My main takeaway, after 14 hours of playing this game, is that the people of future Mars are idiots. As near as I can tell, the various offworld trading companies are about as well-regulated as 19th century corporations. The way you win the game is by purchasing stock in all your rivals until you get a complete monopoly. And during all this, the space-SEC is nowhere to be found.
Maybe it's just a frontier mentality. There's something about having wide-open spaces, not yet developed by industry, that triggers a flaw in the human brain - "we don't have to worry about responsible stewardship of the land, there's plenty more where that came from." You'd think that after the Earth was ruined by reckless capitalism, people would be more diffident about exporting that system into space, but Offworld Trading Company doesn't seem to even acknowledge the irony (though, to be fair, it doesn't have much of a story, generally).
It's probably just a gameplay thing. You've got these businesses and you want one to be a winner and the others to be the losers. How do you bring it about? Just eliminate any player who spends too long in the red? That would probably not be tenable, given the particulars of the game's economy. There's a lot of time, especially at the beginning, where you have to borrow money to keep your business growing, and with the market as volatile as it is, this could lead to you being eliminated by accident. Having the elimination mechanic be a stock buyout puts your fate entirely in the hands of your opponents.
You just have to gloss over the worldbuilding implications, though. Like, the whole game revolves around colonies granting you land claims, but they don't seem to worry about the dangers of consolidation, of one corporation gaining overwhelming control over a significant portion of their economy, including their food, water, and air. When you add in the "black market" mechanic, where you can hire mercenaries to sabotage your rivals, it suggests a weak and feckless government that is incapable of enforcing the law.
I mean, it's not a pleasant thought, the idea that for all your infrastructure building, Mars will develop itself into the same sort of ecological dead-end that Earth has become, or that the future of the colonists will be one of exploitation at the hands of an unquestionable corporate monopoly. How does one even shop around for air, anyway?
I don't think Offworld Trading Company is meant to be an incisive critique of capitalism. Yet there are times it feels that way, when I ask myself "why am I doing this" and the only answer I can come up with is "I must acquire and consume and have more than all my rivals. I must be the only business left standing. Nothing must stand in the way of my wealth." And it is easy to get lost in this rapacity and jealousy, to forget the purpose of your building and development - to create a new life for the human race on Mars. It raises the uncomfortable question - would you hinder the enterprise, if there were greater profit in it for you?
It's likely not intentional ideology, though. It comes from being a multiplayer game at heart. Some games are cooperative, but very rarely so in the strategy genre. So if multiple people are going to play the same game, there have to be winners and losers. And if there are losers in a game primarily about economics, than there has to be (at least implied) misery on the story-layer. It is possible to imagine a world of universally improving material conditions, but if you have wealth as a win-state, than the lose-state almost has to be poverty. The grim implied story of the game comes from a combination of losing-as-poverty and the winner-take-all nature of multiplayer competition.
There's not really anything you can do but take the game at face value, though. If you want to make inferences about the broader world of Offworld Trading Company, you have to extrapolate from the game mechanics. Unfortunately, it looks like humanity took its greed and its short-sightedness with it into the stars. And I guess there's no remembering the mistakes of the past when it's much more profitable to forget.
Bleak. . .
At least I'll have my money to distract me.
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