Why I Don't Shop at Wal-Mart: A Story About God-Game Economic Narrative

I've always wanted to do a post on god-game narrative because it's such a fascinatingly depressing kind of realism. Sure, god-games are all about creating your own imaginary civilization or country. They do present a fun way to experiment with, in some cases, quasi-realistic economies.

I'm not an economics major--I'm an English and journalism grad. If I knew more about economics maybe I would believe economists like Kevin O'Leary when they say "greed is good." But probably not, because greed is not good. It doesn't take an economist to follow the consumerist line of thinking through to where it should lead. God-games have simply accelerated and simplified the process.

It has been said that greed drives everything in society (I wouldn't argue that) and in so doing, all the wealth the greedy people make trickles down to the average working person. Consumerism keeps North America going.

But I don't shop at Wal-Mart.


The Beginning: Building the Empire

Imagine, then, a new country, God-game style. Here you are, controlling your dashingly handsome avatar striding in pioneering fashion across an open tract of green land. The vista is really quite beautiful: mountains, lakes, loads and loads of trees, arable land, every kind of natural resource you will need to build your own country.

And you are in control.

It's really a pretty beautiful country because god-games are made for PCs usually and graphics are good enough these days to make some good old-fashioned Mother Nature eye candy. I like mountains. So do a few in every country, we hopeless Romantics.

You probably think we're all idealists, tree-huggers, opposed to entrepreneurialism and all that. But that's not why I don't shop at Wal-Mart.

To spite me, you decide to start a company call All-Mart, where anyone can buy anything for the cheapest cost humanly possible. You build the first one in the nicest place in your country, and a good little city pops up as your people settle down. All this going to god-game mechanics? Good.

Pretty soon some foreign visitors come buy and introduce themselves as your neighbours. Your people are pretty taken with them, and thanks to their jobs at All-Mart that pay them a salary, they can buy wood from your country's trees to build houses and they can buy local food, or even some of that exotic food the foreigners dropped off. There will be sushi for all! (I have a bit of a thing for sushi--thanks!)

You're in control here, remember, so shopping at All-Mart is the best consumer experience ever! They said that in their shopper-submitted reviews posted at All-Mart. But remember, All-Mart still has to make a profit, especially because the outlet you opened in a neighbouring country isn't doing too well and your first store is going to have to make up the slack.

Your All-Mart never paid its workers much because, really, they don't do much but hawk all the stuff, and since you can buy everything at All-Mart and only at All-Mart, they aren't really needed. Since other outlets are in trouble (damn those foreign tax regulations!) you cut wages some more. Hey, it'll trickle down, and All-Mart's cheap anyway. Your people can get all they need for low prices, so they don't need to be wealthy relative to other countries' people.

There are, conveniently, even a couple of nifty quotes included in the Civilization series of games, one of which I'm going to borrow: Henry Ford said that, "There is one rule for the industrialist and that is: make the best quality goods possible at the lowest price possible, paying the highest wage possible" (source, which also includes a number of other quotes about industrialism).

So why doesn't this work? Why isn't the consumer the ultimate path to wealth? Think of this:


Balance

Most God-games I've played make a single fairly sweeping abstraction about resources, reducing the wide variety of goods and costs in reality down to broad strokes: food, materials, and finances. Money buys wood, which can be traded for food, or bought, or sold for more money. It's a reduction, but it's based in reality.

The key thing is that all three are necessary to run an economy. That's not hard to figure out. When your country has a dry year and crops die, Governor U. R. Player has to step in and stump up the change from the treasury to buy some more from your friendly neighbours.

But remember, you also built that All-Mart. Your country hails the consumer who spends what money he has to buy stuff, the profits of which all roll back into your government's treasury--assuming, of course, that you've set up a strong, enforceable tax system so that the guy who own All-Mart for you pays back all of what's made to the government, minus essential expenses and a living wage.

Of course, that rarely happens, because "greed is good." A living wage for your workers isn't the same thing Phil Mickelson thinks a living wage is. Mickelson was whining about having to pay for other people's disabilities and social security--because he has no need of that himself. He's stinking rich. And good on him, the greedy guy.

Let's be nice and assume that Ethical You has been making sure All-Mart pays fair price for all the resources they pulled out of your country's land in order to build their goods and services empire. Even if you imposed Phil's dreaded 60% taxe rate, 40% of the money still ends up as profit (less the small wages paid). 40% of the value of each small part of your country is now private wealth.

