Utopian Companion
Beecarbonized (2023) is interesting because it plays into modular policy/ecology simulator what ifs that are in its own way a genre on the margins. The genre of ecosimulator is not given much attention, in part because ecological devestation is something people are very desperate not to think about as much as possible at this stage of anthropogenic climate decay, and because its just a genre most people don't know the roots of. The productive forces that prevent this awareness of influences is such that talking about video games in reference to each other is almost impossible without seeming like an academic obscarantist.
The roots of this style of simplistic ecology simulator that focuses on educational reference arguably go back to early computer dos management simulator games like SimEarth: The Living Planet (1990) or President Elect (1981) but the main explosion point of this whole approach comes from the early Crawford games Balance of the Planet (1990) and Balance of Power (1985). Heather has a really good video on the subject called Balance of the Planet | PC Gaming's Forgotten Masterpiece, in which she identifies Crawford as an early pioneer in the medium of games as minimalist information landscapes rather than just game spaces with pieces and a win state. The interesting point to note here is that Balance of the Planet is in fact a forgotten or at least underdiscussed game to the point that her video on the subject is almost required to make sense of what I'm saying here at all. To whatever point that this game has an identifable legacy, Backloggd doesnt really care, as she was (before the account was deleted anyway) the only person with a review of the game on this website. You can check the page for proof of emptiness here.
I've been vocal about how I don't really care about Backloggd as a social space anymore, in part because even with the nodding of importance towards forgotten and underdiscussed art, no posts on here tend to impact anybody else to go try the game out to and talk about it. You are more likely to get people to try a game by starting 'club event' around playing small games rather than by writing about your experiences or thoughts on here. However this is not a criticism of that being the case, contrary to the performative bitterness you might have seen from me in the past, this is not actually in itself an issue or something that the reader in indebted to try and fix. Video games are by design longer and more opaque in inspiration than any other medium, and there's always this arms race on if you 'really' understand the game anyway. It's fine to just read an interesting piece and move on. We all got shit to do really. Yet it does provide certain complications when you try to dig into the weeds.
To illustrate, I can easily argue for instance the Democracy series, Democratic Socialism Simulator (2020), Half-Earth Socialism (2022), and Beecarbonize (2023) are having a conversation and iterating on the specific ideas and approaches harbored in Crawford's ecology cult classic (specifically in how it uses card game design as a modular reference point for which to display how information webs work and uncomplicate them), but the existential issue is that this would be a connection of gibberish for people that havent played this genre in depth, which is functionally almost everyone but me. All I would be doing by not admitting this fact is throwing my intellectual weight around to convince you that I care more than you or that you should respect me because I thought about something you didn't. This is an easy conman's trick and I want to distance from that through admitting you're going to be scrambling to keep up with what I'm saying, and I'm sorry for that. Besides, even if these games have links I can make, I can't actually prove that any of these developers are concious of the discussion going on with this 35 year old unplayed computer game, and the reality is they probably haven't. Most game developers do not openly speak about how they are inspired by other videogames in their work, as its both something seen as too obscure to most people to be noteworthy and brings with it particular copyright concerns. It's goes one rung deeper than that though, developers just play games like you and me, and just like for everyone else this hobby is not given the ability to be understood and critiqued as art.
'Video games as art' is not a serious discussion, but one that I do consider serious is that they are not treated as art and preserved as such by the state. This may seem obvious at first glance, but videogames can't be checked out from the library, despite its obviously cultural import at this stage. There's no state preservation institutions helping make the medium more accessible, and so videogames are trapped in a state of cultural amnesia It doesn't mean that Crawfords work doesnt have impact or influence, but that its a conversation lost in the sands. The other interesting point here is that to assume that videogames as an art form is independent from Board Games is another misunderstanding in terms. All of Video Gaming lends most of its inspirations to board game design. There's a place for which the discussion of say Hearts of Iron 4 (2016) shouldn't be other grand strategy games but how it compares to Axis and Allies (1981). Yes you do have to run the calculations of the game by hand, but functionally this is the only real distinction to playing itself. There is no distinction in how the board game version of Dominion and the card game version of Dominion play besides the former requires the players to all be at the same table and the players have to check how move compute on together (and thus there is room for errors where a computer wouldn't have them). Then you have to take into the fact here that the only board games various state apparatus respects is games over 100 years old like Go, Majohng, Chess, etc. There's many factors to why this is, but one I feel is particularly worth highlighting is that we live in a global gerontocracy. America has a limit to how young you can be to run for president at 35. Even when other countries dont have these minimums, liberal democracies typically bias to electing older people anyway. This is contrary to the fact that people who grew up with the internet have a better ability to map information together more than people who grew up without it. As far as policies go, we are living in the shadow of other peoples historical nightmares, only allowed to express ourselves when its too late.
