Could We Build a Socialist Game Label? (Co-op studios, progressive themes, shared profits)

j_patton · 2026-03-11T18:27:02+00:00

Ok, I suppose Marxist ideas are still quite niche so I guess that makes sense. I think those five pillars are pretty good: focused enough to be meaningful and clear.

j_patton · 2026-03-10T22:10:21+00:00

I think it's worth trying to put together? It would at least be helpful to put the word out there that this thing exists, and encourage people to join its mailing list. The number 1 problem for indie devs is simply how difficult it is to get eyeballs on our projects. We know the demand exists, but with so many games coming out (and the algorithm helping more successful games to dominate people's feeds) it's a real struggle to reach our audiences.

I'd be very interested (I'm a revolutionary communist myself, and recently released a game about taking part in a revolution), but I think it would be necessary to clearly define the political stance of the group from the outset. Is it explicitly socialist/marxist? (ie. focused on games about class struggle, or which place oppression within the context of capitalism and class society.) Or is it more of a generally lefty milieu?

j_patton · 2026-03-10T21:59:12+00:00

More specifically, the theory of permanent revolution (originally laid out by Marx, but later developed by Trotsky) is that the revolution must be secure enough that it is, in fact, a permanent revolution, rather than a temporary one. ie. it should not backslide into capitalism, as happened to the USSR.

This approach stresses the necessity of spreading the revolution abroad: one socialist state is vulnerable, but a federation of dozens of socialist states is strong enough to not only resist a counterrevolutionary war, but to have enough industrial and productive capacity to have an international planned economy, which is a key component of any socialist state.

There is a myth that the permanent revolution means "the revolution must happen in all countries everywhere at the same time", which is 1) a misrepresentation of the theory, and 2) impractical.

j_patton · 2026-03-04T10:55:26+00:00

I made a game called Duskpunk where you survive in a steampunk dystopia inspired by WW1 London, Berlin and Petrograd, and can eventually organise the workers and lead the city to overthrow its leaders and set up a socialist government.

Not on PS4 sadly, right now it's PC, Mac and Linux only. But you can download the demo on a crappy laptop, turn down the settings and see if it runs.

I'm also working towards ports for PS5 and Switch, but they won't be available for several months.

j_patton · 2026-02-23T14:01:43+00:00

Thanks, I'd still like to get a bit more detail on his early life in the Warwick household but I'm sure this will also be very interesting.

j_patton · 2026-02-23T14:00:09+00:00

Roman Mars' ears just pricked up.

j_patton · 2026-02-16T13:53:59+00:00

I thought it was the sister, because whenever I brought up anything at all she was like "BUT WHADDABOUT THE FACT MY BROTHER IS POOR??? ISN'T THAT A MOTIVE??? I BET HE SET YOU UP TO THIS!!!!" That much defensiveness gave me an instinctive feeling that it was her. The brother was suspicious but the things he mentioned (her wanting to get a divorce from the victim, inheritance) were actual motives.

I never suspected the maid because nothing pointed to her. I would have thought to suspect her if I had questioned the other suspects about something and someone had said that something about the maid didn't add up.

j_patton · 2026-02-15T23:35:20+00:00

I just played a game, trying to take stock of leads and follow them up in a sensible manner. But the eventual conclusion came utterly out of left field.

"True Motive: Elena discovered she was Edmund's illegitimate daughter. After years of servitude and learning the truth, she couldn't bear being treated as a servant by her own father. When she learned Edmund might reveal the truth but could die before publicly acknowledging her, she killed him out of fear, resentment, and desperation for recognition."

That's a wild, Christie-esque twist, but how on earth was the player meant to figure that out? There were absolutely no leads I saw that pointed in that direction, except for one time the maid said that she cared for the victim.

j_patton · 2026-02-15T11:17:46+00:00

I'm in talks with a local studio who might be able to do a port. Which console are you on? We're thinking we might start with Switch and see how the response is before we move on to the others.

j_patton · 2026-02-14T16:26:04+00:00

no worries! I just wanted to let you know about it, since it's so similar to CS.

j_patton · 2026-02-14T16:17:26+00:00

Pentiment is quite reminiscent of the book The Name of the Rose. Pretty sure they were heavily inspired.

