He's done it again, Paolo Pedercini has made a fun, polished, punk-positive satire, but this time instead of focusing on a particular industry or scandal, he's taking a broad-view of a world economy driven and chained by oil. In Oiligarchy you play the CEO of an international oil company, drilling your way to riches and dominance. I've been looking forward to this game since Paolo mentioned it to me at Games for Change in June, he told me "the better you are at the game, the worse you'll do."
Unlike some of the major releases this year, this game lives up to its promise.
Pedercini and his Molleindustria-l posse deliver the same cocktail of production value mixed with social commentary; everything from the framing of historical events as covert operations to the clanking music of the derricks puts this game over the top aesthetically. The main success here, however, is in the design of the system, it sets a new benchmark for model complexity and implicit argumentation, just as The McDonald's Game did in 2006 and Operation: PedoPriest tried to do in 2007. Like McDonald's, this game will be played by tens of millions, already hitting two million unique plays within it's first week - this is persuasive media, this is the new mass entertainment, this is the new conversation platform.
I did a review for JIG that covers the basics, the comments there are entertaining. You know those pictures of mammals turning into apes, then hominids, then homosapiens? The comments there may remind you of that picture. Paolo completes the strip toward modern man with his postmortem, where he does the analysis of his own game that I probably would've done here. Instead, I'm about to take us into transhumanity.
So, Paolo's model is pretty good and based off real data and history, at least to the extent that those things are real. Let's start by putting on our meta-programming hats and examine the Godelian gap between Paolo's worldview and the game. Paolo thinks oil prices are correlated to supply, and that the run-up and subsequent collapse in prices are due to free market forces, which he is critical of. If you look at some other data, however, this axiom seems flawed. If you understand the mechanics, the literal equations and algorithms, by which markets price assets, then these patterns are by-definition self-fulfilling prophecies, buying begetting more buying and selling sparking more selling. Futures contracts in oil are financial derivatives that can move due to financial demand, irrespective of actual supply and demand of oil. The majority of volume in those markets come from Hedge Funds and the like borrowing up to fifty times their reserves to buy contracts that will never be settled with physical delivery of any kind. The clincher is that the recent strength of the dollar was literally a conspiracy between the Japanese, Euro and US central banks to buy a bunch of dollars, get the Hedge Funders to flip their positions, and then the collapse of Lehman (which they signed off on) triggered the rest (stock market meltdown, artificial demand for dollars to settle Credit Default Swaps).
While critics of the Bush administration and their ilk across the aisle might see the oiligarchy model as being all-inclusive, those critical of the entire secret government horror-show might want to include a few more variables that aren't preoccupied with picking on "The Free Market". The Free Market is a straw man myth perpetuated by people who had already bought the government with the creation of the Federal Reserve, by having the middle class believe in an invisible hand we ignore the men behind the curtain - free markets generally only exist in villages and college dorm rooms. I could make a game out of this worldview, that monetary oligarchy is a deeper form of control than oiligarchy, and use the same strategy as Paolo. I could put you in the role of the technocratic/fiat money elite, using what I call "phantasm" and Paolo describes as "Challenging Meaningful Play". What we mean is: you take pure agency and spike it with the psychological warp of finding yourself altered in a non-trivial way by monstrous decisions and/or unexpected consequences. In my game, you could use renewable energy to maintain the same kind of hierarchical status that reigned during the oil age, and you would manipulate positive feedback loops in markets instead of negotiate the negative feedback loop of oil depletion.
But, maybe we can do better...
What if had something like Metaplace but for procedural rhetoric? What if we let people build and alter arguments and models? It's like two wicked design problems for the price of one, but if you consider that monetary systems, energy systems, social systems, legal systems, and so forth, are all at the least game-like clusterfucks if not outright games, then it might be worth it to let people construct models that are literally applicable and also lead by example. This is a way to have your cake and it eat too, explore contradictory models like the current facade of a free market capitalist system, while also doing more than just complaining - without falling into the trap of "simulated activism" that leaves you satisfied without having actually done anything.
