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Dystopian business in The Founder video game

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I first started thinking about making a startup simulator around 2012" said Francis Tseng, talking to Creativepool about his inspiration for The Founder - a meta, dystopian simulator that lets you launch and manage your own business. “I was living in San Francisco at the time so I was enmeshed in the startup culture and there were a lot of clear tropes in the startup experience that seemed ripe for a game … I thought about how you could put players in the shoes of entrepreneurs and demonstrate that you have to do some pretty deplorable stuff to live up to the pressure to grow profits.”

"Innovate, disrupt, grow, conquer and change the world (but maybe not for the better)"

Tseng’s ideas took flight and the result is a management simulation video game that takes our world, right after the last bubble burst, and plots out a possible, if exaggerated, trajectory. It’s a relentlessly growth-oriented and profit-seeking environment, in which players are invited to test out how the promise of technology is corrupted when they: “Innovate, disrupt, grow, conquer and change the world (but maybe not for the better)”.

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At the end of last month, the project exceeded its $5000 Kickstarter goal by almost double the requested amount. The lure of a fictional universe and techno-capitalist logic is a very tempting one it seems. In total, 276 backers pledged $9,520 to bring the project to life, and although Tseng was surprised by the support at first, in retrospect he said; “it makes sense that this game would resonate with people. There's such a widespread general frustration against how Silicon Valley conducts itself, prioritizes problems, and so on that a game critical of it could be cathartic. I also think a lot of people in the tech industry enjoy seeing their own experiences reflected.”

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Currently in it’s final stages of testing, before an alpha release in the coming weeks, the game has had plenty of extra features added in to represent the increase in available funding. As well as bootstrapping your dream company, hiring talent, researching groundbreaking technologies and growing a business set to change the world, players will now also be able to access an in-game news publication and email system, as well as an entirely new hiring minigame in which the aim is to say what potential employees want to hear whilst convincing them to work for less of a salary.

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In order to be successful in The Founder, players have to keep expanding profits by a percentage every year, inevitably this is impossible and so everyone ends up losing. Although Tseng did offer that there was also a way to end it all without losses. You'll have to play the game to see what he might mean, though he hinted that it has to do with automation and job security.

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Tseng is something of a wizard in the area of social simulators. As well as The Founder, he is also working at the first museum-led incubator for art, design, and technology, NEW INC, developing a toolkit to make systems thinking more accessible to designers, urban planners, activists, educators, game designers and technologists. It’s an extension of his previous Humans of New York project and overlaps with The Founder’s functionality.

Keep yourself updated with The Founder’s status and release here, and who knows, if the game ever reaches it’s target multiplayer mode, maybe we’ll see you in the boardroom!

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