To make matters worse for you, resources are getting more and more scarce in YourLand, and the prices are going up. All-Mart might need a little helping hand from your government treasury in tough times, or they'll be leaving town along with your people's jobs and most of your resources, not to mention 40% of your country's tangible value, because some other greedy country will take them. But other countries are in tough, too, and have to raise prices on basic exports to survive. God-games make this especially the case when one state is buying all the resources--it's essentially inflation. Worse, those greedy other-skin-tone bastards know you have to buy wood from them because All-Mart sold all of yours cheap cheap cheap and all you've got left are stumps and an angry Lorax.

This could become a problem, you might be beginning to see. The more people buy from All-Mart, the more of your state treasury trickles away in profit margins because, remember, greed is good. It would be nice if the workers could buy some nicer stuff to help keep the artisans afloat, but they can't afford anything but All-Mart. The oligarchs and Phil could buy something, but they already own everything (including, quite possibly, you--you do run this place, and they likely got to you through lobbying long ago) and they like to keep themselves to themselves. They might buy a nice car every now and again, which is great news for the guy down in the car shop, but only a fraction of that money goes back into your treasury through taxes on profits, investments, and goods and services (the dreaded GST--Goods and Services Tax).

Those consumers you've created do not like being taxed. Not at all--it reduces what little they can buy, which in turn reduces how much money comes back to your government. Uh-oh.

By now your government's bank account is shrinking bad, and that incredibly annoying Sim City 4 financial advisor is hollering around the place like bloody murder is happening in the accounts office. Which is probably is, because now the only way for you to make enough money to keep the lights on for everyone, not to mention pay your inevitable war debts to either the greedy other-skin-tone bastards you went to war with or the greeedy other-skin-tone bastards who financed the weapons for your war, is to raise taxes on the general citizenry--and probably on the rich, too, including poor Phil.

If you don't, the banks, who have been safeguarding your money and resources all along in that nice little indicator bar at the top of your screen, will send you a nice "empty" message full of legal mumbojumbo and credit card offers that make no sense at all. You've been telling us you can't sell nothing for nothing all along. Pity you don't have any trees left. (The Lorax has an appointment at 1:30, by the way.)


Anarchy!

It's not really your fault, is it? I mean, damn, here I am using a second-person writing voice to incriminate you--damn journalists! God-games solve this problem with a very simple wave of the digital hand: resources are infinite.

I've never played a god-game where there wasn't pretty much limitless oil in the ground, a nice convenient coal mine right nearby that never runs out (and usually doesn't kill your trees), and a gold mine that is basically a license to print money. Trust me, when this all goes under, you're gonna want a lot of gold handy. Those bloody barbarians understand it when it glitters. Fools.

Sometimes game designers with a sense of economic realism throw a curve-ball and make a resource finite--trees in Empire Earth could be cut down... eventually. Sure, there are thousands more behind. Canada's still mostly trees, isn't it? I mean, cut them down? Might not look as nice, but we need to build more stuff for All-Mart to sell so enough money trickles through to the government. Pretty soon, all the trees will be gone. Real countries have very finite resources.

In a game if you screw this up as badly as this fictional U.R. Player has done here, there's no real consequence. Game over, but try again from scratch tomorrow and start a new country with a brand new Lorax, no doubt. Screw up again, if need be, until you learn the damn game.


If the Game is Real

In reality if you run out of money, it's over. Last time I played Civilization there was no going begging for debt relief and financial aid with nothing but a hat in my hands. And really, would you aspire for Your Great Country Brave And Free to be the god-game equivalent of a tiny, war-torn nation full of desert (which, by the way, you created when you burned and harvested all the resources--nice job!)?

Yeah, you can trade for money in Civilization--but you lose autonomy when you do it. Without money to buy wood or food (to use the simplistic reduction) you have to give up land or more precious materials. The guys who made Empire Earth figured out a slightly less modern but much more accurate way to show this: it was called Vassalage, a nice concept from the Dark Ages (before it, really) where one tribal warlord succumbed to another in exchange for protection and/or retaining control of his little bit of turf.

And hell, you're gonna need the protection soon. Because when you hike those taxes on the rich to save this mess, they'll pull your political support from under you at the same time as they lift-off with your All-Mart and all of your economic infrastructure, all in private hands. Now that upstart Workers' Movement Party, full of laid-off All-Mart schmucks, is looking a lot more threatening. And though they're already poor, you had to raise their taxes, too, just to get money to stave off the barbarians and keep you in shoe polish and golf clubs. Unfortunately, they know about your tee-time next weekend with Phil and are coming armed with pitchforks and torches. You might need to reschedule with Phil.

Of course, Phil's likely to have a good idea for a solution, as he's no doubt apt to do: With enough blood and machine guns you can get some egomaniacal, narcissistic oil baron to come to your rescue, swayed by sex or promises, or maybe just the chance to take whatever's left in your country for himself. Not that there's much to choose from in your corporatized concrete hole-in-the-ground.

