As the Internet ignites the question of how best to (or best) receive medical care for millions of people in the US, and billionaires suffer the horror of possibly having a few billion dollars, it is fair to say that the field of economics currently has a moment.
More and more people seem to awaken to the extent that the big decisions in their lives – what they do, who they love, where they live, when they live – are influenced (or directly dictated) by the impersonal forces of the economy, which Adam Smith called the “invisible hand”.
It’s a conversation that video games have been slowly, almost shyly imposing for years. At this time, there is no lack of games that turn the growing inequality of wealth into a background detail or subplot. These include Watch Dogs 2, the latest Deus Ex games, and some that even make it a staple, such as Grand Theft Auto 5 (both in the story of the game and in its real success) or the recently released Disco Elysium.
But as I write this in November 2019, with scientists calling a climate emergency and the world’s largest philanthropist fearing that his money could be taxed, the game that most fully describes our current moment is Obsidian Entertainments The Outer Worlds.
If a few people have everything .
The Outer Worlds is an action role-playing game in Elder Scrolls / Fallout mode. They play a lost space colonist who was found and frozen again after seven decades of cryogenic hibernation, only to find that society has fallen into a hell of the gilded age spanning many worlds.
Workers in the Halcyon colony work in 16-hour shifts and do dangerous jobs for meager wages. They live in corporate cities that aim to recoup their revenues immediately and keep them in debt bondage. The products they make are often unusable, toxic or both. The management is incompetent, commercial or self-serving in various ways, and the managers are guarded by predatory policemen who are there to suppress dissent and not to uphold justice.
The game finds some of this material darkly funny, absurdistically; more than a search recalled the bureaucratic madness of Terry Gilliam’s film Brazil, as an early subplot about the city dwellers who wanted to conceal a worker’s suicide because the entire city could be punished for the “destruction of corporate property” of the deceased.
Although exploited workers and abusive management could be a hot taco on your dad’s Facebook wall, this is a common 101-level criticism of out-of-control capitalism and corporatism. It’s not wrong, but it’s not the whole story.
(embed) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3AI_u_0oJRQ (/ embed)
What surprised me, as a lifelong political hobbyist who had studied economics for four years and had long since accepted that my subject was condemned to misunderstanding in pop culture, was where and how The Outer Worlds went deeper.
. almost nobody gets something nice
It took a while for this to happen. The first twelve hours of the game are rightly dedicated to the construction of the world and the setting of tables. My sense of where the game would lead and my respect for what it does crystallized only in the final act.
Towards the end of the game you arrive in Byzantium. the richest settlement in the Halcyon system, the exclusive closed colony for the investor class and some handpicked managers. It’s the Brass Ring, the chic Penthouse Suite, the place where every other character you know dreamed of terrible deeds and perhaps committed them to reach them.
Byzantine looks impressive from a certain perspective. Obsidian Entertainment / Private Division via polygon
And Byzantium certainly seems fabulous and beautiful and amazing. It’s nicer than the dirty border towns you’ve seen. But then you come a little closer and see how thin it is. There are cracks in the foundations. The plaster splinters off. The robots and vending machines are broken. People complain that different services no longer work or do not work properly anymore.
You do not have to look far to see the visual and literal cracks in Byzantium’s founding of “Obsidian Entertainment / Private Division via Polygon”
A smaller story would not have thought that Byzantium would be so run down and boring. They would have made it magnificent, a paradise. They would assume that all that good shit is lying around and the rogue capitalists are just hoarding it and you, the hero, just have to take it back.
The outer worlds deny this simple consolation. It shows us how these problems are systemic, and it shows where and why the system goes down based on details about how the world is being built.
However, to appreciate this, a certain context is needed that says what “capitalism” really is. Let us see if I can give you the incredibly condensed version of an economic theory.
In all economies, it’s all about what you should do with the surplus – what you have left after your needs have been met.
If you are a hunter-gatherer, your surplus goes to the members of your tribe who can not hunt and gather for themselves. the elders, the boys, the skilled workers who make their clothes and arrows. If you are a feudal farmer, your surplus can go to a hereditary warlord. If you’re a worker in a capitalist system, it’s about a stakeholder, a capitalist, who can reinvest it in a new business and possibly create new jobs (and a new surplus).
Capitalism as a system relies on markets – on masses of people who buy and sell each other and try to get the best deal. The markets are essentially constantly polling all available people according to their wishes and preferences, and the capitalist who invests your surplus in the hope of creating more surplus uses this information to guide his decisions. In certain contexts, the information generated by a market is both more accurate and more reliable, and it arrives faster than almost any other way we currently measure the temperature of huge crowds.
The problem is that not every human need can be accurately assessed and answered in this way. The markets are awesome in telling producers what people want and need in the short term. How many # 10 screws to make, or how many TV dinners frozen. However, they can only very poorly estimate collective or long-term needs, eg. For example, there is a need for clean drinking water, breathable air or a robust infrastructure.
Other works are content to argue that the problem with capitalism is the gap in wealth it creates, or the violent suppression of the underclass that goes along with the protection of that wealth. But these evils are not unique to capitalism. Even our hypothetical medieval peasant had these problems.
The unique thing about capitalism is that the relocation of the markets creates enormous amounts of waste while at the same time not solving massive problems. This is the problem the game has been dealing with in the last few hours.
Even in capitalist heaven, nothing works. Obsidian Entertainment / Private Division via polygon
It is clear from the beginning that the Halcyon system is drowning in consumer goods. You can not go around a corner without tripping over a junk-food and ammo machine. In terms of gameplay, this is actually a bit annoying! You will spend a lot of time with the garbage of providers. But it is there to make a point.
The whole economy of this star system has prioritized short-term consumerism so much that they have forgotten the infrastructure. Imagine playing StarCraft and building only SCVs and just ordering them to mine minerals. Imagine being able to roam the map, but never be able to scale the technology tree because you’ve wasted everything you’ve done.
That’s what happened in Halcyon. And, spoiler alert, it’s starting to kill them all. Because it turns out that the colonization of a foreign planet requires a lot of infrastructure!
The Outer Worlds understand that from a certain point, the good shit can no longer exist in a world whose priorities have been so fundamentally out of hand. The capitalists of Byzantium are objectively better off than their wage slaves, yes, but their houses are also decaying. Your food is poison too. The system is still running around the ears.
It is not difficult to put this principle into practice in our own world, as exclusive resorts are threatened by hurricanes and golf courses are plagued by drought.
Astronomically and scientifically invented, the problems of the Halcyon colonies may be less daunting than our own (and more easily solved by someone who has a high stealth score, a drinking problem, and 500 cans of tuna), but the game does us one Please – and respect our intelligence – by showing us what a system failure looks like so we can start to tackle it.
Jacob G. Corbin holds a BA in Economics from the University of Missouri-Kansas City. He lives with two cats and a farm in the Kansas City area.
