The only reason this is happening is because Vicky3 is a game that makes a separation between "the cool and smart entrepreneur making mad bank" and the player character, which is more or less, "the spirit of the nation". Most games make you the exploiter for you to enjoy the power fantasy and as such invite no analysis from a player that didn't want to engage in one to begin with. But here, these upperclassmen are obviously hoarding wealth for their own benefit which in the game's simulation is just money sitting around in swiss bank accounts rotting away, to the direct detriment of the "spirit of the nation". If you were playing as some working class prole or similar gamers would bomb the game as preachy marxist bullshit made to demonise the cool and handsome wealth creators, but as you're this third party which wants to increase wealth creation nationwide, as a collective project, that is frustrated continuously, both economically, and politically, making their polity weaker, and more likely to get owned in military engagements, it instantly clicks with them even if they don't want to engage in any kind of analysis, because the analysis is done for them, you are being stopped from doing this obviously good thing that would improve your polity by these arseholes specifically, they're doing it in this way, and they're doing it for this reason, have fun idiot.
It's a super cool game. I'm actually quite surprised at how realistic, or at least believable the simulation is at times, the interactions between interest groups and how each tries to cling or climb to power is basically what historical materialism tells us.
It's still buggy and wonky as hell but unless they do a 180 on the core mechanics and make them more gamey it's gonna turn out amazing when they polish it up.
Idk it's already kinda gamey. You can just hit the reform government button and kick people out of power. I've been ignoring the loss to legitimacy with no problem, they don't actually seem to give a shit until you start passing laws they don't like
They could probably rebalance that but it is kinda realistic too. Laws are the thing that can significantly change one interest group's grasp over power, it makes sense they panic when you effectively try to oust them out of power with a different tax law or something.
You're right that illegitimate governments have too little penalties though.
For the same reason nobles in Dwarf Fortress were hated by players, because they are useless, demanding and abusive to actually useful dwarves.
The whole "justice system" usually gets this treatment from player too, since the traditional punishments in Dwarven society are flavorful and cool but extremely harmful if you actually carry them out and the assignment of blame for broken laws is fairly arbitrary. It's far more useful to the player to simply accept that minor crimes happen and just maximize happiness so that they don't happen too often than to try to find and punish law breaking dwarves.
I think this rings especially true because a lot of gamers and redditors in real life honestly connect more with the "spirit of the nation" than with the working class. Not to generalize the entire hobby, bu I think a lot of gamers are at least well-off enough to be distracted away from the real life contradictions of capitalism so that they don't have to think about labour rights or economic systems. This leaves them to fantasize about how they would improve society if they were, god-like, in the shoes of the "spirit of the nation". Things like "oh, if I could control the United States, I would prosecute Trump, and raise taxes on the rich, or build more houses in such-and-such place." People like this do not have the class analysis required to understand why these things would not work so easily in real life (the rich would just flee the country with their profits, more houses does not actually give unhoused people homes, etc.). And this is the hypothetical milquetoast liberal gamer, to say nothing of the chud gamer.
Thus, when they are confronted with some of these roadblocks in a video game for the first time, they do not understand it at all. Video games are usually about enacting any fantastical policy you want, with the only pushback usually being simple economics or math, like their money number or stability number hadn't gotten high enough yet. Their brains are broken.
You hit the nail on the head, and I completely missed this nuance. "The spirit of the nation" is the most enlightened of centrists, you are beyond politics altogether, they do not affect you at all and all you care about is, at the end of the day, maximizing some numbers. The country could be anarcho-monarchist for all you care. But it just so happens that one of those two number (the other being state revenue, through taxes, tributes, war reparations, foreign aid and what have you) is material conditions. You're trying to increase material conditions (and literacy) for as many people in your country as you can. This makes you a communist from first principles. You don't want to be a leftist, you just want to increase material conditions for the many, not the few.
Reminds me of Timberborn, a city builder with no objective beyond maximizing your population's happiness. Beavers don't have a capitalist economy, they have rational central planning and share the same working hours across the board - and you make them happier by first securing survival and then increasing the availability of luxuries and free time.