Our reality in this respect is uncomfortably dystopian then, but it speaks to the power that these games actually hold. Eco simulators as mentioned show that if given room to do on our own terms, we can consider and engage with ecological crises and see the prevantative measures of doomsday clocks related to them. Half Earth Socialism and Balance of the Planet are certainly worth playing in this respect. Balance of the Planet comes at it from the angle of state subsidies and taxation plans, which is ultimately a liberal framework, whereas Half Earth Socialism comes at it from a vegetarian socialist utopian one. Beecarbonize is interesting in the sense that its arguably a degrowth one or a eugenical one, depending on how you approach it.
A common factor in all three of these games is the wincon and main objective: Mitigate emissions by investing into alternatives before climate change destroys the planet and kills millions. The thing is that Balance of the Planet gives you all the information up front and lets you try and discover what the right dials to tweak are. In contrast these other two work act as card games with a speculative aspect, they have a hidden information aspect you have to discover through multiple run, the only way to see the chain of where something might go is by trying something that seems plausible now. But where Half Earth Socialism utilizes to inspire the ludic imagination into active change, Beecarbonize is more incidental and peculiar.
Very mild mechanical spoiler if you're interested in the game here but let it be known its something you're told at the beginning of the game:
The best way to comfortably win a game of Beecarbonize is to pivot off of emissions entirely as soon as possible. You can destroy industries/cards by unplugging them from the system for a second and...Beecarbonize lets you unplug the main emissions producer at the very start of the game: The 20th century industrial revolution.
Surely this is an oversight or a glitch you might think, but this approach is actually fundamental to a political niche within leftism of the degrowth philosophy:
"Contemporary techno science is reflected in the famous slogan, “if it can be done, it will be done, no matter what the consequences.” This logic is strongly intertwined with the growth doctrine. The essence of this way of thinking is that it does not matter whether we need something or not; a reason will be made for creating it and means found for selling it." - Yavor Tarinski
Degrowth and by design its 'anarcho primitivist' advocates are often mocked within online discourse for being a unique type of unrealistic. 'You cant just unplug the industrial revolution dumbass, what about all the logistic supply lines' is the common reply to these guys (besides the accusations of sympathizing with the Unabomber, or that they are using a phone so they shouldnt complain, which is argumentation par for the course on the internet) but this misses an important nuance. A politics of negation is the first dream towards the future. Just as likely as it is that Beecarbonize comments on Balance of the Planet incidentally, its similarly unlikely that the developers behind this project are aware or care about degrowth. I'm not saying that this is a glitch or design flaw in the game, but just as much as you can do this, you can also scientifically discover designer babies or cull your entire populous on a whim, so the game stakes are the driving force of play with the education implications taking passenger seat. This is reinforced in the fact that you can't read the information about what various cards are and do within the game itself, you have to go to the main menu to check. Along with the fact that there's joke text that this may not really work in real life scattered throughout. Beecarbonize is not ecological advice, its the board game The Forbidden Island if it were a single player ecology game. Yet the fact of the matter is the optimal way to prevent climate collapse as early as possible is to unplug all emissions besides the cleanest ones you have on hand as soon as possible, blackouts be damned.
