Capital (Game Design Document)Capital is a video game adaptation of Marxs Capital, designed with two primary goals:

- Through gameplay, help the player to understand the basics of Marxs economic and political theory

- Experiment with interactive / participatory storytelling. We tell the fictional story of one worker becoming aware of his/her exploitation and staging a revolution. The player participates in the learning / awakening of consciousness at the same time as the character she controls. Ideally, the player relates the concepts in the game to her real-life experiences just as the in-game character relates those same concepts to his fictional experiences

The structure of the game is as follows:

We cover several weeks in the life of a factory worker, called here the worker. (In the game, the worker will be named by the player.) Those weeks are divided up into days, which each have a day phase and a night phase.

During the day, life happens to the worker without much input from the player: the worker has very little autonomy at work, and the player therefore has very little agency there. The games writers control the daytime narrative strictly: essentially, they decide what happens at work each day. (There is room here for lots of fun, wacky story elements, inspired by the Capital manga or other sources.)

Possibility: during the day, we may also want to add in a series of work mini-games that become more and more challenging and/or tedious as work goes on. These mini-games would all be simulations of working in the cheese factory, and the players performance in these games could determine things like whether the worker gets a bonus check or punishment at the end of the week. The games could also change as work conditions change: you have to play for longer when the workday is extended, or harder when the foreman is around. When new assembly line equipment comes in, your task becomes more boring.

During the night, the worker reads Capital. The player experiences this reading through a combination of text, images, sound, and crucially, minigames. This collection of nighttime elements serves these purposes:

- Educate the player on whatever concept the worker is reading about- Connect abstract concepts from Marx to the workers lived daytime experience

In the next couple pages, I present a possible beginning of the game, which introduces our metanarrative (during the day) and Marxs first concept, the commodity (at night).

Day ZeroThe player sees the following text on screen:

Good morning!

You are not currently employed.

Look for a job?

(Yes) (No) | |A job application appears on the screen. We collect the players name, gender, and perhaps some other information for fun; anything we collect can be used later in the game. E.g. which of the following songs do you like best? could end up in Karaoke. Alternatively we can collect information then completely ignore it: e.g. What are your aspirations / what is your dream job?.

After a moment, there's good news: Robin's Cheese Factory has just fired some recalcitrant workers and is now hiring! Does the player want the job?

(Yes) (No) | |Great, work starts tomorrow!

The worker heads to bed but finds a book under their pillow. Its a copy of Marxs Capital! We see a title screen and the real game begins.

If the player clicks no at any point, the inevitability of needing to work is made clear. Maybe we prompt something like OK, what will you have for lunch today? and nothing is affordable, so the only option is Ill take a job. Alternatively, we can choose not to present even the illusion of agency. (e.g. Good morning! You are not currently employed. Youre looking for a job. Please fill out this application.)

Day One

Day Phase

The worker goes in for a first day of work and perhaps meets Robin, who describes the job the player will be performing. We should think more about the progression of work minigames. Possible ideas for work games in no particular order:

- package the cheese / add price tags to the cheese- milk the cows- warming up the milk- adding salt / other ingredients

- churning(?) cheese- cutting cheese into blocks (combined with packaging)- a combination of these (toward the beginning of the game, before robin takes measures to

really assembly-line-ify the process of making cheese).- sneak in smoking breaks while you work without being caught by the foreman- nondescript labor that for the life of you, you cannot figure out how it relates to cheese

At the end of the day, you are paid for your labor.

Night Phase

You begin reading chapter 1: the commodity.

What is a commodity? Its something thats useful to us. A hammer. An apple. A deck of playing cards. We can use commodities to solve problems.

Game One: Use Values

A series of problems present themselves to the player; the player must solve them by using the correct commodity/commodities. The reason this game is playable at all is that each commodity has a very specific use value.

Example problems:

- a nail needs to be hammered into a wall- the players cat is hungry- the players kids are bored- the player has a splinter- whatever we find humorous / fun

The player has a selection of commodities that can be used on these problems. Some of the problems may require multiple commodities to be used in creative ways. Some may just be weird / humorous.

After solving a few problems, the text continues. When solving problems like this, commodities are not interchangeable: each serves a specific purpose. Unlike values such as 3 and 4, use

The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as an immense accumulation of commodities, its unit being a single commodity. Our investigation

must therefore begin with the analysis of a commodity.

The utility of a thing makes it a use value. But this utility is not a thing of air. Being limited by the physical properties of the commodity, it

has no existence apart from that commodity.

values cannot really be compared. A hammer is not better or worse than an apple unless you are hungry or faced with a nail.

Unfortunately, in real life we do not have access to infinite commodities, and so we cannot simply pick the best tool for the job and use it.

Game Two: Mr. Exchange

This minigame is similar to the last: a series of problems present themselves and the player must solve them using commodities. However, they may not have the necessary use values to solve the problem. So there is an additional mechanic. They can take a commodity to Mr. Exchange, who has secret powers that allow him to exchange one commodity with another of equal worth. (Perhaps Mr. Exchange is dressed in a suit made of money or something like that visually distinct.) Unfortunately, Mr. Exchange knows absolutely nothing about use value, so he might give you something you dont actually need.

The player keeps exchanging to various different (also humorous) equivalents (including perhaps X pounds of cheese from Robins factory) until the needed commodity is found and the problem can be solved.

Once the player is done, we again debrief: this game was frustrating, because there seemed to be no logic to Mr. Exchanges actions. Clearly, his idea of equal worth was not connected to how useful the item was. How could it be? There is never an equivalence between different use values; they are specific and unique.

And yet as a society, we do exchange commodities. The market, like Mr. Exchange, seems to have some secret knowledge about the worth of a commodity. This worth is called an exchange value.

The mystery is: if exchange value has nothing to do with use value, what does it have to do with?

And with that, you go to bed, and day 2 begins.

As use values, commodities are, above all, of different qualities, but as exchange values they are merely different quantities, and

consequently do not contain an atom of use value.