You are on a ship, far from land. It appears to be taking on water. There are a thousand passengers, from whom they select a captain before each eight hour shift. Any one captain may only serve two shifts. The captain has some leeway to decide what to do, but unlike a normal ship, the policy is actually set by the crew, who are elected to represent various portions of the ship. There are also a group of nine passengers who decide whether the captain and crew are correctly following the crew's policy. They can be replaced if they get tired of the job and quit or die in office.
Activities on the ship include partying, bailing water, inspecting the hull for leaks, and repairing holes.
The passengers are divided into factions who believe the ship is not taking on water, those who believe it is taking on water but it's happening slowly and won't be a problem for a long time, and those who believe that only immediate action from most of the passengers can prevent the ship from sinking.
I was hoping fishing would be suggested, that’s where I come in…
You see in order to fish, you need:
1) to learn to fish with the proper fishing education. I’ll set that up and teach you but it will cost you. You will pay with 33% of the fish you catch for the remainder of your life.
2) a rod And bait following your education. I’ll also supply that, but again it will cost you. Since you can’t pay up front, I’ll extend you credit, and you will also pay as a percent of future fish. This time with a Variable Interest Rate up to 25% as permitted by the crews’ usury laws (after all we wouldn’t want you being exploited).
3. permit applications, and lucky for you I’ll help you with that also, but there is the matter of my fee as well as the fee for the permit which must be paid annually. As a courtesy I’ll waive my fee so long as you give me the first 100 fish you catch as a second in line creditor to the permit office which gets the first 50 fish you catch.
4. Taxes for the luxury of being on the ship and fishing from the ship. These are progressive taxes to make this fair for you and so taxes are determined by the total number of fish you catch. It’ll be somewhere between 10%-40% of your fish. Technically you could pay 0%, but the bad news is you’ll starve to death if you pay 0%. Note if you mess up the calculations there are extra penalties and fees, and potential jail time if you are found intentionally cheating on your fish taxes. Once again you’ll probably want my services to figure out your fish taxes, because let’s face it, I specialize in counting/managing your fish & you’ll need every minute to dedicate to fishing if you ever plan to have something to eat for yourself.
Roughly you will owe about 98% of every fish you catch to creditors and taxes, this is after the first 150 fish which come right off the top.
Due to historical reasons there are several people on the boat who actually own 90% of all the fish in the ocean. If you catch a fish, you pay them 90% of the value of the fish.
$19.99 for the fishing DLC season pass to reduce my fishing tax to 1%. Golden rod (premium) that blinds fish into taking the bait and other fishermen away from my $49.99 DLC instanced fishing spot. No rod tax (premium), and a discount on next seasons fishing big bad bass DLC 2.
>Note if you mess up the calculations there are extra penalties and fees, and potential jail time if you are found intentionally cheating on your fish taxes. Once again you’ll probably want my services to figure out your fish taxes
Don't forget, the fish tax collection agency already knows how many fish you've caught, but won't tell you what they think your numbers are. Instead, you need to independently provide your numbers and hope they match. Or you can hire one of their "partners" who will help you file your fish taxes correctly, for a fee...
You left out the part where the group that believes immediate action is the only way to prevent the ship from sinking, continually suggests immediate actions that will likely have no actual effect on the rate the ship is sinking, but will drastically affect the ability of the ship’s poorest people to meet their basic necessities.
The leaders of that group can even periodically fly their private helicopters off the ship, to meet and discuss how great they are for keeping the ship from sinking, even though the weight of the helicopters is helping it sink faster.
Exactly. You need a small-to-medium sized faction that runs around with drills, making more holes in the ship, either for the lulz or to irritate the side that believes we're taking on water.
Funny how, when I originally read OP's game, I thought he was talking about COVID response, but then realized he was probably talking about climate change. It's spooky how no matter what the crisis is, we seem to collectively respond to it in the same futile, guaranteed-to-fail way.
It reminds me of a big swathe of survival and/or base building games where you have to balance out things just right, or real life games like Werewolves.
Now I'm imagining a variant of Werewolf where only a handful of the players even know how many werewolves there were at the start, possibly zero, and there are also non-werewolf causes of death.
Will the villagers wipe themselves out in a witch-hunt?
It's closest to a "hidden role" game, like werewolf or Town of Salem.
There's a general task that everyone (often even called a "crew" in space based flavors) has to complete to win, but there are people who are essentially secret saboteurs who are trying to complete a different objective that often explicitly causes the rest of the players to lose.
Look up Secret Hitler, which explicitly has you voting for government leader, different factions, and voting for which actions to take as a government. Your goal as the crew is to vote for democracy or uncover hitler, and your goal as hitler or a facist is to do facism.
You are on an internet forum. You are attempting to describe a very complex societal issue in very simple terms, using an analogy. Your description lefts out many important details and other present or potential problems, as you concentrate on a single issue. In your description, all democratic checks and balances are effectively portrayed as stupid and time-wasting. You end up with apologia for fascism.