You might think then that I'm secretly saying that Beecarbonize is a work of unintended brilliance, but I don't think that. Both the issue of overconsumption ideologies and information to explain what mechanism are, are better explored in other eco-simulators I've played, with often more focus on how people think or what the knock on effects of doing certain decisions are. Half Earth Socialism for instance is both less solvable off the bat and more interested in showing you that some things can not continue explicitly. The people behind the development of Half Earth Socialism wrote a book by the same name, and one of the main arguments is that factory farming and car dependent industry needs to go in order to survive climate apocalypse. It gives you a lot of options for what the future can look like and loosely identifies them with concrete policies that relate to it. Whereas Beecarbonize and Balance of the Planet are focused more on just the dials and gears, letting you fill in the blanks yourself. What I do think however is that instead of being better or worse, Beecarbonize comments sideways to other ecosimulators that a politics of negation from both a play perspective and a political one isn't worth ignoring. On the level of design its percieved as amatuer, but just as much as the politics of contraception is a negation of reproductive meaning, there are other forms of negation that we can think through cynically just by leaving in the mechanics to not do it in the game space. These can be uncomfortable or even outright harmful in some instances, for example if you negate food supply lines you'll starve (something Balance points out). Most arent though, for instance because of how polyester as a material degrades so slowly over the course of years, we certainly dont need a massive shirtwaste retail industry of clothes, and theres enough houses for everyone so we could easily negate housing development as a nessecity to keep building in at least the highest GDP nations, instead just focusing on maintaning the houses we already have. Another more out there negation I find interesting is the argument that space exploration is a waste and philosophically unjust.
"The answer to whether or not we should be allowed to explore other worlds is a giant NO! Followed by a painful slap to our faces. Fuck you, mankind." - DON’T LET THEM LEAVE! a treatise against space
We only think about these in the first moment as rude impossibilities. Disagreeing with the status quo is rude and 'dumb'. Yet, for those friendly to it, socialism itself is ultimately the negation of capitalism.
Beecarbonize has some nice art and makes you feel comfortable losing in its world, there's a charm to watching ecology managers be so openly gamified like that and it's a quaint hour or 2 of your time, but ultimately it pales in comparison to the complexity of these other titans. While that is ultimately ok, I get wistful thinking about how I'm isolated in my own world with this. I wish for a future in which games are free to borrow without shame and treated as an evolving learning environment with a history and conversation, in which games can be treated as a critical course in the same way literature is now. This document I sculpted is not for our own hands but are simply footnotes for the university of videogames generations down the line. Critical appreciation of games is my utopia.
Beecarbonized (2023) is interesting because it plays into modular policy/ecology simulator what ifs that are in its own way a genre on the margins. The genre of ecosimulator is not given much attention, in part because ecological devestation is something people are very desperate not to think about as much as possible at this stage of anthropogenic climate decay, and because its just a genre most people don't know the roots of. The productive forces that prevent this awareness of influences is such that talking about video games in reference to each other is almost impossible without seeming like an academic obscarantist.
The roots of this style of simplistic ecology simulator that focuses on educational reference arguably go back to early computer dos management simulator games like SimEarth: The Living Planet (1990) or President Elect (1981) but the main explosion point of this whole approach comes from the early Crawford games Balance of the Planet (1990) and Balance of Power (1985). Heather has a really good video on the subject called Balance of the Planet | PC Gaming's Forgotten Masterpiece, in which she identifies Crawford as an early pioneer in the medium of games as minimalist information landscapes rather than just game spaces with pieces and a win state. The interesting point to note here is that Balance of the Planet is in fact a forgotten or at least underdiscussed game to the point that her video on the subject is almost required to make sense of what I'm saying here at all. To whatever point that this game has an identifable legacy, Backloggd doesnt really care, as she was (before the account was deleted anyway) the only person with a review of the game on this website. You can check the page for proof of emptiness here.
I've been vocal about how I don't really care about Backloggd as a social space anymore, in part because even with the nodding of importance towards forgotten and underdiscussed art, no posts on here tend to impact anybody else to go try the game out to and talk about it. You are more likely to get people to try a game by starting 'club event' around playing small games rather than by writing about your experiences or thoughts on here. However this is not a criticism of that being the case, contrary to the performative bitterness you might have seen from me in the past, this is not actually in itself an issue or something that the reader in indebted to try and fix. Video games are by design longer and more opaque in inspiration than any other medium, and there's always this arms race on if you 'really' understand the game anyway. It's fine to just read an interesting piece and move on. We all got shit to do really. Yet it does provide certain complications when you try to dig into the weeds.
