The only reason this is happening is because Vicky3 is a game that makes a separation between “the cool and smart entrepreneur making mad bank” and the player character, which is more or less, “the spirit of the nation”. Most games make you the exploiter for you to enjoy the power fantasy and as such invite no analysis from a player that didn’t want to engage in one to begin with. But here, these upperclassmen are obviously hoarding wealth for their own benefit which in the game’s simulation is just money sitting around in swiss bank accounts rotting away, to the direct detriment of the “spirit of the nation”. If you were playing as some working class prole or similar gamers would bomb the game as preachy marxist bullshit made to demonise the cool and handsome wealth creators, but as you’re this third party which wants to increase wealth creation nationwide, as a collective project, that is frustrated continuously, both economically, and politically, making their polity weaker, and more likely to get owned in military engagements, it instantly clicks with them even if they don’t want to engage in any kind of analysis, because the analysis is done for them, you are being stopped from doing this obviously good thing that would improve your polity by these arseholes specifically, they’re doing it in this way, and they’re doing it for this reason, have fun idiot.
For the same reason nobles in Dwarf Fortress were hated by players, because they are useless, demanding and abusive to actually useful dwarves.
The whole “justice system” usually gets this treatment from player too, since the traditional punishments in Dwarven society are flavorful and cool but extremely harmful if you actually carry them out and the assignment of blame for broken laws is fairly arbitrary. It’s far more useful to the player to simply accept that minor crimes happen and just maximize happiness so that they don’t happen too often than to try to find and punish law breaking dwarves.
I think this rings especially true because a lot of gamers and redditors in real life honestly connect more with the “spirit of the nation” than with the working class. Not to generalize the entire hobby, bu I think a lot of gamers are at least well-off enough to be distracted away from the real life contradictions of capitalism so that they don’t have to think about labour rights or economic systems. This leaves them to fantasize about how they would improve society if they were, god-like, in the shoes of the “spirit of the nation”. Things like “oh, if I could control the United States, I would prosecute Trump, and raise taxes on the rich, or build more houses in such-and-such place.” People like this do not have the class analysis required to understand why these things would not work so easily in real life (the rich would just flee the country with their profits, more houses does not actually give unhoused people homes, etc.). And this is the hypothetical milquetoast liberal gamer, to say nothing of the chud gamer.
Thus, when they are confronted with some of these roadblocks in a video game for the first time, they do not understand it at all. Video games are usually about enacting any fantastical policy you want, with the only pushback usually being simple economics or math, like their money number or stability number hadn’t gotten high enough yet. Their brains are broken.
You could say Vic 3 is confronting players with the material basis of ideology. Turning Hegel on its head.
the rich would just flee the country with their profits
I heard a really great point about this the other day. That the truly rich have most of their wealth because they own all of our shit. They can run off with a sack of cash and maybe it won’t be worth going after them in some sanctuary country.
But they’re not taking fucking Yankee Stadium with them. They’re not taking our apartments with them.
Absolutely, which is why nationalization (actually seizing the means) is much more in depth of a discussion than just saying “tax the rich” and not elaborating.
