Was pharonic Egypt capitalist or communist? How about Imperial Rome? Isn’t a military that gives you housing and health care on a base more socialist than capitalist?
A tight religious community where people live together and sell soaps and wine over the web… communist right?
Another community makes travel guide documentaries, including about these tight religious communities that also accept interns… is that a capitalist business?
Enter board games. What a lot of coders have in common, at these Silicon X firms (I hate to say “Valley” as that excludes my Oregon “Forest” and Austin’s “Hills”), is an interest in board games. They tend to stack up at company headquarters, and workers play them on break. A company I worked with, Useractive in Champaign-Urbana (near Wolfram) was much the same.
I went through a board game phase myself in my youth, but next to these die-hard fans, with shelves and shelves of curated board games, I’m a fledgling gamer. Ditto when it comes to shooters etc. I loved Doom for the artwork and would stop shooting to go look at the skull sculptures — not the best strategy for lasting in that universe, especially in multi-player mode.
“Quakers Play Quake” was my mental bumper sticker (Quake was another instance of Doom). Cartoon violence is not outward violence. You blink your eyes and wiggle your fingers. It’s inward, imaginary, and my cliquey cult does not fight against the violent nature of the imagination. My cult would lose if it did so, as only the most conflicted would join. But forget arcade game style shooters and such and focus on board games for a sec: marvel at how many permutations we have, and at the family resemblances. You have spinners, decks of cards (some telling you about a story), dice, the board itself, and rules galore. So many rules. Lets hope they all fit on the back of the box, which on many games they do. Others give you a whole manual.
That’s the mindset of many a social engineer going forward: lets design a game with rules, and have people play it, and modify it as we go (or not — perhaps the plan is to stick to the rules no matter what, but for a definite period, then do postmortem).
Sometimes people in some home office design games for the field, complete with uniforms…