Most catastrophic thinking is related to climate change, though of course it could also be referring to the inevitable end of the solar system as the sun expands.
I thought most catastrophic thinking would be related to personal minutiae. That's why its "catastrophic thinking". Changes to the global climate and the systemic and societal upheaval in response to those changes are significant.
Could be just the general deadlock and inability to come to consensus about any long term future threats. Could be AI, climate change, housing crisis, China, etc. But you’re right, likely climate change.
In the USA, isn't it the fascists and proto-fascists that are the ones denying climate change? I don't think there's any ecofascism movement there at all.
The premise of this ship analogy seems to be that most people are too idiotic to make large-scale decisions and that the people who agree with OP should be in charge of everything.
Ah, I can see it. I feel like it's more a criticism specifically of US civics (a direct shot at the supreme court for example) and US anti-intellectualism (some of the passengers believe the boat isn't sinking at all), but pulling back from that context and I see how it could be seen as apologia for various forms of nonrepresentative government.
Right. A operating a ship is a terrible analogy to operating a society because it's primarily a technical operation that requires leadership to make split second decisions that everyone follows. Obviously, a Supreme Court is worse than useless in such a context.
The fact that you are feeling confident making such assumption just because I disapproved an ship-gaining-water analogy is exactly the problem with public discourse I wanted to highlight.
As a pioneer banker hell bent on decimating the entire population of bison on the Oregon Trail, and yet only being allowed to take 100 pounds of meat and leave the rest as a warning to the other animals, I and my Apple II approve this message.
The responses to this comment illustrate how badly such things are needed.
What's so frustrating about all of it, is I agree heavily with the sentiment, but it's like saying a house is badly built because the sky is too heavy. No it's because it's made of cheap wood and bad angles, and you can't get anyone to change that if you don't understand and just go with your gut, ignoring hundreds of years of history.
People can have negative / positive sentiment on my proposal which seems like it tends to be something like a good idea. But, it seems like everyone isn't arguing about the merit of the idea but instead only of their own sentiment of banks instead of whether people need the education or not.
Though, one could assume where an official game from the Library of Congress would only approve a game that would further some kind of narrative but, I don't think it would be a good idea .
Alas, that's fraught with a lot of ideology that would be a hornet's nest to stir up.
A big part of why historically banking has been so fragile in the US were their asinine bans on branch banking. Until fairly recently, banks were only allowed a single office in a single city. If that city was hit by hard times, the bank was also badly affected.
Compare that with eg Canada's nationwide chains, and their superior financial stability.
That stability comes from having a handful of banks declared too big to fail, and holding oligopoly power. Canadians enjoy some of the highest retail banking fees when compared with peer nations.
> Some states have also had restrictive bank branch laws; for example, Illinois outlawed branches (other than the main office) until 1967, and did not allow an unlimited number until 1993.
No worries. Though I should have been a bit more precise in my original statement.
Branch banking was almost universally forbidden in the US from the start of the country, then over the course of the 20th century, most restrictions were gradually lifted. That process was essentially completed in the 1990s.
The anti-branch-banking restrictions were (mostly) done at the state level; so it's hard to generalise over the whole union.
That's mispricing risk. Now the depositors have no reason to care whether their bank is creditworthy or well-managed, so the bank has the incentive to gamble with their deposits as much as possible. If they get lucky they get to keep the winnings, if they go belly up the FDIC eats the cost.
You guys are familiar with how we arrived at this particular regime of mispricing risk, right? It’s preferable to the alternative. This is why banks are tightly (but imperfectly) regulated.
Similar observations apply to that more fundamental instrument of mispriced risk - limited liability business entities. The worst possible arrangement, except for all the others.
Personally I prefer to tilt at the windmill of the asymmetrical payoff diagram of US CEO compensation structures. While it’s still the case that nobody much cares about my opinions on the subject, this one at least has less of an aspect of battle-tested socioeconomic optimality.
Americans didn't arrive at this particular set of institutional arrangements by some rational process that weighed the alternatives properly.
Really, have a look at eg https://www.cato.org/blog/there-was-no-place-canada for a comparison between American finance and Canadian finance. The Canadian arrangements were much superior to the old and new American system.
> Similar observations apply to that more fundamental instrument of mispriced risk - limited liability business entities. The worst possible arrangement, except for all the others.
I don't see what's wrong with it? In most countries you can form both limited liability business entities as well as unlimited liability business entities.
When you do business as a company you (typically) have to clearly declare what kind of business you are, and your counter-parties can decide whether they want to deal with you based on that information.
(At least for the most part. If a limited liability contractor paves my driveway, and they damage my neighbour's roses while they are at it, my neighbour never got a choice.)
> Personally I prefer to tilt at the windmill of the asymmetrical payoff diagram of US CEO compensation structures. While it’s still the case that nobody much cares about my opinions on the subject, this one at least has less of an aspect of battle-tested socioeconomic optimality.
