I wish I torrented it after I found out the lead dev is a chud from the UK, but I wasnt particularly political when I bought his last game and didnt notice his overt politics.
As for the game itself, what does Hexbear think? I still like the design of the game, and it has modding support, but does its economy make sense from a Marxist perspective?
It is a mostly US based liberal democracy sim. Played it a couple of times. It gets some things right in terms of legislation that if you had a magic wand would instantly make the world better and the only downside is capitalists/conservatives screeching like to name a few state housing, public healthcare, many public transportation laws etc.
One of the biggest problems is the absolute childish understanding of economics rooted entirely on mainstream economic principles that are proven to be nonsense.
One big example is taxes in many forms hurting GDP, it implies the government money is taken and sent straight into a black hole never to be seen again when in reality the government is solely responsible for building and maintaining the basic infrastructure and services that capitalism needs to function. These are often called externalized costs. The irony here is that at the same time the game takes the government at complete face value, the F-35 doesn't exist in this universe. No ability to funnel hundreds of billions straight into executives and investors pockets, yet increasing payroll/income taxes will make even the US/Germany/France GDP turn into a banana republic overnight? Might as well call it Fox Business Simulator 2020 or something.
There are so many pundit talking points though, again like raising the retirement age increases productivity. Yes because people are realy fucking productive when they have to suffer through joint pain and 10 different medications every day. Like how the fuck.
Another way to describe it is imagine if you made a game about running a country but all the concepts you decide to implement comes from mainstream media pundits and Wikipedia articles.
The most you can do is have a few state company monopolies(rail, energy etc...), tax the shit out of everyone while providing all social programs at max value. Socialism achieved I guess Marx failed to consider it would be so simple.
My biggest compliment is the potential for radicalization, I don't think it is total trash, in fact I do think it can help educate some gamer chuds about at least some basic principles of social democracy and legislation that could be implemented today, I think that it could also be used to show that "solutions" exist and what is stopping positive change isn't some technical limitation but political will to sign a piece of paper which could be the first step to radicalization. Making them connect the very simple dots that "X can't be done because Capitalists won't like it", just baby steps.
this is what I was looking for, thank you!