I’ve been playing the game Satisfactory with my sister for about the past year. Neither of us have played games much, and that mostly pre-2000. It’s been slow going as we learn what tools are available to us, how to interact with the world, and what goals we’re meant to pursue. But another thing we’re learning are the world rules.
Chatting with a friend who also plays the game, I mentioned that we were really limited by only having one power plant and coal mine. “By one,” he asked, “do you mean one one?” As he laid out the vast resource extraction the game supported, I realized that I’d been operating under real-world scarcity mindset, assuming that mines would run out, wells would run dry.
That was a few months ago, and I continue to run up against the constraints of mindset that are holding us back in the game. (The latest? Realizing that we could construct workshops everywhere, not run back to the central workshop every time we need to build something.) But what I’ve found interesting is how perceiving that the game world has its own rules makes clearer that I am living in a world with constructed rules too.
“The fact that capitalism has colonized the dreaming life of the population is so taken for granted that it is no longer worthy of comment.”
— Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism
I’m noticing the many ways capitalism’s rules shape the way I act and the things that I want. Underneath all of them is the pernicious quest for more — the idea that more is always better.
This post introduces a series on tackling wants, managing my information diet, and finding enough.
Danah Abdulla