Related:
In the years after the big financial crisis of 2008, Credit Suisse paid their bankers' bonuses in the form of 'toxic assets'. See eg https://archive.is/x3GKl
That make got the 'toxic assets' off Credit Suisse's balance sheet. It was also popular with the general public. And, the best part, over time those ostensibly toxic assets actually mostly paid off in full, so the bankers got a much better bonus than if they had gotten straight up cash.
The windmill I like to tilt at is the different tax treatment of equity vs debt in many tax systems around the world. Both shareholders and creditors demand a return on their capital. But when your business pays creditors, via interest and return of principal, that's usually with money that's less taxed ('pre-tax money') than when they pay dividends or do share buybacks ('post-tax money').
Most people agree that an economy with less leverage, ie less debt and more equity, is more stable and less prone to crises. But then we have tax systems that prefer debt.
We should at least treat them equally, or even better, tax debt higher than equity, to nudge company's in the direction of more equity.
(And, of course, there's also the big, big windmill of land value taxes being superior to almost every other form of taxation. But almost no one uses them.)
> If a limited liability contractor paves my driveway, and they damage my neighbour's roses while they are at it, my neighbour never got a choice.
Limited liability doesn't mean no liability. You can still go after them and get the assets of the company or its recent profits, which will generally be more than the value of some roses. You just can't get company owner's house.
But that sort of thing is always the case. There is no such thing as unlimited liability because nobody has unlimited assets. You can cause a million dollars in damage when you only have a hundred dollars to your name and there is nowhere for the money to come from.
Limited liability is just choosing the line at which we say something is closely enough associated with another thing to have to pay for its mistakes.
> But when your business pays creditors, via interest and return of principal, that's usually with money that's less taxed ('pre-tax money') than when they pay dividends or do share buybacks ('post-tax money').
It's worse than that. Corporate acquisitions use pre-tax money, which encourages business consolidation.
The real solution is to use consumption taxes instead of income taxes, which are much fairer, harder for tax laywers to avoid and less invasive of individual privacy, and are one of the best ways to tax international corporations. Then if you want a progressive tax system you just give each individual a tax refund in a fixed amount, which creates a progressive effective rate curve.
This would also have the benefit of disadvantaging debt, because you would have to borrow enough to pay the tax on whatever you buy and then pay interest on the higher amount, discouraging debt-based purchases.
But there are a bunch of misguided claims that it would hurt the poor somehow (even though they would be paying less in total tax after the refund), probably because it would actually work and the people who benefit from the status quo have to put out some argument against it.
The industry eats the cost, not the FDIC, which funds it through industry taxes.
If your gamble fails, not only do you lose everything related to your endeavor, but now banking as a whole is more expensive, more people centralize into the big banks, and whatever business you want to start up or run afterwards is going to be more expensive.
This is why most banks don't gamble, because gambling like SVB did is really fucking stupid. You can be a boring bank and most likely mint profit for yourself for eternity, while also being seen as a positive actor in your city! The only people who aren't satisfied with such a set up are the same "Gotta grift everyone" silicon valley style assholes who think an economy is an idle game and they have to have the highest number because they are smartest and bestest.
> The industry eats the cost, not the FDIC, which funds it through industry taxes.
So in other words the FDIC eats the cost but the FDIC is really the taxpayer, or the customers of "banking industry" which is to say basically everybody.
> If your gamble fails, not only do you lose everything related to your endeavor, but now banking as a whole is more expensive, more people centralize into the big banks, and whatever business you want to start up or run afterwards is going to be more expensive.
But if your gamble succeeds you make an enormous amount of money and if it fails someone else pays most of the cost, so it's more profitable to make the gamble because you have privatized gains and socialized losses.
> You can be a boring bank and most likely mint profit for yourself for eternity, while also being seen as a positive actor in your city!
Are banks known for their desire to leave money on the table?
Isn't "banks will be conservative and responsible" the argument for not having mandatory insurance?
> Isn't "banks will be conservative and responsible" the argument for not having mandatory insurance?
The problem is not so much that the insurance is mandatory, but that it's provided by an entity whose pricing is set by the government, and which also enjoys the (implicit or explicit) backing of the government.
Privately and competitively provided insurance, even if mandated by the government, wouldn't be quite as bad.
Though I agree that giving banks the choice whether to get insured is a good one. Otherwise, you'd have to write regulation about what counts as 'good enough' insurance. Instead of letting customers of the bank decide what they are ok with.
> The industry eats the cost, not the FDIC, which funds it through industry taxes.
One problem is that FDIC does an insufficient job at charging banks of different riskiness different premiums.
Privately organised deposit insurance without an (implicit or explicit) government backstop would avoid that problem.
> You can be a boring bank and most likely mint profit for yourself for eternity, while also being seen as a positive actor in your city!
Banks caring about individual cities is a weird Americanism. Mostly stemming from their long standing bans on branch banking.
