There were a couple of really nice days in Ohio during the normally cold month of December where many of my peers went out for a few rounds of golf. I was invited to more than one of these games—but I declined because I had a different game that I wanted to play—one that I am thoroughly obsessed with. During this past week The Old Republic released it’s most recent release to their MMO game which my wife and I play together and that update was a space combat simulator featuring PVP action called simply enough Galactic Starfighter. Since it came out on Tuesday–by Saturday I had shot down hundreds of opponents in dog fights through floating ship yards in a capture the flag type of game scenario—and I have been having a blast with it. It is full of detailed attributes which are boundlessly applied to multiple strategic circumstances and is a lot more fun than chasing a white ball around on a golf course with the object to knock it into a hole. To begin to get a grasp of the level of detail, and learning curve needed to play the game have a look at the link below which features some of the basic weapons, upgrades and ship types utilized within the environment.
http://dulfy.net/2013/11/11/swtor-galactic-starfighter-ships-and-components-guide/ When I play these kinds of things with hundreds of other real players I can’t help but make some basic observations about those players which sustain many of the comments I make in political and economic articles of a serious nature that are worth noting. Galactic Starfighter for me is a well executed science experiment confirming the merits of capitalism and why nations should support that system of economical means as opposed to socialism. The answer is clearly exhibited in the popular BioWare game.
I was amazed while playing that during the queue up screen where live players sign up for a mission to fly against opposing players, I would have thought that it would take a while to find 12 real life players from each faction to load up. There are two factions in The Old Republic, those of the Republic and those of the Empire. The Empire are statist types who are big government advocates and love the power of collective force to impose their will upon everyone else. Think of the Nazi regime, Stalin from the U.S.S.R. or the Obama administration—they are very much like the Empire in the game The Old Republic. The Republic of course is very similar to the original idea of a Roman Republic most currently experimented with in The United States. In the game scenario of The Old Republic the Republic are the good guys and are part of a rebellion to stop the rise of the Empire who are the unequivocal bad guys. I of course play as a Republic player. My wife and I won’t even consider playing story lines in the game that involve the Empire. We are clearly aligned with the Republic faction ideologically. If something like the Republic was not an option—it is likely that I wouldn’t enjoy the game so much—but because it is, and reflects my thoughts about things in the real world, it is immensely exciting for me to fight on behalf of the Republic in a space dog fight scenario meant to capture and maintain control of specific strategic targets. I would think that there would be lots of people who want to play as Republic players as they are the good guys, but that such a flight simulator would struggle to find Empire players—NO—the average queue up time was about two minutes. Of course there were lots of Republic players lining up to fly, but there were equal numbers of Empire players as well. In fact, sometimes it appeared that the Empire side had more pilots than the Republic side. For this to happen there would have to be thousands and thousands of people online across over six servers wanting to play the game at all hours of the day. The queue up time was the same at 3 AM in the morning as it was at 9 PM, or noon. And of those players, they were equally split under their own free will right down the middle ideologically. There were thousands of people who were attracted to the role of the Empire. They willingly wanted to play the bad guy—which was interesting in and of itself.
When I was a kid and we’d play cops and robbers, or cowboys and Indians, or any game of good guys against bad guys—all of which public schools are trying to outlaw these days—there were fights with my friends over who would be the good guy. Everyone wanted to play the hero and nobody wanted to be the villain—very few did anyway. The people who did find themselves wanting to play the bad role were often the kind of kids who came from broken homes, had troubled childhoods and lived in homes where their mother worked and were often home by themselves a lot. They couldn’t identify with the kids who had mothers who were always home, were generally loved by their parents and knew it. The bad guys had power to impose themselves on others and that was attractive option to kids who had daddy issues—mommy issues—and genuine social insecurities. I never played a bad guy. I can’t even think in such terms in a role play scenario either as a kid or a grown up adult playing The Old Republic. So it was rather stunning to see so many players who not only wanted to play for the Empire, but they were proud of it. The funny thing about the whole experience is that Galactic Starfighter treats players who struggle through the dogfights—which are often very intense—with two forms of currency—requisition, and fleet requisition. With that currency upgrades for pilot’s ships can be purchased and this incentive is enough to send most of those pilots into countless hours of combat so that they can get paid the requisition currency they have coming to them. I found myself playing the game for an extra two or three hours finally turning the game off around 4 AM last night just so I could earn enough requisition to purchase concussion missiles with long-range target lock for 10,000 req. And I wasn’t alone—there were hundreds of people doing the same thing who had played for 10 to 12 hours straight just to earn some virtual shielding, proton torpedoes, engine boosts, and armor increases. The reason that the BioWare game of The Old Republic is successful and MMO games like it is because they offer “rewards.” The game designers know that the human being will do just about anything for the prospect of profit, and when they have to earn it—they value it. Galactic Starfighter would not be a fun game if everyone received the same currency no matter if they won or lost their engagements. And if the game did not offer incentives for players to purchase ship upgrades so that they could have an advantage over another player—the game would fall flat on its face with boredom. It’s likely that nobody would want to play, and the few who did would not be renewing the queue every two minutes with fresh players spontaneously wanting to dog fight opponents all over the world.