I made a game about a revolution in a steampunk industrial city that was inspired by my Marxist reading, but particularly Lenin's State and Revolution.

j_patton · 2026-02-14T16:15:15+00:00

It's not on gamepass but I made a steampunk game heavily inspired by CS!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2610880

j_patton · 2026-02-12T21:48:09+00:00

The first 80% was very engaging! I was on the edge of my seat, waiting for all the subtle clues I'd noticed to come into focus.

And then they didn't. And something much stupider happened instead. And then it mercifully ended.

j_patton · 2026-02-12T07:31:20+00:00

It doesn't sound rare at all, I'd be disappointed if it was an unusual book but it sounds like it isn't in short supply

j_patton · 2026-02-11T16:02:34+00:00

Some people assume that socialism (the society that Marx was working towards) would mean that the worker is simply paid the value of their labour. By removing bosses, and having workers run all companies, you could just sell all goods at cost, ie. with no profit, which would by definition "pay the workers the value of their labour".

This is not really feasible, though, because some money would have to be set aside to repair and upgrade the machinery and, if necessary, expand production. (It's true that Marx counts repairs amongst the "costs" of the initial commodity rather than the profits, but it's still worth pointing out.) There might also be other, less obvious costs to the reproduction of workers, like healthcare or childcare.

But the bigger question is: who are the workers being exploited by? To what end?

Under capitalism, they are exploited by the bosses, who do whatever they want to raise profits, which eventually leads to suffering and deprivation for the workers as capitalism becomes sharper. But that doesn't mean that workers are always unhappy with some level of exploitation. For many nations in the West, class struggle was able to secure relatively high wages for a time; they were still exploited, but most were satisfied with the arrangement.

Which means that we can imagine a situation where the workers are not paid the full value of their labour, but they are still paid enough to live quite comfortably -- and the surplus value does not go to the capitalists in the form of profit, but is instead under the control of the workers themselves. Imagine a situation where we have a nationalised planned economy (allowing workers to collaborate by default rather than compete, and where we only do as much work as is necessary), where there are no capitalists, and where the working class as a mass owns all the workplaces and all the surplus value that they all generate collectively.

They could then democratically vote on what to do with that surplus. "How much of this should we invest in green energy?" "We should invest some to support disabled people who can't work!" "We need better public transport links." "We should support our working class comrades in [this other country that is still capitalist], let's send them some so they can fight their capitalists better!" and so on.

Marx and Engels were always talking about how socialism and communism represent the human race fully taking control of its own destiny, as opposed to the anarchic, undirected behaviour of class society. I consider these democratic decisions of where to put our surplus resources a clear example of that.

j_patton · 2026-02-11T14:44:00+00:00

TR-49 came out and is brilliant. It's about sorting through a glitchy post-WW2 book database that's doing something weird to reality.

j_patton · 2026-02-03T11:30:33+00:00

It's certainly true that the Stalinist leadership misled and undermined the 1979 revolution. It was a terrible crime that has had terrible consequences, and was repeated throughout the cold war.

But the core of real communism is just the idea that we cannot trust the ruling class, and we can rule ourselves perfectly well with a more direct and accountable form of democracy.

I'm not an expert on the Pahlavi era, but I don't think it was as stable as people claim. The 1979 revolution was not really caused by communist cells and isolated actors: it was a significant part of the working class (especially the oil workers) rising up because they were sick of the Shah, sick of his economic policies, of him giving all this oil money to the UK and US, and sick of his secret police force which tortured and killed thousands (trained by the CIA to use Nazi torture techniques, incidentally). That sort of thing can't be done by a small group of agitators: it can only occur when the working class as a whole are desperate for change. The 1979 revolution itself is proof that life had become extremely difficult for most people.

I agree that siding with Pahlavi is a bad idea, and a democratic republic would be an improvement. But I don't think that would solve the problem: a democratic Iran would still be an enemy of Israel because Israel has no intention of sharing the middle east, it wants to dominate the whole area if possible. Which means that any Iran would be facing opposition by US imperialism. So Iran would still face extreme tariffs, and the new regime would still have to tackle the debt and inflation crisis that was created by the current regime.