To illustrate, I can easily argue for instance the Democracy series, Democratic Socialism Simulator (2020), Half-Earth Socialism (2022), and Beecarbonize (2023) are having a conversation and iterating on the specific ideas and approaches harbored in Crawford's ecology cult classic (specifically in how it uses card game design as a modular reference point for which to display how information webs work and uncomplicate them), but the existential issue is that this would be a connection of gibberish for people that havent played this genre in depth, which is functionally almost everyone but me. All I would be doing by not admitting this fact is throwing my intellectual weight around to convince you that I care more than you or that you should respect me because I thought about something you didn't. This is an easy conman's trick and I want to distance from that through admitting you're going to be scrambling to keep up with what I'm saying, and I'm sorry for that. Besides, even if these games have links I can make, I can't actually prove that any of these developers are concious of the discussion going on with this 35 year old unplayed computer game, and the reality is they probably haven't. Most game developers do not openly speak about how they are inspired by other videogames in their work, as its both something seen as too obscure to most people to be noteworthy and brings with it particular copyright concerns. It's goes one rung deeper than that though, developers just play games like you and me, and just like for everyone else this hobby is not given the ability to be understood and critiqued as art.
'Video games as art' is not a serious discussion, but one that I do consider serious is that they are not treated as art and preserved as such by the state. This may seem obvious at first glance, but videogames can't be checked out from the library, despite its obviously cultural import at this stage. There's no state preservation institutions helping make the medium more accessible, and so videogames are trapped in a state of cultural amnesia It doesn't mean that Crawfords work doesnt have impact or influence, but that its a conversation lost in the sands. The other interesting point here is that to assume that videogames as an art form is independent from Board Games is another misunderstanding in terms. All of Video Gaming lends most of its inspirations to board game design. There's a place for which the discussion of say Hearts of Iron 4 (2016) shouldn't be other grand strategy games but how it compares to Axis and Allies (1981). Yes you do have to run the calculations of the game by hand, but functionally this is the only real distinction to playing itself. There is no distinction in how the board game version of Dominion and the card game version of Dominion play besides the former requires the players to all be at the same table and the players have to check how move compute on together (and thus there is room for errors where a computer wouldn't have them). Then you have to take into the fact here that the only board games various state apparatus respects is games over 100 years old like Go, Majohng, Chess, etc. There's many factors to why this is, but one I feel is particularly worth highlighting is that we live in a global gerontocracy. America has a limit to how young you can be to run for president at 35. Even when other countries dont have these minimums, liberal democracies typically bias to electing older people anyway. This is contrary to the fact that people who grew up with the internet have a better ability to map information together more than people who grew up without it. As far as policies go, we are living in the shadow of other peoples historical nightmares, only allowed to express ourselves when its too late.
Our reality in this respect is uncomfortably dystopian then, but it speaks to the power that these games actually hold. Eco simulators as mentioned show that if given room to do on our own terms, we can consider and engage with ecological crises and see the prevantative measures of doomsday clocks related to them. Half Earth Socialism and Balance of the Planet are certainly worth playing in this respect. Balance of the Planet comes at it from the angle of state subsidies and taxation plans, which is ultimately a liberal framework, whereas Half Earth Socialism comes at it from a vegetarian socialist utopian one. Beecarbonize is interesting in the sense that its arguably a degrowth one or a eugenical one, depending on how you approach it.
A common factor in all three of these games is the wincon and main objective: Mitigate emissions by investing into alternatives before climate change destroys the planet and kills millions. The thing is that Balance of the Planet gives you all the information up front and lets you try and discover what the right dials to tweak are. In contrast these other two work act as card games with a speculative aspect, they have a hidden information aspect you have to discover through multiple run, the only way to see the chain of where something might go is by trying something that seems plausible now. But where Half Earth Socialism utilizes to inspire the ludic imagination into active change, Beecarbonize is more incidental and peculiar.
Very mild mechanical spoiler if you're interested in the game here but let it be known its something you're told at the beginning of the game:
The best way to comfortably win a game of Beecarbonize is to pivot off of emissions entirely as soon as possible. You can destroy industries/cards by unplugging them from the system for a second and...Beecarbonize lets you unplug the main emissions producer at the very start of the game: The 20th century industrial revolution.