Yeah, I should have probably made it clear that "the spirit of the nation" can refer to other paradox games or simulation games, not just Vicky 3. EU4 (in)famously has its mana/monarch point system, which is much more abstracted compared to Vicky 3's pretty functional economics. I'm glad to see that in Vicky 3 people's usual strategies or gameplay styles don't work because of more realistic economics, which is leading to posts like OP where the gamers are realizing class consciousness.
the rich would just flee the country with their profits
I heard a really great point about this the other day. That the truly rich have most of their wealth because they own all of our shit. They can run off with a sack of cash and maybe it won't be worth going after them in some sanctuary country.
But they're not taking fucking Yankee Stadium with them. They're not taking our apartments with them.
Absolutely, which is why nationalization (actually seizing the means) is much more in depth of a discussion than just saying "tax the rich" and not elaborating.
You could say Vic 3 is confronting players with the material basis of ideology. Turning Hegel on its head.
Hot take: Disco Elysium and Victoria 3 have done more to radicalize folks than AOC.
Neither of those games can betray you by voting to bomb a foreign country.
This teaches those paying attention about social democracy and what wing of fascism it is (objectively the moderate one)
I had pretty low expectations from her back then and I still ended up disappointed.
The realization that the wealth at the top has to come from somewhere seems so fundamental to me, but there are a lot of people out there that just can't connect the dots.
The billionaires generate the value! The only thing holding us back from a tech utopia are the poors collecting welfare and lazy workers asking for a livable wage. :so-true:
I have had conversations with finance chuds and we were right on the same page with economic analysis, the fecklessness of liberalism, the horrors of warmongering, etc. Then they were like "that's why nobody should pay any taxes" and I was like "actually, it's why you should be killed"
That's the original fallacy of the whole Randian thought process, that somehow all actual wealth and value comes pouring forth from the fountainhead of the ubermensch, rather than created from material dug out of the earth and reshaped by the labor of many hands
crusader kings subreddit: is incest a good way to keep the family estate in one piece?
victoria subreddit: we must hang every banker by a landlord's entrails
city: skyline one more lane bro please bro it helps with traffic bro please
Paradox games simply lay bare the obvious outcomes of political and economic systems.
crusader kings 2 taught me that weak and infirm siblings strengthen a banking dynasty by letting the one freak who survives inherit everything and further consolidate the empire
We should test this hypothesis by playing a merchant republic.
True, r/shitvictorianssay is full of people asking how to commit
But a lot of hoi4 redditors want to simulate the Holocaust for "historical accuracy" in a game which at this point is mostly devoted to being an ahistorical sandbox
I swear to God, if I see "Señor Hitler" pop up again I will burst a blood vessel
Even the very rudimentary toy model of an economy present in Vicky lays bare all the contradictions of Capitalism. I think one thing that breaks strategy and sim gamer's brains is that there's not actually any economy in most games, and so the only thing they are familiar with is the kind of unitary accounting of basic input/output that is the "economy" of most games.
Well, games tend to have incredibly low barriers to economic entry and little in the way of maintenance or upkeep. Warcraft starts you out with five peons and a gold mine, right at your doorstep. Sim City starts you with abundant lucrative-to-develop free real estate and a bunch of low-interest loans, then extracts wealth continuously from the native terrain more-or-less indefinitely. Civilization and Age of Empires plop you down into a resource rich wilderness. Everything on the Monopoly board starts out as vacant, profitable, and for-sale.
Then the conflict is primarily between Player Commanders (or AI-controlled NPC Commanders). You're rarely struggling to "beat the board" or wrangle the restive unit tokens from whom you're trying to extract wealth. Your big threats are always adjacent and external. Nobody in Warcraft ever experiences a coup because their pig-farms pull in a bad harvest. But also, nobody plays these games once the board's resource pools have been exhausted. The game resolves. The End of History is reached. You win or you lose and then you start back from scratch again.
One of the "realistic" aspects of Paradox Games (and other historical 4X games) is that there is often an internal domestic struggle within your own board position. The games tend to be long and develop out over iterative cycles. Maxing out the board space comes relatively early and precipitates a higher degree of tension rather than a resolution. And players do eventually have to wrangle with soft ceilings on materials and manpower, the social ramifications of random historical changes, the politics of succession, etc.
Capitalism works great when history can just end and declare you the winner. Capitalism doesn't work when you're forced to keep talking about next cycle.
Monopoly should start with one player controlling 80% of the board and then be a competition between the remaining players paying rents to the one to buy one of the remaining 20%.
