This is an archive of the former website of the Maoist Internationalist Movement, which was run by the now defunct Maoist Internationalist Party - Amerika. The MIM now consists of many independent cells, many of which have their own indendendent organs both online and off. MIM(Prisons) serves these documents as a service to and reference for the anti-imperialist movement worldwide.
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"Geniu$" has the greatest educational value of any single game reviewed yet. Heavy on engineering, math and physics, it's for high school and college age youth. Don't be fooled by the graphics: "Geniu$" will be too hard for most adults. It's a perfect challenge for youth, an example of how education in the future will look.
When it boots up, the game calls itself "Genius Physics," so it looks like there was some after-the-fact marketing. We ran it well on a not-so-advanced persynal computer for 2006.
There are two parts to the overt political agenda that we do not agree with. On the whole we have to call it a bourgeois game, because it's another in the series of games about how tycoons see themselves. Science appears to come along through the work of highly intelligent individual inventors, what we call the bourgeois idealist version of history.
Stalin and Mao in particular worked hard on coming up with an alternative perspective for the history of science. According to Mao, what matters is not what theoretical scientists research so much as what gets applied in production and class struggle by the people and how the people learn from production and class struggle to improve their scientific ability. It's not something where sending off a letter to the top scientist or getting a science journal composed by top scientists is key to moving forward, the way "Geniu$" claims.
In addition to disagreeing with the bourgeois idealist approach to science history, MIM also disagrees with the usual conformism in a game to be approved by parents. Early on in the game, the player assists police in nabbing counterfeiters or other crackpot scientists. Whether police deserve such support and whether it is a good idea to encourage people to think there are fraudulent scientists that need to be handed over to police--that seems unlikely to us.
The overt messages are all bourgeois, but one covert aspect of this sort of science is the choice of the game's balance between applied and theoretical science. At one point, a character that assists the player says that "50 Newtons" is a do-able level of force for children and senior citizens to apply when riding a bike. This seemed dubious to the reviewer as an example going from a math formula to an application where the individual would need a sense of how much 50 Newtons is. On the other hand, many other examples did seem realistic.
We appreciated the emphasis on the applied side of science in "Geniu$." If we redid the game, the objective would not be money, but the uses of science to the population and the reduction of dependence on the class structure to increase production. Success would be enabling millions of people to apply science, thereby bypassing expert engineers that require higher pay.
"Geniu$" has an aggressive outward thrust to it involving "building an empire," which in this case is very positive, the same way that exploring space can be a positive motivating factor in "Star Trek." When people ask MIM, "what will we motivate ourselves with without profit?" or "I agree production will advance to a level where people can be comfortable by old standards, but I still don't see a motivational factor other than capitalism," we need to remember exploration of space and the need for scientific discovery--curiosity. These will be the long-term characteristics of our species if it survives imperialism and the socialist transition away from imperialism. In "Star Trek," they don't need a profit motive for space exploration, and later versions of "Star Trek" show Ferengi profit-seekers as eccentric.
There is a simplified demographic element in the game in addition to a market element. However, fail too many applied math questions and there is nothing that is going to make up for one's errors in "Geniu$." The bottom line message is that a capitalist that falls behind in hard science will soon be going out of business.
For some of the years covered in the game in the 1800s, this was not such a bad assumption, but it became less true as the years went on. To say today that corporations fall behind because of a lag in science is unfortunately untrue.
With the development of globe-hunting multinational corporations, a level of power develops to influence politics that makes it normal not to bring cutting edge science into business. So in 1973 there was the oil crisis when everyone had to line up to get gasoline at gas stations, because of the Arab oil embargo. There were resolutions made and Presidents Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter both promised that the united $tates would cut its dependence on foreign oil. Yet now it is 2006 and the average miles per gallon of the U.$. fleet of cars is pretty much unchanged, at around an average of 21. Arab oil imports increased.
It would be hard to point to any profound science that went into making pick-up trucks, minivans and SUVs. Yet that is where the market went and for many years it was the easiest means for Ford and GM to increase their profits.
During that period of time, there was solar electricity. Fuel cell technology has been bandied about. We also learn that "hybrid" cars have been an option for quite some time. Whether we blame the consumer or the mega-corporations that brainwash them is almost a pointless question. We have entered what Lenin called the decadent phase of capitalism, imperialism. Countless ideas of great genius lie unused, because investors see no merit in them or because consumers won't be bothered. Curiosities and hope for advance in these technologies have been labelled impractical while the same people found it "practical" to give 60 million votes to a president in 2004 who is spending trillions occupying Iraq. The other character getting 58 million votes was just the lite version and not able to steadfastly oppose the Iraq War.
Militarism is the great reality factor, the thing that gives people a means of cutting through the bullshit, a reference point. The great ideas of great innovators in science were left unapplied while the trashiest political ideas found limitless backing with tax dollars. Science-lovers should become political, and indignant. Application does appear in "Geniu$" mainly in that corporations can go out of business for failing to apply science; yet, what is more important is that failing to apply science also leads to failure to find further gains, not just because the company went out of business, but because no science proceeds just from the drawing board to the field. Most of the gains come from the field going to the drawing board. If the budget goes into patrolling Iraq, then that budget for applying science was not there. That also means giving up the future gains of science that would have been discovered from applying trillions of dollars to science instead of to the Iraq War.
In our view, "Geniu$" is much, much too cheerful in painting a progressive picture of capitalism and heroic individuals. If we redid it, the part about capitalist history would show great scientists having their ideas unused and misunderstood, basically by coupon-clippers as Lenin called them, people making money off bonds but with no real knowledge of production, especially its scientific aspect. We would show people grumble about obviously needed applications of science, and yet do nothing about their desires. Individual people inside corporations would know better regarding science and technology, but profits and politics would dictate a different result. The game would need more politics of the corrupt and stupid sort we see now.
A game like "Geniu$" should arouse lovers of the hard sciences into politics. There should be no question that the life's labors of most engineers and scientists are wasted, because we created a demand for something else in our political life, wasteful wars and security "vigilance." "Geniu$" is about knowing things in what Marx and his sort of economist called the "productive sector." Yet the growth in the economy, and now 80% of the weight is in the unproductive sector. This too, very much connected to militarism and so-called security is something to be indignant about.
One could say that the soldier patrolling Iraq would not have a job as a federally-funded rocket scientist. This misses Mao's point. The soldier in Iraq could be doing the "impractical" thing of installing solar devices. That is a possibility that exists right now and provides much more energy per dollar spent than killing off the Arab peoples, which only wastes gasoline driving around tanks and other armoured vehicles. The people have an energy problem globally, and the people can apply science to resolve it, if the right priorities are in place.
Despite its overly optimistic representation of capitalism and its delusions about capitalism's will to apply science, we still give "Geniu$: The Tech Tycoon Game" our highest recommendation. Our readers should know that MIM's critique is true, because the vast majority of games are about wasting society's resources through meaningless militarism. That is the truth about imperialist countries, not what "Geniu$" says. At the same time, in its own bourgeois way, "Geniu$" provides a positive reminder to players of what the imperialist world could be about, but isn't.