Surely this is an oversight or a glitch you might think, but this approach is actually fundamental to a political niche within leftism of the degrowth philosophy:
"Contemporary techno science is reflected in the famous slogan, “if it can be done, it will be done, no matter what the consequences.” This logic is strongly intertwined with the growth doctrine. The essence of this way of thinking is that it does not matter whether we need something or not; a reason will be made for creating it and means found for selling it." - Yavor Tarinski
Degrowth and by design its 'anarcho primitivist' advocates are often mocked within online discourse for being a unique type of unrealistic. 'You cant just unplug the industrial revolution dumbass, what about all the logistic supply lines' is the common reply to these guys (besides the accusations of sympathizing with the Unabomber, or that they are using a phone so they shouldnt complain, which is argumentation par for the course on the internet) but this misses an important nuance. A politics of negation is the first dream towards the future. Just as likely as it is that Beecarbonize comments on Balance of the Planet incidentally, its similarly unlikely that the developers behind this project are aware or care about degrowth. I'm not saying that this is a glitch or design flaw in the game, but just as much as you can do this, you can also scientifically discover designer babies or cull your entire populous on a whim, so the game stakes are the driving force of play with the education implications taking passenger seat. This is reinforced in the fact that you can't read the information about what various cards are and do within the game itself, you have to go to the main menu to check. Along with the fact that there's joke text that this may not really work in real life scattered throughout. Beecarbonize is not ecological advice, its the board game The Forbidden Island if it were a single player ecology game. Yet the fact of the matter is the optimal way to prevent climate collapse as early as possible is to unplug all emissions besides the cleanest ones you have on hand as soon as possible, blackouts be damned.
You might think then that I'm secretly saying that Beecarbonize is a work of unintended brilliance, but I don't think that. Both the issue of overconsumption ideologies and information to explain what mechanism are, are better explored in other eco-simulators I've played, with often more focus on how people think or what the knock on effects of doing certain decisions are. Half Earth Socialism for instance is both less solvable off the bat and more interested in showing you that some things can not continue explicitly. The people behind the development of Half Earth Socialism wrote a book by the same name, and one of the main arguments is that factory farming and car dependent industry needs to go in order to survive climate apocalypse. It gives you a lot of options for what the future can look like and loosely identifies them with concrete policies that relate to it. Whereas Beecarbonize and Balance of the Planet are focused more on just the dials and gears, letting you fill in the blanks yourself. What I do think however is that instead of being better or worse, Beecarbonize comments sideways to other ecosimulators that a politics of negation from both a play perspective and a political one isn't worth ignoring. On the level of design its percieved as amatuer, but just as much as the politics of contraception is a negation of reproductive meaning, there are other forms of negation that we can think through cynically just by leaving in the mechanics to not do it in the game space. These can be uncomfortable or even outright harmful in some instances, for example if you negate food supply lines you'll starve (something Balance points out). Most arent though, for instance because of how polyester as a material degrades so slowly over the course of years, we certainly dont need a massive shirtwaste retail industry of clothes, and theres enough houses for everyone so we could easily negate housing development as a nessecity to keep building in at least the highest GDP nations, instead just focusing on maintaning the houses we already have. Another more out there negation I find interesting is the argument that space exploration is a waste and philosophically unjust.
"The answer to whether or not we should be allowed to explore other worlds is a giant NO! Followed by a painful slap to our faces. Fuck you, mankind." - DON’T LET THEM LEAVE! a treatise against space
We only think about these in the first moment as rude impossibilities. Disagreeing with the status quo is rude and 'dumb'. Yet, for those friendly to it, socialism itself is ultimately the negation of capitalism.
Beecarbonize has some nice art and makes you feel comfortable losing in its world, there's a charm to watching ecology managers be so openly gamified like that and it's a quaint hour or 2 of your time, but ultimately it pales in comparison to the complexity of these other titans. While that is ultimately ok, I get wistful thinking about how I'm isolated in my own world with this. I wish for a future in which games are free to borrow without shame and treated as an evolving learning environment with a history and conversation, in which games can be treated as a critical course in the same way literature is now. This document I sculpted is not for our own hands but are simply footnotes for the university of videogames generations down the line. Critical appreciation of games is my utopia.
Erato_Heti
6 months ago