This game has proved a few things, at least to me:
- you can tackle complex subjects quite effectively without using too many CPU cycles
- you can make such games fun and appealing to a wide audience
- you can make such games for very little money in short time periods
- there is definitely a place for punk satire of this type
- there is also a place for inductive gameplay that transcends satire and encourage the emergence of new models
If we get to this high goal that I'm setting, it'll be because we stood on the shoulders of snarky Italian giants.
Great fun.
Haven't had this much fun being evil since Dungeon Keeper 2 :)
It needs a real gaming background
I played this game just a few days before it was reviewed here, so I already had my opinion made.
It's a likeable game, but not that great or even "punk". The criticism of the free market, capitalism, etc, and even if I quite agree with that criticism, is not really impertinent anymore; it's more like the new norm.
Still, it's always good to see some of that subtle bashing.
The game in itself is way too easy. I won without encountering a single disturbance, and so had the impression to have lost several minutes of my life playing.
Drill Baby Drill!
Sorry I couldn't resist that one. But that's pretty much how I felt playing this game, this is just wickedly fun.
Win state
I gave up when I reached year 2129 and had had stable oil production (a new tech is introduced at some point), complete control over government, and ownership of Iraq for over a decade. I started and continued in anticipation of a huge collapse, which simply never came...that can't be right.
One time I decided to skip the election process and a new green bill was introduced every turn until the next vote. The poor game must have been waiting centuries to unleash them!
Macroeconomics, conspiracies and metaprocedural rhetoric
Well, I don't think this website is really a place for discussing macroeconomics but I'll drop a couple of notes anyway. The game and the peak oil theory itself is not really about prices but about production. Prices are affected by a number of factors like financial issues, expectations, wrong predictions and so on. Now you see the price per barrel falling and you can explain it in many ways, but it's the big picture, the long term trend that Oiligarchy is trying to point. And to put it simple: oil is unquestionably a scarce resource, the production is about to decline or is already declining while the demand is growing and the efforts toward renewable energies have to be massive and government-driven because they would involve big-scale infrastructural changes and not just some clever technologies. We see a lot of commercials with wind turbines solar panels and green stuff on television and my concern is that a lot of people are thinking that a sort of transition is already happening, that the market is already adjusting itself to new necessities because it makes sense commercially.
Except that is not true, there's a big gap between PR and actual private and public investment. Check what did BP except for rebranding itself as a sort of corporate GreenPeace. And counter-check with ExxonMobil who's the most straight talking oil company. [http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/16/business/16exxon.html?_r=2&hp&oref=slogin]
About the monetary conspiracy theories you're taking for granted I can just suggest you to drop that kind of websites. Central Banks have very little control and they fuck up all the times. Everybody is looking for a simple explanation for the economic crisis so it doesn't surprise me that some bloggers come up with crazy stuff. But you seem to be a little too smart to waste time with that.
The Metaplace for procedural rhetoric is a good point. I had a couple of projects that were supposed to give the player a certain level of control on the algorithm. Gonzalo Frasca's seminal essay “Videogames of the Oppressed” was basically envisioning that in 2001. The problem is that technically it's a pain in the ass and at the end of the day you just move on another level the same ethical/political design issues. Basically the 2-level game designer would be forced to work on a context set by a 1-level game designer.
It would be like: I give you a documentary by Michael Moore so you can re-cut it according to your opinion. It may be an interesting experiment but if you want to make an effective counter argument you just have to shoot your own footage and do your own researches.
That is basically what I argue with video games: we need many different and strong opinionated models in order to realize that there are no such thing as accuracy or realism when it comes to social “simulations”.
A couple of years ago persuasive games released a game tackling the same issue. Some people were criticizing Oil God
[http://www.persuasivegames.com/games/game.aspx?game=arcadewireoil] in the same way they are criticizing Oiligarchy: “too easy”, “too hard”, “too obscure”, “too political”. To me the game was just wrong because it was basically supporting the theory of artificial scarcity: since the oil companies tend to increase their profits after disasters and turmoils, there is a sort of disembodied will, connected to the oil industry that is actually causing these turmoils and disasters. I think that statement is partially true but above all it absolutely misleading if you want to explain the rise in oil prices.