Minting profits for eternity is nice, but having money right now is also nice. A company can use their 'cost of capital' metric to make a rational decision between the two.
> The only people who aren't satisfied with such a set up are the same "Gotta grift everyone" silicon valley style assholes who think an economy is an idle game and they have to have the highest number because they are smartest and bestest.
Leave the ad-hominem at the door, please.
Managers have a fiduciary duty to the owners of the company. For most companies, and especially most banks, that means they have a duty to make money for the shareholders. (Shareholders can have other goals that they can task management with; making money is just the default.)
If managers shirk their fiduciary, shareholders can sue them. And that includes when they are shirking making the right trade-off between long term profits and short term profits:
Use your cost of capital to calculate the present value of future cash flows. Choose the path that has the largest present value.
If interest rates are high enough, it _is_ economic rational to chop down the entire forest for wood today, instead of harvesting it sustainable.
Btw, most banks do 'gamble'. They just differ in how much they gamble and on what.
Right, the depositors (up to the limit) don't have to care if it is solvent. They also don't get to keep any winnings by the bank.
The shareholder both get to keep the winnings and can get wiped out. So they are the ones who set the bank policy.
Factually, it seems that retail banks, those covered by the FDIC, don't tend to be poorly managed. There were some recent counterexamples in 2023 with rising interest rates, but in general bank failures are pretty rare. In the heights of the 2008 mess (which was in 2009/2010) around 2.5% banks were failing annually. That's not bad.
> The shareholder both get to keep the winnings and can get wiped out. So they are the ones who set the bank policy.
But it's the depositors' money they're gambling with.
Suppose you can put a million dollars of your money in something that has a 10% chance of netting you 20 million dollars and a 90% chance of losing your million dollars plus 20 million dollars of the depositors' money. That now has a positive expected value for you even though it has a negative expected value overall and results in a 90% chance of triggering a 20 million dollar claim against the FDIC.
Meanwhile your counterparty is quite happy because you gave them 21 million dollars in exchange for a 10% chance to less than double "your" money.
Shares in a bank essentially behave like call options on the assets of the bank, where the strike price is the sum of debt and other liabilities of the bank.
When you are pricing an option ahead of time, you can still misprice them; even if it turns out that at the end of the day, the option turned out to expire out-of-the-money (ie the bank's shareholders get wiped out).
The economic games I've seen all were terrible simulations of markets, and would teach the wrong messages. Monopoly is one such example. (One of its major faults is one must roll the die and do whatever you land on says.)
I expect a banking simulator would hew to the ubiquitous propaganda that the Fed is there to stabilize the money supply. (It's actual purpose is to inflate the money. See Freidman's "Monetary History of the United States")
Markets are fundamentally about choice and trade offs. Monopoly is about runaway power dynamics created through random chance and force (you have to pay rent, you can’t choose not too).
1. you cannot increase the supply of property, or build something bigger than a hotel
2. rents are rules. You cannot be creative with rents. I.e. rent control
3. there are no predictable expenses to owning property
4. the only business you can engage in is property
5. there is no supply & demand at work
6. what properties you acquire is completely random
7. the outcome of the game is controlled by a roll of the dice. There is a strategy to Monopoly, but it is very simple, and soon everyone learns it and that ceases to be a choice
8. Not being able to collect rents on mortgaged properties is quite unlike any actual business
9. No interest is paid on debt
The biggest divergence from an actual marketplace is it is designed to be zero-sum. Markets are not zero-sum.
But if all players work together and vow to not buy any property, they will just keep accumulating money (the odd card aside) and eventually bankrupt the bank.
(I'm aware you can't technically bankrupt the bank but you get the idea).
No, it's to inflate the money whenever the government needs to spend it. Which is what it has done continuously since its inception. The same has happened in every other country that switched to fiat money.
Monetary policy isn't fiscal policy. Perhaps monetary policy is preventing politicians from facing the consequences of bad fiscal policy, but the alternative is suggesting accelerationism. It's not countries that relied on gold never overspent themselves to ruin.
The whole "Fuck big gov bailing out big bank! We are the 99%!" sentiment, if I had to take a guess.
The virtue of bailing out banks is certainly worthy of debate, but that is all irrelevant here because the parent comment implies the need (and there definitely is a need) to teach the masses what banking is, first of all.
Remember, these are people who can't tell apart bank bail outs from loan forgiveness from government handouts. The level of civic understanding among the masses is atrocious, and it isn't helped by the media and the powers that be doing their fucking damnedest to keep the masses ignorant and misguided.
Yeah. I've played many video games with built in economies but not one of them ever tried to introduce the concept of lending. People really need to understand this.
MMORPGs provide a nice example of inflation though: when random enemies drop gold, you're printing money by playing the game. It's only natural that industrial money printing presses in the form of bots show up.
Supporting a lending economy in an MMO is an interesting problem. Collateralized loans would be pretty easy to implement. Maybe implementing a system for getting a lien against a long-term absentee debtor would be interesting as well. Making a more risky loan business, where lenders are responsible for reclaiming their loans by force if necessary could be a cool mechanic as well.
