Capitalism 2 and Capitalism Lab Forum

I think some people and probably most casual gamers would consider Capitalism series "serious" games, not just serious with its portray of Capitalism enterprise framework, but seriously lack of humor elements during game play . It's a contradiction to the idea of having fun by playing games. Probably why a lot of people consider it can be "educational tool", since study is usually no fun.

A lot of strategy games for simulation are way more popular, because sometimes they try to bring out the irony or humor to the subject they are portraying. Like Tropico series to the extreme irony of dictators; Prison Architect's goofy prisoner history and behaviors, and even democracy 3 where you have policies that's just so seriously politically incorrect (sometimes even true in real life) that's funny, like taxing junk food to make health level go up and earn extra tax income.

There are tons and tons of criticism, and analysis of Capitalism for centuries, plenty for modern system as well. Surely, we can find some irony and humor elements to add into the game, and make it less serious. Point out some absurdity of the Capitalism in play in real life. Maybe even use mods to create scenarios and illustrate that.

Let's gather some thoughts about of what these humor elements could be added in game.

The first one come into my mind, is the famous Ponzi scheme "bug" greene345 discovered, and I pushed it to the extreme later, and force it to be dealt with by developers.

Although it's really a loophole shouldn't exist, but I can tell you, the days when I tried to exploit it are "seriously" fun, and probably put more grim and smiles on my face than it should be . And honestly not that far from the truth in the real world. We really just experienced an economic storm created by similar type of Ponzi scheme from financial sector since 2007. They are really just repacking subprime mortgages into higher rating securities, resold to upstream and so on, at a point the repackaging price got so bloated, it's not even funny. Sound familiar? The warehouse Ponzi scheme of golden toothpaste. I wonder if all those executives in Wall Street just feel the same excitement when they discover the "bug" in financial engineering.

I am not saying we should put the bug back in, but if the relaxing of rules to allow "shell company" for book cooking could be a possible way to put some fun in the game. Not every business needs to be legit. Or maybe we can have "crook" AI that does dirty business deal to cheat the stock price like human players can do (yes, you can sort of still cook the book and bloat your revenue and profit for a bit, just not outrageously insane like we did in Ponzi scheme). Let the "holy warriors" of Capitalism save the market from crashing by providing cheap goods to the people