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Forums - General - Capitalism, Socialism, and Video Games.

Slimebeast said:
Khuutra said:

Mafoo, I'm telling you, this analogy does not work. The problem here is that you're putting down Gold as the primary measure of success in WoW. The problem this creates is two-fold:

1. While it is very much possible to obtain Gold by oneself in WoW, ventures made together tend to be much more lucrative, and the Gold-per-person-per-hour rate rises even if every person takes a smaller cut. Financially speaking, it makes the best sense to earn gold with your buddies and let the impartial system dole out the filthy lucre.


How could this be an argument against WoW being capitalism?

Co-operation in itself doesn't have anything to do with socialism, forced co-op and forced division of wealth has, but none of that is in yor example.

If a bunch of strong individuals decide from their free will to co-operate and make a lot of money and wealth, then that is indeed pure capitalism.


I kind of see what you're trying to say here. 

However, you do realize you've just described unionism, or if not to that extent, an association which touches base with socialism.

Either way, the Topic, is interesting for the fact that it tries to compare complicated economic systems to a very simplistic game (WOW).



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The more I think about it the more ridiculous the idea of somebody trying to promote capitalism or socialism in a video game becomes.



I find Animal Crossing is a better example of a utopian capitalist game. Buy, sell, trade, expand, work, earn, all with the love and support of a neighborhood.



I guess Noby Noby Boy would be a socialist game. All players are equal and connected, and everybody pools their work together to reach a common goal. You don't get rewarded for your efforts alone because the work itself is the reward, and when everybody works together then you reach new planets and everyone benefits.



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The problem with this analogy (and most analogies) about communism/socialism and capitalism is that the scale of a system involved largely determines how fair a system can be; and the kinds of checks and balances that can be made to make a system fair ...

To demonstrate this concept consider WoW, on a small scale (party) working together and taking an equal share of the rewards works out well for everyone because they can collect more gold and get access to better loot than they could on their own. As the system grows to the size of a Raid the system becomes less fair because many people can bot their characters to perform their role (and the player can watch TV) while other people have to work hard to keep everyone alive, and since the workload is disproportionate an even distribution of the rewards is not (necessarily) fair. If you take this concept to a higher level (like an entire server) it no longer seems fair at all that a person who played from day 1 and did all the grinding should be given the same equipment, level and gold as someone who signed up years later and has only signed in for a couple of hours to chat.

 

A modern capatalistic system is based on this, as a small group of people (founders of a small company) will share equally based on their hard work, while a larger group of people (mid to large company) will distribute the rewards less equally based on the value of the work done, and the system on the whole has a dramatically disproportionate distribution of rewards to benefit the people who have put in the long hours of hard work.