Counterpoint: Eve Online has both a massive in-game economy and a player base doing a ton of things on the side, including things like giving out loans and the like.
I mean the legitimate loans are outweighed by the scams so people are hesitant to actually set up these things, but still.
Renting is another one, you and your friends can rent a system from one of the larger alliances and get some protection while doing money making activities.
Well, they're still there, they just don't get a platform and the creators get doxxed and hounded off the internet. A fairly recent example was a(nother) school shooter game.
They're trolling, they're trying to create a logical knot by pitting different values they perceive people to hold against each other to try and create contradiction and confusion. But it's easily untied by recognizing they don't have any interesting point to make and we can just ignore them.
I thought that this was a great idea, until I read a few of the rules:
In short, you work for them, for free. You don't win unless you check all of the beaurocratic checkboxes. If you make something good, you might win $20k, $10k, or $5k, but good luck with any further monitization, as you give them right to use it forever (not for "commercial" use, but the "educational" catch-all is pretty broad). It's non-exclusive rights, of course, but why would I pay you for it when I can get it from the LOC for free?
The game is required to be in the browser. It's pretty obvious that they plan to put this on their website, or perhaps even create a portal for these types of games to point teachers to.
I also found it interesting that they require a cheat code to allow judges to play all levels.
And, they don't like copyleft licenses, either. LOL.
"If you win, in consideration of and by accepting the prize, you hereby grant to the Library the worldwide, nonexclusive, transferable, perpetual, irrevocable, fully paid-up/royalty-free right to use the entry that I (or my team, as applicable) has submitted to the Challenge, consisting of the game itself and the description thereof (“Entry”), for noncommercial purposes in connection with the Challenge and otherwise in furtherance of the mission of the Library of Congress, including, without limitation, associated promotional and educational purposes. This right includes the right to reproduce, prepare derivative works from, distribute, perform, display, or otherwise make use of the Entry, in any form, media, or technology, now known or later developed, including television, radio, satellite, cable, and the Internet (including, without limitation, streaming, podcasting, and on websites with user-generated content, such as Facebook and YouTube). You must also allow us to use your name, brief biography, and likeness, or if you are a minor, your first name, last initial, and state, to promote the challenge."
"The game must be accessible to disabled individuals. Many people with different abilities use content and apps from the Library of Congress. We have to make sure everyone, including people with disabilities, can use anything we post."
"Where there is a choice, use the most permissive license (i.e., the one allowing the broadest unconditioned use; please avoid viral licenses such as GPL)."
"i. Be Section 508 compliant.[1] ii. Work with screen readers like Jaws, NVDA, VoiceOver, etc."
> In short, you work for them, for free. You don't win unless you check all of the beaurocratic checkboxes
> you give them right to use it forever
It's a contest. They don't pay you just for entering. And of course they have rights to distribute for free forever... you're making a game _for them_. How else would it possibly work?
If you want to make a game that teaches civics and want to make money off it, then just build one and don't enter the contest with it.
I would expect it from a private corporation. I would not expect it from a government agency.
Usually, a government agency is more interested in getting people to create things. The motivation is that by offering a prize, they encourage people to create things. Acquiring the thing is not the point. Of course, they need the right to depict the product, but they do not usually want to use it for anything and everything that they want, in perpetuity, including the right to make derivative works (without your permission, I might add).
The way that this is designed, I would not want to encourage anybody that I know to participate in it. You may disagree, but we probably have different thresholds for what we deem to be acceptable risk.
Let me put it another way. If I were to pour my heart and soul into this project, the absolute maximum value that I could extract is $20k, which is ~$13.7k after taxes. That is the ceiling. That is it. Why would I do something that would take so much time for so little potential? I would rather risk my time on something that has no ceiling. I would give the same advice to anyone. Never settle for anything when there is an artificially-imposed cap on the earning potential.
This isn't designed for anyone to pour their heart and soul into it. Contestants are to make a "lightweight" (their word) game. They added a ceiling (to varying degrees) not just to the payout, but also to the submissions
The rules are designed so that there will be absolutely no encumberance to them using your submission in any way that they want (if you win 1st, 2nd, or 3rd place). From limiting datasets to stipulating the license to a requirement of patent unencumberance and broad IP permissions.
The section 508 requirment is also very telling. Whatever wins, they plan to copy-and-paste it into their own website at the very least.
If I were to do this, then I would pour everything I had into it, because that's the way that I do things. And so, I read all the rules, and decided that I didn't like the terms.
The only reason that I commented here in the first place is because the terms were so eggregious (in my opinion) that I felt that others should be warned about the danger and the extent to which they must sacrifice their IP in order to win the contest.
This contest could have been so much better. Sadly, it sounds like the terms were written by some greedy corporation looking to find a cheap way to mass-producde games. ($35k for 3 games is a bargain, but only if you're the buyer!)