In any case it's great that you start to see more and more players saying “good game but I disagree”.
Cui Bono? Cui Designo?
"Central Banks have very little control and they fuck up all the times."
I'm about seven blocks from the Banco Central de la Republica Argentina and man, I can tell you how right you are about that. In the case of the recent dollar rally, it is a publicly recorded fact that the three major banks co-ordinated a massive buy in, though the hedge funds were free to close their positions and not go back in on the long side, they could've taken a less predictable position on Yen/Euro or something. Financial institutions were also free not to tie trillions of dollars in notational value up in CDS contracts with no standard clearing and massive counter-party risk. I don't buy any monolithic conspiracy worldviews, not anymore, but I do buy controlled chaos, or as I like to call it, game design. So I think in this case, collusion is part of the score.
Anyway, that point of view only feeds what you're saying about procedural rhetoric.
Regarding a serious MetaPlace (MetaRhetoric?) your described limitations are absolutely there, which is why the business of developing content creation and/or game dev platforms we've seen not only different approaches to different scales and genres of game (Mockingbird for spatial casual games, Metaplace for MMOs, Storytron for drama, Playcrafter for spatial puzzle, ect. ect.) but we'll also see divides in audience-orientation within those genres (you could have a "serious game" creation platform appealing to governments, non-profits, corporations, financial institutions, crazy artists, and they would all have distinct parameters and axioms).
Perhaps we should create a meta-metaplace, but then there would be assumptions about designing design platforms, so we'll have to create a meta-meta-metaplace, and then eventually a w(o) place that encompasses a transfinite set of possible platforms for creating platforms for creating plaforms (...n) for creating games. Or we could keep seeing singular games like Oiligarchy, that's probably more interesting. ;)
Finally, regarding renewable energy, market-based solutions can tackle this, we just need a free market in the first place. I spent six months researching the issue, defining a new kind of security and trying to start a company around this idea - right now the technology is solid to produce renewable electricity at good ROIs relative to bonds, as bonds rise in an inflationary environment then electricity rates would as well, so it's more a core delta in putting your capital on technological infrastructure over government debt. Currently renewable energy is paralyzed by the credit markets, which is less profitable and effective at proliferating the technology than an equity-based model. Compounding this confusion is a delusion that the financing solution lies in tax credits, Federal RPS and carbon credits, which are all essentially just different forms of debt. Since debt is, by origin, fixed by Central Banks, then any fiat moneyed, debt-driven market is not free, and that's true no matter how good they are at controlling the resulting competitive chaos.
Fuck top-down solutions... how punk is that? Now that "free markets" are out, only the people arguing for real free markets can be remotely classified as punk. You're alright though Paolo. :P
And just to be clear, I think this game is a masterpiece - mas o menos.
I got the game to go MAD
the game is easy to win
But, I played it badly on purpose and before I could even drill in Alaska I caused World World 3 to happen and it mushroom clouded and said game over.
LOL
thanks for the link!
Wow
I didn't know you could do that!
"Check what did BP except
"Check what did BP except for rebranding itself as a sort of corporate GreenPeace. And counter-check with ExxonMobil who's the most straight talking oil company."
Meh. Don't get me started on either of them.
BP spilled 260,000 gallons of oil in Prudhoe Bay in 06 because they were too stingy with money and didn't repair their pipeline (after all, they only made a net income of $10 billion this fiscal quarter) These are the same people who would handle ANWR if (Allah-forbid) drilling starts there. Drilling proponents spew shit about it providing 16%-25% of our national oil supply and other nonsense while they forget that it would amount to nothing more than 2.4% of our country's CONSUMPTION. And isn't it odd that Palin both suppourts drilling in Alaska via BP and has a husband who holds a substantial position in the company?
Exxon Valdez. What else is there to say? (other than that it's been twenty years- this happened last week, in fact -for Exxon to reimburse those harmed by the spill)
Fuck Big Oil. Paolo, you rock.