Cutthroat Capitalism: The Game

Earlier this week, I found a neat little game called Cutthroat Capitalism in an article on Wired. The article was about high-piracy in the modern day, and focused on recent piracy off of the coast of Somalia and in the Gulf of Aden.

Many games are designed with the intent of informing players on a certain subject. I remember a few years ago I spent a weekend at a friend's house and we found this "game" on the Internet called Real Lives (the website which hosts the game has since been taken down) which simulates the life of a random person in the world.

In the game, you are born as a random person of a random gender in a random family based on real-world population distribution figures and live the life of a person in your country of birth.

We found this game highly entertaining and somewhat comical, although we were certainly making light of some serious third-world problems. In the game, your character (is that the right word?) will come into contact with diseases like malaria or polio, which have been all but eradicated from life as we know it. You'll also have to stay away from political protests, as you can be jailed or executed for participation in some at-risk activities. Smoking is also something that comes up frequently, and is highly addictive in-game (it's almost impossible to stop once you start).

It's tough to classify Real Lives as a typical game, and Cutthroat Capitalism falls into the same category, although it is a much simpler simulation based on a more narrow topic of interest. As a game, I didn't find it all that entertaining, but it is much simpler to understand than the article you can find the game in. It deals with most or all of the challenges that pirates face in the article: costs of doing business, the difficulty of commandeering a ship once you've found it, negotiating with the owners of the ship and cargo, etc. But it is still an interesting way of delivering content to the reader, and is much more gripping than the words on the page.

While I'm sure you won't feel obligated to kill a day playing it, Cutthroat Capitalism is an interesting look at the way games can be and are often used to draw an audience into the world of a story or article.