Molleindustria

The New York Times Simulator is out now, free to play from any browser. It works decently on mobile too.
It’s a meta news game about how corporate media manufacture consent for genocide, minimize police misconduct, and serve the ruling class.

The content of the game is literally “ripped from the headlines” in that it uses mostly real headlines (and even actual edits) from the NYT, the Wall Street Journal, and other “liberal” mainstream media. I originally wanted to make parody headlines but I just couldn’t come up with anything more shameless and contrived than what’s already out there.

The indie connoisseurs will immediately recognize the similarities with Lucas Pope’s The Republia Times. The NYT Simulator is basically a modern remake that replaces totalitarian censorship with the “propaganda model” of Western corporate media, as described by Chomsky and Herman in Manufacturing Consent.

Instead of a turn-based narrative puzzle, you have a real-time gameplay more reflective of online publishing in the 24 hour news cycle. Instead of one power to propagandize, you have three interest groups you are trying to not piss off. Like in The Republia Times, Reigns, and the Democratic Socialism Simulator, the effects of your actions aren’t explicit. The variables affecting the approval are hidden, so you have to make educated guesses – meaning you have to interpret the headlines in relation to the interests of the police, Israel, and the capitalist class. 

Whether you play the game “cynically” or try to do your best without getting fired, I’m hoping The New York Times Simulator can train players to quickly identify common spinning and framing techniques like the infamous passive voice (children “found dead” in Gaza), weasel words, or biased euphemisms (“officer-involved shooting”).

 

 

 

 

Headlines are important. Notoriously most people only read the headlines, and things only got worse with social media becoming the primary way to get news. It turns out that even when the full article is read, the headline dramatically condition how the information is interpreted and retained.

If you want to know if a headline in the game is real or made up, or what was the reasoning behind its inclusion, you can check out the links next to each news item in the game data.

Public game data

I managed to put together this spreadsheet very quickly thanks to media watchdogs like FAIR.org, and NYT diffs, (which tracks post-publication edits of major outlets). I’m also thankful to the thousands of individuals holding media into account every day on social media.

Of course, the danger of relying on mainstream Western media is to reproduce the same omissions. For example The New York Times has devoted almost zero coverage to Palestine Action which accomplished newsworthy results including the permanent shutdown of entire weapon factories. You also won’t hear more graphic details like the story of the Palestinian child carrying the body of his 5 year old brother in a blood-soaked backpack.

As I final note, I realize how the media’s role in cheerleading a genocide may not be the most urgent aspect of the conflict, but it’s the only the aspect I felt I could turn into a game. It’s hard to do satire and moral role-play in the face of unspeakable horrors. I hope a ceasefire will make this game dated very soon, but until then, I’ll try to update the news database to keep the game timely.

The Green New Deal Simulator is out and free to play on all the main operating systems.
It’s a spiritual sequel of the Democratic Socialism Simulator, in that they share the same visual style, simple drag-and-drop interactions, and short-term practical utopianism.

When it comes to climate change, we are well past the “raising awareness” phase of the discourse; we need culture that raises awareness of the solutions, which are:
1) technological, infrastructural, and cultural
2) already available (at least to all the industrialized nations) and
3) inevitably threatening the existing economic and political powers.
I wanted the GND Simulator to be an accessible, almost child-friendly, catalog of these solutions and their challenges.

Even if climate change is a global issue, I was aiming for a certain geographic specificity. There are several recent games representing climate issues in a proactive, utopian, and systemic way. Half-Earth Socialism posits a global ecosocialist revolution as a prerequisite for a just energy transition; Beecarbonize abstracts a wide range of policies that the player implements as an undefined, global, collective consciousness; Terra Nil postpones ecosystem restoration to a post-apocalyptic and possibly post-human, future.
To be clear, these are all excellent titles, but I felt the need to tackle climate change as something that has to be done right here, right now, and without the need of entirely new political and economic structures. There is a chance we won’t bring down capitalism in the next 20 years or so, and that’s the timeframe we have to avoid irreversible environmental damage.

The original plan was to have three scenarios: USA, Europe, and China, with slightly different mechanics pointing at the different degrees of state agency. It turned out to be too complicated for the time I allocated, but there may be expansions if there is enough interest. Besides, the United States is the biggest emitter, historically and cumulatively speaking, and arguably the most politically resistant to climate policies.