> The rules are designed so that there will be absolutely no encumberance to them using your submission in any way that they want (if you win 1st, 2nd, or 3rd place). From limiting datasets to stipulating the license to a requirement of patent unencumberance and broad IP permissions.
The rules not only do that for them, but for anyone else (the direct grant of rights would be sufficient for them, asking for the most permissive license available where there is a choice establishes that for other people.) This is consistent with this being a public interest project.
But, if you win I assume you would still keep the right to produce "derivative works" yourself which Government has no rights to. So you could start maintaining and improving the game and sell the improved version.
I'm not a lawyer so do your own investigation into whether that is possible or not.
You are correct, and that was actually my first thought. If you win (1st, 2nd, or 3rd place), they have rights to your game and the right to make their own derivative works. And you have rights to make derivative works. But then I thought of how this could play out.
So you make "UltraCiv" for the competition and win. You decide that it was a good idea and decide to expand on it. You make "UltraCiv: Election Paradox". Now you have something successful. They make "UltraCiv: City Manager". You can't stop them, because you already gave them permanent rights. They claim that they only use it for "educational use", which is 100% true, since it is an educational game. So was Oregon Trail. In this case, however, your franchise is tainted.
It's just poisioning your own well and IP.
Again, someone will win $20k, but that someone won't be me. I'll put my efforts elsewhere.
The reason government is trying to get outside developers creating this game is that they don't have the talent for that, nor are they in the business of creating games in general. They would probably not have a program for continued improvement of games provided by 3rd parties.
Whoever wins the competition however is a talented creative developer. If government wanted to develop the game further they would probably be happy to contract with the original developer if they have further budget for that. But if not, you the creative developer could create your own follow-up game which government could not copy without your permission.
I think the winner will be somebody who is already developing games. They have the process and tools in place already. It won't be me (either).
I feel like you are doing the legal equivalent of reading the side effect warnings of an over the counter drug and freaking out.
Those rules that are freaking you out? Literally just the same expectations you would have around a gift, except made strange and unfamiliar by specificity.
You also seem to be reading the language around use as indicative of a plan to resell your software which is utterly bizarre.
I'm also not seeing anything that would indicate a cap on profits. You seem to have decided that if people can see the source that means you can't sell it? That does not make any sense. Let alone the ability to make improvements and sell that as a closed source offering.
> Work with screen readers like Jaws, NVDA, VoiceOver, etc.
This is the actual dealbreaker from a technical standpoint. Good luck with that shit. One does not simply "et cetera" the screen readers, especially since games are likely to use canvas (rasterized text).
The flip side it that it may eliminate a lot of competition. I still won't be participating (for reasons that I give in another thread), but it's worth remembering that these types of technical difficulties can be a gold mine in the real world.
> these types of technical difficulties can be a gold mine in the real world.
It is. A11y is hot in web dev right now, but the Library of Congress isn't paying out anything close to that for this and normal web pages are much simpler to make accessible than games.
A “game” doesn’t have to use canvas and rasterization (in fact, its pretty clear that they don’t assume that games will, since “can I use graphics” – the answer is yes – is a FAQ, not just something that goes without saying.)
It's easy to poke holes in government program and claim it's not friendly to a commercial mindset. The goal is to build compelling educational content for free use.
I see this as a net positive and a good first attempt to do this. I'm hoping future iterations do a better job of incentivizing creators to make games for public education.
If people were motivated to build compelling education content for free, congress would not need to incentivize it with a contest, no?
Incentives aren't there. As somebody who has judged indie games festival entries, I can tell you that even there it's rare to get a game that feels like it's complete, and even rarer to find one that feels like it's actually executing a gameplay idea. I don't know many folks who would bend over backwards to make a game for the government.
> I see this as a net positive and a good first attempt to do this. I'm hoping future iterations do a better job of incentivizing creators to make games for public education.
My take is that a good first attempt would cast a larger net through proper incentives and/or less restrictions. Then as they iterate they can decide where to tighten up things. As is, this seems to be completely lacking any inspiration and actually demotivational
No, if that was the case the permissions would be exclusive but sublicensable, not non-exclusive.
> It’s pretty obvious that they plan to put this on their website,
Yes, and?
> I also found it interesting that they require a cheat code to allow judges to play all levels.
Seems to be a sensible way to make evaluation possible when a game might naturally have a longer gameplay with progressive enabling of content. What do you find interesting about it?
> And, they don’t like copyleft licenses, either.
Copyleft licenses limit the utility of the code as a starting point for others looking to consume LOC resources; serving as that seems to be a secondary goal behind the primary civics education goal of the project.
Is this a "please" or a requirement? Because the easiest answer to the issue is just... release the game under GPL3 and have done with it. Essentially transferring your copyright to the US government seems silly, would rather just make it available to everyone.
> You must also allow us to use your name, brief biography, and likeness, or if you are a minor, your first name, last initial, and state, to promote the challenge.
