Recently an article by Max Grünberg has been published in the art magazine e-flux Journal. The article critiques the widespread “negation of ludic violence”, the competitive dimension amongst players, in cooperative political and recent economic planning games like “Soviet Republic: Workers & Resources” and the Half-Earth Socialism game.
“Against the shallow utopianism of cooperative games, serious games truly embracing an alternative political dimension to our capitalist present should therefore focus less on specific content like climate change and center gameplay instead around agonistic forms of socioeconomic deliberation. In that sense, the ruleset of a socialist resource-management game should be characterized by a certain openness, with space for autonomy and player interpretation. This could be achieved by offering both individual and collaborative winning conditions. To a degree, by addressing players through overlapping agendas as political subjects, the inquiry into human nature could be delegated back to them, thereby maximizing their agency that, for game theorist C. Thi Nguyen, constitutes the essence of games. Such a focus on player agency would break radically with the manipulative and paternalistic character of educational games that hard-code a compulsion for solidarity in cooperative games—presupposing some docile submission to a greater good hardly to be found anywhere in the real world.”
The article can be found here.