distorced and dubbed, but when they do speak, they're sacrossant. (Perhaps another USian thing.)
And yet! And yet!
OK. So this one time, I was playing the game, and I kept losing. Running out of money. Everything seemed to be going well, then my expenses suddenly skyrocketed and the bailout was a mere stopgap because I'd lose twice as much the next month. I had a save a few months before by peculiar crash, so I tried meddling with everything to see if I could ride it out. No dice. I could get a few more months, but I was on the path to bankrupcy.
I started reading guides to find out if I was doing something wrong, and I was met with a peculiar suggestion: build a lot of Teamster Offices. These are a building in Tropico from which little dudes in trucks come out to deliver your goods to where they need to be. Without them, people have to walk to where they are. The guide suggested building as much of them as possible. So I did just that and used all my money in Teamster Offices, then increased their sallary for good measure.
I didn't go bankrupt this time. And, a few months later, I was richer than I'd ever been before.
Back to logistics! Back to little trucks driving around and delivering goods! Back to little numbers getting bigger!
Is there nowhere on Earth that's free of capitalism?
https://www.youtube.com/embed/g1Sq1Nr58hM
And that's how we got to Mars.
Surving Mars was a game I really enjoyed. It's quite sedate and friendly, despite the somewhat dangerous setting. You start by sending robots to the red planet, using them to create domes and other infrastructure so you can receive a bunch of weak fleshy humans. It's fun! You accumulate piles of basic resources and your drones scurry to and fro delivering them to where they are needed. The domes are quite tiny and have very limited space, and while they can be connected, walking through a tiny corridor surrounded by deadly vaccuum leaves the meatsacs uneasy, so knowing what to build on each dome and how to connect them is key.
And, more importantly, it doesn't cost any money to build stuff. You're on Mars! Abandon your tired Earthly conceptions of money. There are no construction crews here. There are only robots and iron you mined yourself from an alien planet.
Now, you do have money in Surviving Mars. And you can make money. One of the resources you can find on Mars is called Rare Metals, which is even marked with a dollar sign on the map. Pile these on an earthbound rocket, and you'll get paid for your services. But these are also necessary to create eletronics, a much needed resource in the late game (which is when you'll be able to manufacture it), so it's not like money generation is its main purpose.
What good is money for? You can use it to buy additional supplies from Earth, which is great if your math was off, and additional rockets to bring them in, or to bring colonists. (The colonists themselves are 'free'; they are generated continously and aren't paid or anything.) But while Suriviving Mars doesn't give you any direct goals, it feels obvious to me that the ultimate objective is to create a completely self-sustaining Mars colony, one that dispenses aid from Earth entirely.
Once you realize this, you figure out what money means on this game: it's a tether. You can spend it in order to fix your screw-ups, or prevent them from happening, or just cushion your path towards autonomy. Making money gives you a little more give in your leash, a few more ways to survive and thrive. But the dream is to abandon the need for money entirely, to create a brand new world, and to make your colonists happy, by fulfilling their needs for relaxation, socializing and... wait... what's that need?
SHOPPING? THE FOLKS WOT STEPPED INTO A ROCKET TO A DIFFERENT PLANE FEEL THE NEED TO SPEND MONEY FOR OBJECTS AND SERVICES, OR THEY'LL BE UNHAPPY?
YOU WERE SO CLOSE, SURVIVING MARS!!!!!
OK, this isn't that bad. In many ways, Surviving Mars is my perfect management game, exactly because it doesn't have money. But the idea that shopping is a kind of basic human need is kind of weird. Your colonists can pick up food directly at farms, but they're happier picking them off a grocer, because it fulfills their shopping needs. This is almost exactly the same as in Tropico, only there the building was named restaurant, it's better because it increases the food quality, and it has the flavour that it's better because someone will prepare and serve it for the visitor, not because someone will put the food in a bag and take objects that represent value in exchange for it.
This seems like a massive nitpick, even to me. Some of the traits in Surviving Mars are a bit tongue-in-cheek. There's Gamer, which adds the need Gaming to colonists. There's Vegan, which is only described as "Don't worry. They'll tell you." (I thought it was just a funny joke trait with no actual effect, then I discovered it actually has an effect: it makes people happier if there's a farm in their dome.) But Shopping is not a trait, it's one of the basic needs all colonists have. Neglect to put stores in a dome, and the people in there will be unhappy. And, much like Tropico, you need people to be happy in Surving Mars, or they will leave the planet in the next rocket (no, really, this is the effect of having someone be so sad they become 'earthsick').
Still, this is as close as I got, and I ended up loving the game because of it. It's important to dream of better worlds, and videogames are a chance to experience them in two ways that help us understand ideal worlds very well: as interlocking systems, that help us know them intellectually, and as immersive experiences, that help us sense them emotionally. One of my favourite books is Ursula LeGuin's The Dispossessed, "an ambiguous utopia" that she described as a way to stress-test her beliefs in a just society. The world in the book is not perfect, and it's shockingly different from the flawless pearls that true believers try to sell us. But as main character Shevek learns that he prefers his homeworld to the lavish, boutiful twin world he visits, we understand the utopia he lives in, not as an idea, but as an actual place. If a book can do this, can't videogames do much better?
Well, yes, obviously, but not on a management game, I reckon!
Maybe I should just go back to the pet store game and pretend to pet some doggies...
You can publicly comment this article on my personal blag.