This is awesome, thanks for sharing! For those interested here are some similar recent or upcoming efforts to encourage more participatory and generative civic engagement:
Superb game. Wonder what the logic was to get that feeling of "no matter what you do you're doomed" but still made it incredibly fun and, to a degree, relatable looking at different parts of history (it's not one country but has aspects that are very familiar to many).
What we need is motivation to learn civics. The culture has largely abandoned them, and in many cases has demonized those that know them. Consider the concerted and successful attacks on state-level organizations that administer voting in the US. Those people, from the Sec State on down are probably the top 1% of those who understand civics, and they are under fire. Why? Because cultural norms tell people to not care about civics, and institutions are so weak that even the "elitist cabal" doesn't seem to care about it, either.
At least, this is the appearance. Perhaps there is a firm bedrock of dedicated, knowledgeable citizens making American democracy work, and the recent attacks are less hard body blows and more jabs that are easily ignored. I hope so.
It is ironic and tragic that people who complain about how governments in the US are structured also have no fucking clue about what they're complaining about.
We are the United States of America, and yet most people don't understand what a state even is.
Not sure why you're being downvoted- that's my experience as well. It's still their right to complain but taking a single US govt course in college dispelled almost all of my frustration just by understanding the structure.
>Think Oregon Trail, Flappy Bird, or Candy Crush, but with educational content that
teaches lessons about civics and incorporates Library of Congress resources.
That's a fairly interesting list. The author hasn't looked at games in a decade, I bet a themed version of 2048 would blow their mind.
I'm envisioning 2048, but themed around voting drives, with cookie-clicker-like graphics progression, culminating in a "you won all 50 states!" celebration.
Users can also find a text-only transcript of the game published by the developer, which can useful for making study notes or for accessibility (ideally after playing the game at least once if possible, as the concepts are more memorable with the interactivity and animations): https://ncase.me/trust/words.html
The developer also provides additional written notes about the different strategies featured in the game at: https://ncase.me/trust/notes/
I hadn't seen this before and just played through it. I totally agree! And I think this is exactly appropriate for a civics game, except for that it doesn't incorporate LoC content.
I will admit that this is a surprisingly cool project. The limitations put upon it severely limit what it can be and, as a result, a little tough to overcome though.
For one, who exactly is the audience here? If it is intended for adults, then restriction on anything deemed offensive, racist, or not in line with unspoken agenda ( it is not listed ) will miss the mark if only, because it will not deal with the reality of the world around them. Even "Papers please" dealt with difficult questions. How on earth can you even begin to have a game about civics that is not grounded in the reality that this country was founded on?
If it is intended for younger audience, then the encyclopedic nature of the required sources will almost automatically make the game not cool for anyone, who consider games games. How are going to keep the younger audience's attention? You think you can make a quiz show 'So you wanna be a President?' Good luck. Thing won't even register to kids unless you are jumping on a pogo stick in US senate on senator's heads in an effort to confuse them enough to vote for the bill. Hold on. Let me write it down.
I like the idea. I do. I do think we need more civic engagement. We do need engaged and informed citizenry. But I do not think it can be achieved by writing an RTS of trying to 'capture' all lobbyists before they reach certain congress members and change their minds on how the vote should go..
Civics as it's designed to function, with checks and balances?
Or a congress based on 100 year old apportionment & pointless census, a hyperwealthy hyperminority bribing congressmen left and right, then getting receipts for their bribes via Congress's famous lack of a secret ballot?
Because one of those is a fantasy, and the other is the world we live in.
A really smart guy with who I was at school loved to argue that a video game that teaches you an insane lot about civics is Deus Ex (the original). I can nevertheless see why the Library of Congress is probably not looking for such a kind of game in their contest. :-)
EDIT: Or some kind of PC/browser port of the (in)famous Illuminati card game ...
These opportunities are great for reaching sophisticated audiences.
Anyone who wants to build the game with Unity for this can use my game streaming service gratis (https://appmana.com). This will let you build an ordinary Unity game and deploy it with instant loading and high fidelity graphics to all web users. It's also unique for networked multiplayer games: you write a local multiplayer game, and each player gets their own camera. (e.g. https://appmana.com/watch/oreo)
I also support the Mozilla Creative Media Awards. There are lots of opportunities for video game storytelling.
The game provides a simple government simulation, allowing the player to manage the British economy and compete in elections every 5 years. The player takes on the role of leader of one of the major parties, managing variables such as tax rates and welfare payments, which each year results in changes to key economic indicators such as inflation and unemployment.
The trick to win was to tax people massively for four years. And then spend like crazy in the election year.
I can't find any detailed information on this outside of this post. What kind of Library Of Congress resources are there? Is there anywhere to discuss things with other people?
GPT means there's lots of opportunity to do more qualitative stuff, similar in spirit to Oregon Trail, than there used to be. There's lots of issues with anything that uses GPT interactively (fun as that can be), but pre-calculating a ton of narrative material (including structured material) opens up a lot of possibilities.