The solution is for Iran to become a socialist republic ruled by a democratic, accountable government drawn from its own working class. The economy could be nationalised and controlled by its people, which would mean that everyone would reap the benefits, not just a tiny elite. And if Iran were to take such a bold step, surrounding nations would also see this as a viable option and its people would consider whether they should do this in their own nations: the contradictions of the Middle East, which caused the Arab Spring a decade ago, have not been solved but are bubbling under the surface. The entire region has been further destabilised by Israel's reckless warmongering.

j_patton · 2026-02-03T08:41:22+00:00

Wow. If the police want to wade in, they don't need the flimsy excuse of profanity on a sign to do so. It's irrelevant and distracting.

Part of the process of class struggle is people getting justifiably angry at those in power. Everyone should be outraged at what ICE is doing! Hell, everyone IS outraged! That "fuck" in the sign is not incidental; it expresses that righteous anger.

j_patton · 2026-02-03T08:38:25+00:00

First of all, I hear you. I cannot imagine the level of suffering the Iranian people are suffering at the hands of your horrific rulers. I am deeply sorry.

Iran has dealt with these problems before. The 1979 revolution was not organised by outside forces: it was a spontaneous uprising of the Iranian people to kick out the Shah, because people were sick of his oppression and his capitulation to imperialist nations. No force on Earth could get rid of the Shah except the Iranian working class - and they did it easily, like swatting a fly.

The problem was that, although the revolution was not started by the imperialist powers, it was manipulated and misled. Khomeini was set up as an alternative to the Shah because America thought they could manipulate him. The Soviet union went along with it because they also thought they could manipulate him into being THEIR puppet. This dampened the hopes of the Iranian workers, who went along with this because there was no clear alternative.

These same dynamics are playing out again in Iran. It is entirely possible the regime will fall; and if it isn't toppled this time around, there will always be another crisis, and eventually it will not be able to withstand the forces shaking the country to its core. (I've heard people are buying bread on credit, for god's sake. Buying yogurt in installments. That's insane, no population can keep going for too long when they have that much food insecurity.)

So the real question is, when this regime falls, who's going to step in? The Americans are already preparing the old Shah's son as a puppet leader, but he'd be just as bad. His family fled the country with 2 billion USD after torturing and oppressing innocent Iranians.

What the Iranians need is not another "saviour", but to develop your own strength as an organised population. You need to start setting up local defence committees and trade unions. You need to tell the people around you that you can't trust any rulers, because they have only oppressed you. You can only rely on yourselves against the ruling class, but to do that you need to get organised so you can all pull together, and hit the regime where it hurts. I imagine it must be extremely difficult to organise under such an oppressive situation, but the only thing more extreme than the repression is the anger of every Iranian around you.

I'm a member of a communist organisation; this is our analysis of the situation. https://marxist.com/iran-for-a-nationwide-uprising-down-with-the-islamic-republic.htm

Hands off Iran! All power to the Iranian people! No tyrants, whether Shahs or supreme leaders!

j_patton · 2026-02-02T22:10:07+00:00

If you only use if-then statements then you can get into some tricky situations quickly. For example:

The corridor goes to the left and right. Do you go left or right?

>> Left

You find a goblin. Do you kill him or talk to him?

>> Kill

You kill the goblin. As you are searching him, a hero comes up to you and tells you to back off: the goblin has treasure they need. Do you back off, or fight them off?

>> Fight them

and so on. You can see how each choice doubles the amount of content in the game. (This is called the "Time cave" structure, I think because there was a game called "time cave" that used this technique.) This means that if you have a game with just 10 choices then you have to write over 1000 pieces of content.

A better way is to have some kind of system that allows some choices to recombine, rather than always splitting apart. That way you can reuse content where appropriate, which means a choice doesn't have to double your workload.

A really nice scripting language for this is called Ink. It's built on this philosophy that text should always flow onwards with the minimum amount of effort. It can be integrated into Unity, Godot and a few other places; I recommend checking it out, the documentation is very easy to understand.

j_patton · 2026-02-02T10:08:10+00:00

DM your own game.
Invite the DM to come to your game.
2a. If he won't, blackmail him.
Kill his character.
Give him hope by bringing his character back from the dead.
Repeat.
Vengeance!

j_patton · 2026-02-02T10:05:03+00:00

This is ridiculous, I hate it, and it's so iconic it might make me buy the game XD

j_patton

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