“Casino roguelike” AAA Simulator’s Steam page has a demo, and also a boxout description I imagine I’d find extremely trite (in a Brewdog Punk IPA, Outer Worlds anti-capitalism-as-a-feature type way) if I hadn’t already read designer Nic Vasudeva-Barkdull’s much more convincing and considered thoughts on putting the game together. This is the nature of trying to sell a game in a couple of sentences, admittedly.
Vasudeva-Barkdull says the idea came about when Blizzard’s Rod Fergusson implored executives, in the wake of layoffs, to “be empathetic…these people aren’t knobs and dials”. It made Vasudeva-Barkdull wonder, he says, “what kinds of knobs and dials the executives of these companies actually have, and whether there could be game design that actually shapes your actions towards greed and callousness”.
“My first instinct was that if a player were given a literal knob or slider to hire and fire people, along with an ever-increasing profit goal to meet, they would have no choice but to do evil things like mass layoffs in service of the bottom line,” says Vasudeva-Barkdull. “The design of the system wouldn’t have it any other way. And that, I believe, is the core truth of simulating the corporate world. Any option which does not bring profit to the shareholders simply does not exist – in the simulation or in reality”.
Incentivising player callousness by marrying it to efficiency or other incentives isn’t a new idea, of course. Frostpunk. Papers Please etc. But I do think there’s something interesting in stripping away the narra-framing and telling a story about a system, albeit with some heightened surreality and a bit of silliness.
As for the demo itself? It made me grin like a guilty pickpocket roleplaying as a guilt-agnostic pickpocket, yeah. You fire people ten at a time. Hiring interns is abstracted as a buff where you “select five employees to receive minus 100% salary”, itself very funny and horrible wording, but it feels especially nasty when you go to use it and actually have to click five employees with names and jobs shuffling their way around the studio. The interface and music are pretty charming, too. It all feels very cartridge-coded – much lighter and livelier than you’d probably expect from a business tycoon or management sim. The full thing is out September if you fancy it.
1
20
20
