Francis Tseng's simulator game invites you to "grow your startup and please those investors until there's nothing left to give" by building biotech, defense, machine learning, cloud computing, drone and space companies with a crew of employees whose low wages can be mitigated with bulletproof coffee and whose products can be sold with "causewashing" sponsorships of hip music festivals.
Tseng's looking for $5,000 to complete the game (it's fully funded) and if it raises $15,000, there's a "persistent shared world" stretch goal that'll come into play. $10 gets your name in the credits; for $300, your startup can be one of those in the game.
"At some point, if I get the game's design right the player will ask themselves: is this actually a reasonable way we should want the world to work?," Tseng explained. "As you pursue the growth of your company in the game, you'll start to see the effects your pursuit of growth has on the world — the destabilization of other countries, the exploitation of other populations — and I'm hoping that's what will get people thinking."
The Founder: A Dystopian Business Simulator
[Francis Tseng/Kickstarter]
Build the Most Disruptive Startup Ever in a Dystopian Business Simulator
[Allison Meier/Hyperallergic]
(via Dan Hon)