The game environment as I’ve pointed out many times of a MMO based endeavor is a microcosm of capitalism. The more rewards offered, the harder people are willing to work to get them. In the real world women get their nails done for the same reason that pilots in Galactic Starfighter paint their ships different colors—to show that they worked hard and have achieved some level of success. When a young home owner buys a lawn mower and spends all day of a summer Saturday working on their yard, they are caring for the product of their hard work. They worked hard to purchase a home, and they want to show it off to others. That is the power behind capitalism. If Galactic Starfighter were a socialist game, all the ships would be the same, none would be better than another. All players would be forced to be equal. Players also wouldn’t be able to win—so there would essentially be no point in even playing. Since there is nothing to work toward, there would be no reason to risk anything and try to pit your skills up against another person. There would be no conflict, no violence, but there would also be no activity to generate any production. The game would be boring and uneventful. Lucky for me, Galactic Starfighter is a wonderful celebration of capitalism in the most pure form of the word. If any economist of the typical Keynesian school of thought wants proof of how flawed their socialist theories are, check out Galactic Starfighter at 3 AM in the morning anywhere in the world—and the evidence of capitalism’s superiority will be clear. When Keynesian economists decided to tamper with the economy artificially with regulation, they discovered that there were fewer incentives for people to try to produce anything. In the game environment of Galactic Starfighter the production is a vibrant world where combatants try to kill each other with specially designed ships and augmented modifications looking for a competitive advantage. The result is activity—in the case of Electronic Arts and BioWare—money spent on their product so players can experience such a thing. The fact that there were so many Empire players and Republic players wanting to play against each other every two minutes is a testament to the economic activity generated in the game. As to the Republic and Empire players, one craves freedom and liberty, the other tyranny and terror, they seem to represent the same kind of voting preferences currently at play in politics where half the country voted for Obama, the other half against him, or half the voters support school levies, the other half does not—the demographic of the game between good guys and bad guys is clearly evenly balanced—startlingly so. The Old Republic is not struggling to attract players to the Empire faction, and in my opinion if all was right in the world, it would be. So it has been easy for me to fly against the Empire players and yell at my monitor in joy when I blast them out of the sky. It has been tremendously fun to tear the crap out of them with my Strike Fighter and long-range concussion missiles. As I tore through the fuselage of hundreds of enemy craft, I thought of Lakota levy supporters, Obamacare, and labor unions—and my score increased dramatically.
I had lunch with a few of those golf friends who took advantage of the nice weather on Wednesday to play and I ribbed them about how less dramatic it was to knock a ball in from 15 feet for Birdie, than shooting down 50 enemy craft during several hours of play on the video game Galactic Starfighter. Those same friends questioned why I had no Fantasy Football picks for the last several months, and the answer was that I didn’t find it interesting to randomly pick players from different NFL teams and hope they do well to provide me with points. I like to provide my own points—not to passively rely on somebody else to provide them, so I don’t enjoy Fantasy Football even as a recreational sport that wastes too much of my time and thought paying attention to whether a player from a team that is not the Buccaneers had a good day on the football field. They gave me a quizzical look as our food arrived at Bravo! Cucina Italiana–the Lobster Ravioli Alla Vodka as the weather outside had changed from spring like weather to a dramatic snow storm. “So what do you think about while you play that game of yours,” one of them asked genuinely. I replied that it was a more active endeavor than passive ones where other people determined your outcome, like a football game, or gambling, which many people tend to consider entertainment. I added that when I play Galactic Starfighter not only do I scratch the itch of a time gone by where I would have loved to have been a fighter pilot during World War II, before all the stupid rules the FFA has today, and that game gives me a feel for that kind of activity. It also makes me wonder why we don’t have shipyards in space, similar to what we have in Norfolk, Virginia building battleships and carriers, or the Boeing facility in Washington making airplanes—in space creating space stations, and deep space transports. One of the battle zones in Galactic Republic takes place in a Kuat shipyard and there are several half-built Star Destroyers floating around in various states of construction. Just the previous night I chased a poor soul into the superstructure of one of these things and blasted him with so much fire that he turned out of my targeting reticule right into a giant support beam ending in a fiery crash. You don’t get that playing Fantasy Football.
By the end of our meal all the guys swore to me they were going to go home and log on to play. I gave them the login information and how to find me there—but nobody showed up. The snow came down intensely and everyone went their separate ways after that. Once they returned home, away from my “vivid imagination” as they call it—everyone snapped back into their usual mode of thinking. They planned their next golf games in preferably warmer climates and got ready for their Fantasy Football picks on Sunday, and I spent the rest of Friday well into the early Saturday morning playing The Old Republic: Galactic Starfighter. The game is a perfect representation of why capitalism works over Keynesian economics and degrees of socialism. The pilots playing Galactic Starfighter with me have as little interest in the terms of modern politics as I do in Fantasy Football. They only know that they want to shoot and kill someone and earn requisition for the ships in their possession. But the comparisons are unmistakable, and the explanations are valid—Galactic Starfighter is a game that proves how effective capitalism is over all other forms though valid experiments. The current MMO marketplace is the finest modern example of capitalism anywhere in the world—and I say this on the eve of the big Pratt & Whitney machinist strike in Hartford, Connecticut—which will happen on Sunday after this writing. America still builds airplanes better than any manufacturer in the entire world—but the socialism of labor unions is threatening that domination—purposely as the international unions behind these strikes truly want to bring progressive reform to America and end United States domination of aircraft manufacture. Knowing those kinds of things, it is quite delightful to attack the Empire in the fictional Old Republic and take out my wrath there while the snow falls in abundance outside of Bravo! Cucina Italiana and Fantasy Football is on everyone’s mind—as the world spins helplessly out of control toward an abyss that could have been avoided—if only people opened their eyes to see it coming. To cope with that frustration I play Galactic Starfighter.
The Overmanwarrior 