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In the two weeks since the release of Paradox Interactive’s new grand strategy game, Victoria 3, gamers have been experimenting communism has become more profitable than capitalism. As entrenched conservative interests in their 19th-century countries prevent modernizing reforms – such as the abolition of slavery – the players begin to revolt against landlords, exploitative capitalists and the petty bourgeoisie with rants that may have come from Marxists a hundred years ago or today .
“I hate the owners,” one player wrote shortly after the game’s release. “I hate these inbred, backward, slave owning, tax stealing, progress blocking, head in the sand, law hating, wearing stupid hats, anachronistic assholes, I hate landlords.”
This is exactly what Mao Zedong himself would have said, if not cursing, probably. This rhetoric arises because in Victoria 3, powerful interest groups can block laws and powerful landowners and industrialists will block reforms that could reduce their power, control and profits. For example, they like regressive tax regimes and ideas like giving only the rich the right to vote.
Players are also discovering that a properly implemented communist economy can lead them to become not only the dominant world power, but one in which the average standard of living of the lower middle classes is as high, or even higher, than that of the upper society. layers in other countries.
Why does this happen, said game designer Mikael Andersson.
It’s no secret that Victoria 3 is in many ways a simulation of historical materialism. How you choose the shape and organization of an economy affects the living conditions of the people who participate in that economy. They, in turn, form political thinking in this country and influence its development in certain directions. If you highlight the profits of your capitalist class by importing cheap raw materials from foreign colonies, then private investment will be strong, allowing you to swell your manufacturing industry. It also empowers industrialists who want the country’s laws to be set liberally to secure those profits and their position in society. But if you focus your economy on domestically producing and exporting basic consumer goods in high-performance, technologically advanced factories, your underclasses will thrive, grow stronger, and assert their rights to democracy, a living wage, and freedom. humanitarian policy.
In short, a powerful working class in a worker-owned model that produces, consumes and exports basic goods drives up prices, and therefore wages, for all employed in key industries such as food processing and construction . In combination with some liberal reforms, which are supported by both capitalists and communists in the game, society becomes not only more stable, but also economically stronger. This leads to incredibly funny messages like “The current communist meta is overly strong” and “Damn, this game made me appreciate subsidies and welfare in reality”.
By the end of the game, the Soviet government, made up of workers who elect representatives to ever-higher councils, forces the working class to own factories and farms. This means a more equal distribution of wealth and the solution of more pressing and practical problems. Anderson explains:
That means moving away from private investment, but growing wealth means more demand for the manufactured goods you too produce and less demand for the exotic luxuries and art on which the mega-wealthy spent their excess cash. This, in turn, means more stability for your industries, less need for social transfers, more tax revenues and so on.
At the same time, it cannot be said that successful communism is incredibly easy to implement. For every post about deranged communism, there’s another about how minimum wages and social security have destroyed a nation’s balance, or how a monarchical, colonial police state can maximize a country’s economic power by depleting its colonial subjects. For communism to work well in Victoria 3, a certain size of the economy is needed, and the alternatives work too (to the point where a racist police state can be described as ‘working’), but many of the largest GDP figures released to the end date of Victoria 3 in 1936, use communism for this.
There are also alternatives to a more liberal communism, such as planned economy and state-run authoritarian socialism, but players don’t use them as often and don’t complain about them.
We didn’t plan for these effects to work that way, in fact, we just implemented the mechanics the way we intended them to, and here’s the result. It is likely that some of these effects could be balanced out a little better, which we will work on in the future, but the underlying dynamic will not change: introducing a wealth distribution that encourages a demand-driven economy is a perfectly good way to play the Victory 3 game.
Another point to keep in mind is that although Victoria 3 is an ambitious simulation, it is not a complete simulation. Currently, there are no clear mechanisms in the game that simulate bribery or nepotism, foreign economic influence other than trade, or direct interference in another country’s politics, all of which may contribute to making 19th-century communism less attractive than to the current goal. Perhaps this is what we will see in the future.
In any case, we will be following with great interest the growth of class consciousness of Victoria 3 players. Why? Because, at least according to Marx, communism is inevitable.
