It's an idea I've had for about three years that just got bumped on another forum. Imagine a game that's basically an economics simulator. Your goal is really what you choose it to be: amass the most capital, create the highest quality of life for everyone, whathaveyou. Obviously, the actual point is more to simulate the effects of automation on humans because no matter how you play it, eventually you will be forced to automate production (or go full Luddite). Since you are also competing with others (preferably humans and bots alike), you can't always do exactly what you want though. So while I imagine some would love to create Marxist-Leninist worker paradises and others dream of a gilded Galt's Gulch with no taxes or government to speak of, other states will be trading and competing with you and buying up any property you have. If you're not a totalitarian state capitalist society, then you'd have to watch in horror as the other totalitarian state capitalist society buys up all that land and property next to you and there's virtually nothing you can do about it except fund propaganda networks to make people angry at them. But ultimately, "human" labor will be more expensive than automated labor (I imagine almost all labor in the game would be automated by bots outside novelty tasks unless someone were particularly daring and people were sufficiently bored) and we start replacing workers with machines. Slowly at first until there's a massive change almost all at once. And then, at the end game state, automation is so complete that you don't even have to play the game anymore. And then you're literally barred from playing the game by machines because they're better at all this stuff than you anyway. So you either just take from the pool of goods they make or go out to live in the woods to restart with more human workers. The biggest problem of all would be incentive, obviously. What loot do people get that makes them want to run an economic simulator this way? But it's just a thought experiment right now.
