For a while now I've been watching the economic crisis in the US (and elsewhere) unfold. With this in mind, I decided to create a game that shows how we got here from the point of view of Wall Street. In my opinion Wall Street has perpetrated the largest Ponzi Scheme in the history of the planet.
When I started thinking about this idea, it seemed overwhelming because I was looking at it from the point of view of a simulation. About a month ago it dawned on me that I had to go in the reverse direction and make it simple, so I decided to base the design on a board game.
The current design looks a little like the Monopoly board, though the rules are different. Instead of streets, there will be Banks. There will be two main categories of cards that can be picked up, so called Black Swan cards that introduce unexpected events and more common Business/Political cards that can be kept by the player to use at a later time. Players will be required to be somewhat co-dependant and are forced to lend each other money. Money growth will be exponential thanks to the magic of Derivatives.
Sounds boring? It might well be! The purpose of this is educational I suppose, sort of interactive documentation of what went wrong. It's also therapeutic for me, since I keep hearing so called "experts" explaining away all the problems as bad luck, unforeseen events, etc., when it most certainly was not. Look at Greenspan for instance, as recently as a couple of days ago he was claiming it was all caused by "bad data". Utter rubbish!
I've got the game to the stage where it is technically "playable", the player can move a counter around the board and the game detects whether they are on a bank, offering to sell it to them, or on a card, in which case they can add it to their hand. The rules haven't been implemented yet, and that's really going to be the hard part: finding the balance while still having it resemble the real world.
Anyway, here's the mandatory screenshot. For now the graphics are rudimentary since I'm focused on the engine and if I actually get far enough to make this worth playing, I can worry about fancy graphics and 3D then.
I'd say the rules are pretty similar, the cards are the same, banks are the same as properties really, just a different name.