Anybody remember President Elect for the Apple II? As kids, my cousin and I were obsessed with that game during one Christmas break. Turn based campaign finance simulator. I have no idea why we thought it was so fun. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/President_Elect_(video_game)
Mark Brown of Game Maker's Toolkit fame runs a yearly game jam centered around a specific theme [1], which would line up well with this initiative. The quality of submissions is really, really impressive.
You gain knowledge of civics by participating in civic activities. We don’t need more learning gimmicks, we need more (and easier) opportunities for people to participate. Beyond that, it’s not a knowledge problem, it’s a cultural problem.
I know they don't qualify because of the needs-to-run-on-the-web requirement,[1] but I firmly believe that every politician (heck, every citizen, period) ought to play MULE, SimCity, and Civilization.
Sorry, I can only make games that are fair to each player. Not a completely rigged game where the ones with most points can stay on top using rhetoric, lies, and financial corruption.
lol, I thought of an idea: You assume the role of your favorite senator and your job is to fillibuster a bill. You have to talk into your mic and move your character for as long as you can. As time goes by, objects are thrown at you, if you get hit, game over. If you stop making wavy hand gestures, game over. If you stop talking, game over. All roads lead to the bill being passed anyway...
This smacks of out of touch bureaucrats saying "what do the kids like? Video games? Lets get some of them together." $20k covers next to no development of a modern video game. If they _actually_ wanted to engage with folks creating popular games in order to create pro-civic content, that'd be neato (imo) but it's going to require actually paying for quality.
> This smacks of out of touch bureaucrats saying “what do the kids like? Video games? Lets get some of them together.”
Its actually bureaucrats getting together and saying “what would be simultaneously educational and a way to showcase how to use of LOC resources that other people can build upon”.
> $20k covers next to no development of a modern video game.
They don’t want what you are thinking of when you say a “modern video game”, nor is the prize intended to be a purchase fee, rather, a bonus along with showcasing it for a labor-of-love. There are government projects that buy things at prices intended to cover the actual costs, they are government contracts, not competitions like this. If this isn’t the kind of thing that just seeing the description of what they are looking for doesn’t make you think “Hey’d, I’d like to do that even if I wasn’t getting paid to”, its probably not for you.
> If they _actually_ wanted to engage with folks creating popular games in order to create pro-civic content, that’d be neato (imo) but it’s going to require actually paying for quality.
Yes, and if that’s what they wanted, there would be an RFP, the usual set of government contracting requirements and preferences, etc., not a short-timeline competition with a requirement for (a) using LOC resources, and (b) maximally open licensing (which the LOC itself doesn’t need since it is also acquiring broad nonexclusive rights as a condition of the contest, separate from the license under which the code is offered: the open licensing is for third parties.)
> A cheat code must be built into the game to allow the judges to quickly play through the game in its entirety
Man, the NSA really can't control themselves...
But on a more serious note, the challenge doesn't require the participants to be US citizens nor US residents. I can imagine lots of interesting entries resulting from this policy: a game about privacy sponsored by the CCC, third-world developers for whom 10k is a big amount, games like Monopoly containing a hidden message about the failings of capitalism...
The rules specify that the games must be non-partisan. Are there any major contemporary issues being debated where opposing sides of the issue do not end up falling on partisan lines? It seems to me like anything as controversial as "privacy" could be labeled as partisan and disqualified.
Free speech is now considered "partisan" and "conservative ideology" in a bizarre turn of events.
Nowadays, the only dichotomy I face that seems to hold true is authoritarians vs not. No matter how they label themselves as in terms of regional party politics or political compass terms.
I think in this case, given the structure around the rules, I could imagine the mean “partisan” in a more explicit sense:
A game where you play as the Democrats to defeat Republicans would be explicitly partisan. A game where you learn about the consequences of defunding social security, in a way that nudges you away from cutting social security probably wouldn’t be considered partisan, even though it’s an issue ghat largely follows party lines.
Civics as it's designed to function, with checks and balances?
Or a congress based on 100 year old apportionment & pointless census, a hyperwealthy hyperminority bribing congressmen left and right, then getting receipts for their bribes via Congress's famous lack of a secret ballot?
Because one of those is a fantasy, and the other is the world we live in.
Hi! I'm a game developer and software architect building a platform to enable the quick design, iteration and deployment of web games. I would LOVE to build a game with you for this challenge (and we can split the prize money if we win.) DM me if interested, email in my bio. :-]
What exactly would a 'civics' curriculum teach that would be consonant with contemporary political culture? The next generation is being taught a "civics" that is hostile to the American civics tradition. This sort of program is DOA.
Activities on the ship include partying, bailing water, inspecting the hull for leaks, and repairing holes.
The passengers are divided into factions who believe the ship is not taking on water, those who believe it is taking on water but it's happening slowly and won't be a problem for a long time, and those who believe that only immediate action from most of the passengers can prevent the ship from sinking.
Good luck.