this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2025
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What I love about those video games is that they teach us very clearly that a command economy leads to prosperity (unless you suck as a player I guess), but then billionaires tell us no, free market capitalism and trickle-down are the way we have to go.
"Trickle-down" was a rebranding campaign.
It used to be called Horse and Sparrow Economics, with the idea being the Horses eat the grain, and Sparrows peck their meals from the horseshit.
The wealth layer has been playing this game against the poors for a long time.
I mean, the moral is that free markets are a fiction when primary accumulation is illegal.
I can't simply claim a vacant property at the clearance rate. I need to bargain with a landlord at a cartel price. And thanks to public-private collusion, we routinely tax, trade, and subsidize properties at three entirely different figures.
Every economy is a command economy. The question you have to ask is who is in control.
Along those same lines, they didn't put parking lots in Sim City. They tried, but it completely fucked everything.
The had to set rent to 0 in Cities Skylines abd completely remove the economy in Dwarf Fortress, otherwise the player would be confused why they would build enough vacant luxury condos to house everyone, while more and more of the population went homeless.
Funny, because it taught me that that task in reality is impossible, given real nations can't load an old save file to fix their fuck ups in a simulation far, far simpler than reality.
Of course you could certainly argue that one person wouldn't be in charge of doing literally everything.
I understand your take but it is not really hard to grab the basic mechanics and make a thriving city in any game.
The basic mechanics are universal.
What throws off the managing part is "enemies", "natural disasters" and other excitment mechanics.
A managed economy could happen and would be highly efficient, especially because running a nation is a collective endeavour. Individuals fail but groups have memory.
Yeah. Imagine how prosperous the United States would be if the current administration was running it as a managed economy.
Imagine if any country could manage itself, by thinking ahead and admiting bad actors could arise, thus preparing in advance for it.
The United States was preparing in advance for bad actors like Trump since 1787 and it didn't fucking help.
No it wasn't and it never did.
The constitution itself allows for a very small group of individuals to control the entire country, from the first moment it was written.
It was never truly reviewed to allow a proper redistribution of voting power throughout all the states and it still allows for indirect election of the most powerful state figure, where it should instead by directly elected by popular vote.
The gerrymandering, the filibusting, two chambers system, common law system, etc.
The american government was never created to be a proper one; it was an emulation of the english system but even more botched.
The document itself should have been thrown in the trash and a new one written, the moment the civil war broke. And again it should had been trashed when the market crash happened.
There is only so much an ammendement can do.
with the resources of a real command economy, you could find the best player in the nation and put them at the wheel
Get outside, touch the grass bro
weird take. video games have to have a command economy because they are designed to be played. a free market city builder would just be a screensaver.
Cities are not functionally free market. You could have control of layout, zoning, regulations, infrastructure design and allocation, tax incentives, etc.
Not sure how well this would model a real city where the "freehand" is guided by countless individual decisions.
Definitely won't be a CPU saver though
fun fact, most old screensavers were super resource-intensive.
Yeah, I remember a few of the Win98 ones.
Which one would be harder on the old processors though? Pipes, or the one in which it put a moving magnifying glass or bubbles on an image of the current desktop?
i think pipes was opengl and swirl was software, so probably the latter
On a Pentium 2 without Voodoo, both would be software
did pipes even work without a graphics driver? i know maze didn't
Hmm. Now my memory might be being a bit flaky with Windows 98 vs Windows XP (which was run on a Pentium 4 and that one surely had a onboard GPU on the motherboard), but I remember for sure that if there was a listing in the screensavers dialogue for it, it worked (because I don't remember any one of that not working).
I do remember seeing the message about voodoo not being available, when I tried to install Desert Storm from a CD, so it definitely didn't have that (the computer was handed down and I was a kid and didn't open and see it).
Yeah, that's what I find so amusing.
ok i think i get the joke
I've had similar thoughts about the auction house in World of Warcraft. Since the game caps the amount of gold you can have at a small fraction of the overall economy, no one person can buy everything and then jack up the prices.