You could also add a mechanic where wages could be earned from a landowner by staying on one tile that equal to the rent of the tile plus $1 or something.
Honestly more in line with the original utopian socialist bent of the game where you play in reverse with progressive taxation after one player wins out and watch the redistribution of land.
The original socialist take on the game was cooperative, with the goal being to develop the board in as few turns as possible.
Even then, its just kinda a bad game. The co-op version is still heavily random. The competitive side has much of the outcome predicated on a handful of trades made halfway through, with RNG determining early position and everything after the big swap being functionally settled.
You could make it quicker and more pleasant to play by shrinking the border and offering players more decision-making agency apart from buy/sell/trade on wherever you land.
Life extension technology is when capitalism's execesses will finally dawn on most people. Having 200 year old trillionaires is going to be a hoot.
also if the current rich people are any indication they will refuse to learn anything in all of that time and make the world run on assumptions that are not only long disproved but weren't even taken seriously now
Wisdom doesn't come from age, it comes from living an examined life - taking/seeking knowledge from your own experiences and others. Which sounds simple, something that every human likely does, but that is not the case.
With enough money/power one can delusionally assert their will on others/world until they run out of money - or life.
"To Thine Own Self Be True" from Polonius's speech in Hamlet is a good line on living the examined life, but the rest of the speech has some bangers as well.
https://nosweatshakespeare.com/quotes/famous/to-thine-own-self-be-true/
We are manifesting our nightmares onto the world. When capitalism first emerged we created vampires to project our lived horror onto, as symbols of capital. Now the capitalists are just willingly turning themselves into vampires, injecting themselves with blood to extend their lives.
At least they still bleed.
Once billionaires merge with machines we are going to have problems.
They'll eat the core of planets like Galactus. Aliens will nuke our solar system, which will probably be for the best.
is that ever really gonna happen though? it seems more likely it's impossible for our time and it's driving the existential anxiety of our octogenarian billionaires
Humans are getting really, really good at computational chemistry and all life is about balancing a system of chemical equilibria. So maybe?
Computationally, we might be close. Practically, probably going to be awhile. There are aspects common to all life about the molecular machinery of DNA/RNA/protein synthesis that biology still does not have good models for yet . Without accurate models of the entire human proteome engineering to significantly reverse or delay aging is next to impossible - it would be shooting largely in the dark.
There were many novels, comic books, TV shows, radio programs, and movies before humans actually had the Apollo program to the Moon. 100's of years of them. No idea where we are on that time scale now. We could be in the 1950's during the Space Race or we could be in the 1850's before even planes were invented, and gliders were the highest technology of the time.
thank you for this informative response. I honestly had no idea about most of this
You're not going to have a 200 year old trillionare, because a lot of this shit is vaporware.
You're going to have a 200 year old chatbot that was originally conceived to evade inheritance taxes but now exists as a religious icon. It will publish mangled sequels to Rich Dad Poor Dad and auto-populate reactionary SCOTUS decisions, while an army of Chud cops bash your face in for bad mouthing it on the holonet.
By the end of my game as Russia, the Social Democrat Nicholas was still tsar and the average engineer had a higher standard of living than a Western European aristocrat lol
It's good but still easy to cheese and end up with crazy unbalanced global economy. Like my working class was consuming more luxury goods than the rest of the world combined by the end and the goods I needed were orders of magnitude greater than what's even available to extract.
Love the game, but it's definitely still needs balance (which I think they've addressed in some recent patches)
Proven long-term highly lucrative systematic exploitation of working people :is-this: Paying passive investors with their own deposits minus a hefty administrative fee
:blob-no-thoughts: Critics of a Socio-Economic Policy Try Not To Call It a Ponzi Scheme Challenge (Easy - :read-theory: , Impossible - :grillman: )
It's only called a Ponzi scheme because his targets were wealthy investors, of he was doing it to workers then he'd just be a shrewd businessman
Walked into that sentence half expecting "its only called a Ponzi scheme if it comes from the Ponzi region of Wall Street".
That's the better post right there
"Otherwise it's sparkling capitalism"
Of course they should be made conscious of their exploitation and they must be moved to act in their behalf. Those who feel that they are doing well, and those who actually are doing well should be introduced to the fact of “surplus value.”
George Jackson
