Various Maladies and Half Earth Socialism

B R

B R

— 4 min read

I don't talk about games a lot here but I wanted to briefly talk about two fun new games I'm currently engaged with.

Minesweeper: Cold and Flu Season Edition

The first one is simple: a losing game of minesweeper; in the form of choosing where to sit during French classes such that I am most distant from someone with a cold.

The professor places these on the desks before we get in, as prompts for the intro question of "Ça va?" or "how are you?". I'll leave the translation as an exercise for the reader but, no, gêné does not have anything to do with bottoming. At least if you've prepared properly. And affamé isn't vore. Probably.

Agency in the Face of Systemic Failures

The second game I've been playing is called Half Earth. You are placed in the role of a global planner trying to combat climate change and the resulting environmental devastation while avoiding being thrown out of office.


Given we have nothing close to a global plan, much less planners with the power to create one, the game dispenses with the single hardest question first: how do you rear modern state capitalism - premised on nigh unrestricted growth, profit maximization, and (often violent) inter-state competition - to combat a massive global collective problem?

That's the beauty, you don't!

Having addressed one set of seemingly intractable issues, you are free to try out all kinds of research projects, policy changes, and radical shifts in energy and land use. The constraining factors include general public sentiment and staying in good favor with a global parliament filled with Consumerists vs Ecofeminists vs Authoritarians vs Animal Liberationalists vs Accelerationalists etc. Oh, and balancing that with the moral necessity of not killing billions of people.

I basically played until I got this and "Abolish Prisons" done and then claimed victory. I had brought warming down to 1C, which in our timeline will probably happen when the current interglacial period is over.

One can nitpick various parts of this free game - how are any Consumerists or Accelerationalists still alive and elected to the global socialist parliament? - but the start of the game frankly begs bigger personal questions for me.

Cute.

At some point I'll need to get a real job. I am privileged, in that - right at the moment - I have some choice in what I work on.[1] With such privilege comes a responsibility to work on something socially valuable, if I can.

This game skirts the deep question that I've found myself asking recently: should one be (1) trying to dismantle the systems that got us here or (2) use them, in place, to limit/ameliorate the resulting mess?

Obvious answers between the two abound - the former in service to ideological purity (whatever that is) and the latter is easy because it's also (by far) the easier way to live in the world as presented.

The one thing they have in common is that both are, sadly, full of failures.

What workers of the world own is a rounding error as far as global wealth is concerned, and here is the current state of the in-place system your gonna wanna try to do some good in:

I'd say the author is going to hell but, assuming an AI didn't write this, they will be soon enough with this attitude.

Anyway I'm additionally lucky that I don't have the answer this question right away. I'm in week four of a total of - if one chooses to accept it - 44 weeks! So here's a particularly smug dog picture.

She is not happy with being cooped up in here while her stitches are healing.

Stay tuned next week for the story of a class field trip and a resulting medical emergency (it's cool, everyone is fine).

  1. For now. Precarity is built in to the system, excepting the very highest levels of wealth. ↩︎

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