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Last month, I published a little Twine game called You Are Jeff Bezos. In this one, you wake up in the body of Amazon CEO, Jeff Bezos, and you spend every penny red in his name.
That's all. That's all. I mean, there's also a narrative frame where you run away from the police and try to crawl down a sewer. And a hidden end involving a hedgehog.
But basically, that's all.
Above: you are Jeff Bezos
The game started as a joke and it should probably stay that way, but people made the mistake of encouraging me. I wrote it in four days. Bezos's money is measured in cash rather than assets because I did not want to take the time to model something more complex. I've created together the cover image used for the store page in about two minutes, using standard fonts and a Creative Commons logo. He has no business next to all these beautiful games on the itch.io storefront. I would have expected about five people to play it.
But here we are: 110,000 views, articles about Vice and Newsweek, and a modest number of donations later, I'm forced to admit that I may have found something. Educators showed the game to their students. It's apparently the "best modern shaker" ever seen, and more than one player has called it "one of the best horror games ever created." Friends praised it as a socialist praxis.
Also someone attracted fanart ??
Above: The Twine Node Map for You Are Jeff Bezos
Now that the 15 minutes of fame have faded, it's actually not that hard to understand why it worked. Basically, everyone wants to have more money to spend and relatively few people think it's acceptable for a rich guy like Bezos to spend money as a private space while his own employees live under the seal food. And yes, it probably helped me publish it the same day the Mega Millions jackpot reached $ 1 billion.
I do not really consider the game as socialist, much less effective as an agitator. Anticapitalist, perhaps, vaguely and incoherently. But it is in my interest not to assume that it is not because I have not been decided in my writing that this is implicit in the text. And he is referring this one tweet about the Communist Manifesto and Monday Night RAW. In other words, I validate all your headcanons, even if I do not agree with them.
Personally, I wrote "You Are Jeff Bezos" because I felt lousy and useless (like, for example, when I'm out of work and I feel like my last three years have been spent on creative hanging animation), I like doing things for people. I have therefore written a fantasy of power that takes huge social problems in real life and reduces them to a few round figures.
Porto Rico? You can fix that. Repay the student loan of your friends? Easy. Solving the water crisis in Flint, Michigan? Pocket change.
I hoped that some friends would play the game and feel, at least for a few minutes, as though they had come out of the hole that society had forced them to dig. To paraphrase the title of another Twine game that (as far as I know Google) no longer even exists in a functional online state: All I wanted was that my friends have an absurd power.
I think it shows how frustrated people are that the game has exploded as it did. But I do not think it's just because Bezos is easy to hate and everyone loves the fantasies of power. It's not that the Earth is asking a billionaire with a conscience, as if it could solve even a fraction of our problems. It's not even that Nozaki-kun, a monthly for girls, is one of the best cartoons of all time and deserves a second season (though it's objectively true).
I believe You Are Jeff Bezos has found an echo because, at some level, most of us recognize that money is a shitty game in which we have never asked to be opted, and as long as the world plays it, it is almost impossible outside. If it worked at least well, it might not be so bad, but you do not have to be socialist or really anywhere in the political left to see that this is not the case and for a long time. It's a poorly balanced system, full of exploiters, and the mods are clearly asleep.
I have therefore created a game that basically launches you with an infinite money fraud. And instead of earning money, all you can do is get rid of it.
But really, if you're Jeff Bezos communicates anything, I hope that private wealth is actually just a terrible way to solve problems. There are many things you can not do even with Bezos money. I first included the $ 1.5 trillion figure of US student debt to illustrate that, but in reality, you could not afford that even with the combined wealth of the 10 richest people in the world. It's almost as if our ancestors had realized that at one point people were fed up with repairing shit and that we had to organize ourselves on a fairly large scale to handle things.
Fredric Jameson or Slavoj Zizek are used to saying: "It is easier to imagine the end of the world than that of capitalism". That's why I like the term "millennium" with all its apocalyptic nuances. Especially when I hear that we have killed another industry. We may not be able to leave capitalism in our own way, but by the gods we will try to reduce it with us.
Money is fake and bullshit. My game is also fake and bullshit. It uses simple calculations in an extremely unrealistic way and there is a scene where Amazon delivery drones are trying to kill you. If it were up to me to decide, I would not have chosen this thing for (viral hate I hate this sentence) to become viral, but I can not deny that there are legitimate reasons for that.
Go ahead, become an absurd powerhouse and help others do the same.
Kris Ligman is a writer, publisher and developer of casual games living (somehow) in Southern California. You should probably hire them before someone else.
(This post originally appeared in Unwinnable.)
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