The gameplay is more complex (and less proven) than the Democratic Socialism Simulator, incorporating a map, a bit of deck-building, and a few more moving parts.
While the DSS was primarily about what reforms we should enact, the GND Simulator is more concerned with where the investments should go.
Rural regions, in particular in non-coastal and southern states, will play an outsized role in the energy transition due to their higher potential for renewables. This presents a challenge because they are the least progressive (i.e. Republican) areas in the current political terrain.
This challenge can be turned into an opportunity to achieve consensus on climate issues, because a green transition means jobs and state-driven development in regions ravaged by neoliberal policies.
Therefore, negotiating employment and emission reduction goals is a core mechanic in the game, reflecting a central tenet of the Green New Deal.

Another important design choice was the differentiation between fossil fuels for electric power generation, and fuels for heating and transportation (gasoline and natural gas). This is the aspect that confused my playtesters the most, but it’s a crucial communication goal: you don’t save the world by driving an electric car if the electricity is created by burning fossil fuels. Conversely, transitioning the grid to wind and solar won’t automatically take care of a big chunk of emissions that are not related to electricity. I hope to convey that electrification and the development of renewables are interrelated but distinct problems.

I also wanted to communicate the importance of energy infrastructure. The highest potential for renewables is in sunny deserts or windy mountainous regions. That’s not where most Americans live! Transferring massive amounts of energy across the United States will require high voltage power lines that are simply not there yet. In order to make intermittent sources like solar or wind more reliable we will need pumped storage hydropower, batteries, and more sophisticated “smart” grids. Infrastructure is less photogenic than wind turbines and electric cars, but it will be a major aspect of the energy transition.

A design pillar very dear to me is “No Exposed Numbers”. All the quantities in the game are expressed visually through bars and charts. This strategic vagueness is meant to encourage a more qualitative approach to the issues.
There is some research informing the variables and the algorithms in the game, but any game model will have to resort to gross simplifications to be even vaguely playable.
The use of “simulator” in the title is in line with the ironic contemporary usage, as in: Goat Simulator. I want people to keep in mind that this is fundamentally a fable with talking animals, an interactive toy, and not a scientific model. I maintain that all games claiming to be realistic, or based on real data are misleading their players. When it comes to complex systems, realism is just an aesthetic.

Since the map is fixed and the cards are limited, the GND Simulator may have a puzzle-like vibe, but there are multiple pathways to decarbonization. There is also no silver bullet: you cannot win by only using nuclear power or carbon capture.
There are so many aspects of the energy transition I couldn’t fit into the game. That’s the downside of making a small, minimalistic game about the most complex challenge the human race has ever faced.

Rules:

1. Start from a random Wikipedia article
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random

2. Click on the link that might take you closer to the “Capitalism” page

3. Repeat 2 until you get to “Capitalism”

Each click = 1 point. The player with the lowest score wins.

Variants / house rules:
*A page mentioning capitalism counts even without the link.
*Avoid the United States of America page (too easy).
*Speedrun: keep track of time instead of links/points.
*Single player: get to capitalism in less than 5 links.

Democratic Socialism Simulator was released yesterday for Windows, MacOS, and Linux. The Android version is still under review. It’s a casual, single player game in which you play as the first socialist president of the United States. You have to evaluate an endless stream of policy proposals, balance the budget, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, gain the support of different voters and build people’s power.

The title Democratic Socialism Simulator is a bit of a misnomer since the game doesn’t portray a democratic socialist society but rather the first years of a hypothetical post-capitalist transition via social democracy. I have made a few prototypes that modeled a democratic socialist economy but, at least as single player experiences, they didn’t differ too much from traditional resource management games. I thought the very beginning of such a transformation would make for a more interesting and timely subject.
In other words, DSS is an attempt to prefigure a Sanders (or a Sanders-like) presidency by focusing on the issues not fanboyism. Most of the proposals are lifted straight from Bernie Sanders’ platform so you can see it as an interactive flyer of some sort. 

DSS borrows its gameplay from the game Reigns (which in turn, borrows its interface from the dating app Tinder). It’s a simple but infinitely expandable structure that can touch upon a lot of topics with very little audiovisual content. Aside from being particularly satisfying on touch screens, the swiping mechanic is a clever way to present a lot of variables and effects to the player. Dragging a proposal left and right visualizes its most immediate effects without cluttering the interface.

In Reigns you play as king or queen, going through a series of grievances from your subjects. Your goal is to stay in power as long as possible by not alienating (or favoring too much) the Church, the people, the army, and the treasury. This kind of agency is appropriate for a feudal setting but it doesn’t work in a game set in a liberal democracy, and in which the goal is to change the status quo. 

In DSS your actions are attributed to the coalition supporting the president. The congress counter represents not only the seats held by the Democratic party but also the forces that actually support you across institutions and in the civil society. Some radical reforms require a minimum of support to be enacted. Your presidency is obviously limited to two terms with the possibility of losing the reelection. 