Remember that arable, lovely, mountain-filled Romantic country? Now it's got no culture of its own. Everyone knows that, really, the greedy other-skin-toned bastards you were mocking earlier are telling your just what to do, and laughing while your enslaved, impoverished people do it. Gladiating is coming next week.

The worst part of this is that your name is gone. All your sparkly advisors are either gone or have given up, going from screaming red bleeping boxes (ah, Sim City 4...) to sad, unemployed, depressed automatons, just like everyone else, left to shake their heads at your ineptitude. They know you didn't listen to them.

And yeah, the Lorax wants to meet you again. He saw all this coming a long, long time ago. An economy is not a complicated system when you think about it in broader terms. When you play God, all the large numbers may as well be small; whether you have $12,000,000,000,000 trees or 12 doesn't change their relative worth.


Game Over: A Sad End

I'm no economist. I'm a storyteller, so what you have here is a story gone all wrong. I'm sure there are a bunch of economic reasons my dystopia is wrong. The predicament is the same: if public wealth becomes private the public loses--eventually. Without some public, a country loses its own identity. Can it all start from a single All-Mart? Maybe not. Enough of them? Certainly. A whole economy based on consumers not workers? I'd count on it.

I don't know that there is a solution--the Lorax never was a very positive guy. At this point it might be Game Over--though it was really game over back near the fifth paragraph of this story--right about where reality is, before I branched off into speculation, when I'd just read that Wal-Mart is expanding into groceries and that "consumers will benefit."

Back in the fifth paragraph your society was already more tyrannical than your society was when you were still barbarians walking the Earth in those precious first few turns, looking for the best spot to settle. That was always my favourite part of a god-game--seeing the whole world undisturbed, a treasure of art and possibility, ready to be explored, imprinted, and imagined. You cut it down. Game over.

When you built that first All-Mart (and to be fair I did--not you, but I just made off with the money, it was your government. It's hardly my fault, I'm just good and greedy, trying to make it in the world) you turned your nice reliable settlers into "consumers" who can buy things, but who won't pay taxes because they wants to buy more shit from All-Mart and stick it in their ever-expanding houses. You forgot about the "worker," the actual people in your country, who followed you--poor little gullible souls--and who wanted to spend their working lives trying to make something in your little corner of this imagined world. You gave them dead-end jobs turning all of their natural beauty into plastic crap.

The "worker" is part of this thing called the "public"--they're the ones who burned you in effigy (and possibly literally later--damn barbarians) when you screwed up before. The public might seem like an imaginary concept, but if you think about it, it's pretty obvious what a "public" is. It's your country. They vote for you to lead it, or, if you're playing one of those wonderful dictatorial games, they're nice enough not to overthrow you. When they're valued parts of public society, not just a corporation, they make great art just for the hell of it, because they like to make your country--and theirs--better. They can do this because they have jobs, which allow them to eat. Some of them even have creative jobs, which allow them to produce more and better art in exchange for eating. Then other countries come and marvel at your old and beautiful culture--and spend a little spare money of their own while they're here. Everybody lives within their means, using what they need. The trick is that everybody has to live comfortably, but not grandly.

That "public," that oh-so-wonderful group of people you passed off as arrogant, know-nothing reporter wannabes before, is your country. Without them, all you had was hillsides, and no All-Mart at all. Workers cost money when they get sick or old, but that's OK because you've been taxing Phil all along and he, along with everyone else who lives in your country, can afford it if they all get together. Even you're in on this. You have to be. Nobody gets extra shoe polish. Nobody gets brand name golf club endorsement deals.

That's called "communism" in some circles. Some communist regimes have become totalitarian hellholes, of course, usually through other massive feats of stupidity, like assuming (like you and me did a while back when we lost sight of anything but economic concerns) that all the greedy other-skin-tone bastards don't deserve to live like we do, or possibly at all. Not when we need something badly enough. It might be worth remembering that, by the end, your country was pretty much a totalitarian hellhole, too.

I'd like to believe there are ways around that fate--perhaps other countries could be more forgiving. But it's not good enough simply for the rich to give to the poor. Charity and sainthood are hollow if the problem persists through poor management of resources and finances. People are greedy, and consume too much, so ask "Why?" That's what the Lorax was asking for all along.

Human beings are actually worth something because they make things that are--or are themselves--beautiful, tasty, loveable, breatheable, and generally liveable. That concept is called humanism. The concept that all a person is can be found in a small barcode--a consumer, money--is called greed.

I don't shop at Wal-Mart.