The voters’ approval depends on their top two issues, and this is a crucial feature. In a time of polarization and tribalism, it’s easy to forget that the ideological alignment of most Americans is more complex, contradictory, and multidimensional than what the media portrays. We are tempted to conceptualize voters as standing on an axis going from “very liberal” to “very conservative”, a gradient of blue and red. That’s a simplification that favors a centrist view: since the left and right wings are assumed to be already politically engaged, the only way to expand support is to appeal to the moderate center. In reality there is evidence showing that swing voters can hold very progressive and very conservative positions at the same time, and that non-voters are all across the ideological spectrum. I believe this multidimensional model of affiliation is fundamental to create working class coalitions in the USA and abroad. Moreover, in DSS the electorate’s composition and top priorities can change as a result of your reforms.

But DSS is not just a power fantasy for leftists. The game speculates about the challenges to radical reforms that could come from the ruling class, Wall Street, mainstream media, deep state, and corporate Democrats. While the polls show that proposals like the Green New Deal or Medicare For All are extremely popular, the general public may not be prepared to even conceptualize the opposition that they would inevitably encounter. 

The latest issue of Jacobin is entirely devoted to democratic socialist horror stories. The capitalists may be irrelevant in numeric terms, but they have an enormous leverage over “the economy” and the state apparatuses. They can collectively withdraw investments and use their media to frame the subsequent crisis as a political failure. They can outright buy politicians’ support. They can exercise their clout over liberal elites. The left in the United States has been marginal for so long that any conversation about what can possibly happen once in power has become irrelevant. The neoliberal/technocratic vision of politics still dominates the Democratic base, and the idea of a continuous mobilization and pressure campaign after winning the elections is unheard of.
As the perspective of a democratic socialist turn becomes more concrete, we need to create culture that both expands the realm of the possible, and prepares us for the struggles ahead. Change may be scary, but no change at all is much scarier.

DSS has not been designed to mount a precise linear argument. It has different endings and a specific starting point (you have a mandate) but it doesn’t prescribe a “correct” path to socialism. Instead it’s more like a collection of semi-random choices, conditions, and cause-and-effect relations that interact with each other in a messy way, creating a multitude of possible paths. Players can define their own idea of success: they can play as cautious moderates, or even enact some markedly right-wing policies (deportations, privatizations, austerity, militarism). 

Games that try to embed their politics deep into their gameplay are still relatively rare. In my experience, many players expect a clearly delivered “message” and try to extract it from a single play-through. DSS has a significant element of randomness and a number of implicit mechanics that the player can only guess, so I wouldn’t be surprised if different people come up with widely divergent interpretations. Without getting too much into semiotics, what the game “says” about socialism is a network of micro arguments explorable in a variety of directions. The *ideological engine* of the game is basically a series of spreadsheets that I share here for the most curious and nerdy users. There is even a column with notes and links related to the specific proposal and event.

THE COMPLETE DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISM SIMULATOR SPREADSHEET (spoilers) 

Notes: The data should be rather self explanatory. The “equality” variable is the “people’s power” red bar. The command “chain” stacks a card right after the current one. The command “delay” postpones an event after a random number of cards within certain intervals. 

 

Democratic Socialist Simulator is not free. After 17 years of Molleindustria, it is the first proper commercial release. I’m already getting some comments like “iF iTs SoCiaLIsT wHy IsNT iT fREe??”. There are a couple of reasons: 

1) Pretty much nobody cares about free games today. Websites don’t review them, stores have no interest in featuring them. There are hundreds of indie games coming out every day. Many of these releases are student projects, prototypes, half finished jam games, joke games, zine games, sketchy asset flips. It’s wonderful to see such a democratization of the form, but I’m afraid not putting a price on a game is increasingly seen as not attributing any value to it.

2) During the Flash era, free online games could reach a potentially huge audience. Some Molleindustria games racked up millions of plays. It meant connecting with people outside my filter bubble and challenging them with naughty anticapitalist games. To some extent, Democratic Socialist Simulator is meant to preach to the choir (although it’s a rapidly growing choir); it’s less “Wake up sheeple!” and more “What is to be done?” so I’m fine if the price tag pre-selects the audience.

3) Free games cannot be used for fundraising purposes. In recent years we’ve seen a multitude of game bundles put together to support good causes. Since all my games were free I had nothing to contribute, and that bothered me a lot.

Of course if you are a broke comrade, feel free to contact me, and I’ll send you a download code.