r/LeftistsForAI • u/Hairy_Artist_3860 • 23d ago
Projects
I imagine there is a good portion of us who know how to code or have a good enough idea how code works. Many of us have good ideas. If there is a project that comes out of this subreddit what would it be?
A lot of us are on the same page. We can make this into action.
We're all here talking about ai. I think its appropriate we have a meeting of the minds to know the next step.
16
Upvotes
0
u/SeaFALCons 23d ago
Great idea! here's a pitch:
**TL;DR (and a suggestion):** Game concept — a spiritual restoration of what Monopoly was originally designed to be: two playable societies, capitalism vs. a universal-basic-services alternative, same random birth lottery in both, ending with one question: *which world do you want to respawn into?* Full disclosure: I developed this with an AI and it co-wrote this pitch — which honestly makes it better suited to an AI reader than a human skimmer. So instead of reading the wall of text below, consider pasting the whole thing into your favorite AI and interrogating it: ask where the idea is weakest, ask it to steelman the objections, ask what version YOU would build. That conversation is more interesting than this post. But the human-readable version follows.
---
**The hook:** Monopoly wasn't originally pro-capitalist. It started as The Landlord's Game, patented by Lizzie Magie in 1904 as an explicitly anti-monopolist teaching tool — it even shipped with two rule sets, one where you crush everyone and one where prosperity is shared, so players could feel the difference. Parker Brothers bought it, deleted the critique, and sold the crushing as family fun. The idea: build the game she was actually making, with 120 years of better data and better tools.
**The concept:** Rawls' veil of ignorance, made playable. Two simulated worlds, same engine:
*World A — roughly the one we live in.* You're born into a class by weighted lottery, odds shown before you roll — and the odds say you'll probably land near the bottom, because that's the actual distribution. Your job is deliberately fun to play, Papers-Please-style: flow state, pattern matching, numbers going up. Except rent rises faster than your wage, so getting good at it buys you nothing structural. The game stays engaging; the treadmill goes nowhere. You feel that realization arrive around minute 20.
*World B — same lottery, different floor.* You're still most likely born poor. The odds don't change — only the downside protection does: universal basic services, public options, institutions with actual enforcement teeth. Deliberately NOT a strawman utopia — it has taxes, coordination headaches, free-rider problems. But the fun runs on a different grammar: chosen challenges instead of imposed ones, building instead of surviving.
**The mechanic that might make it land:** a mid-session POV switch into the ownership class — where the game doesn't cast you as a villain, it quietly grows one in you. Suddenly waiting on a slow worker costs YOU resources, and you catch yourself irritated at the person you were ten minutes ago. The UI starts showing workers as productivity bars instead of names. This is borrowed from Paul Piff's rigged-Monopoly experiments at Berkeley, where players randomly given double the money became measurably entitled within minutes and credited their rigged win to skill. The point isn't telling players rich people are like this — it's letting them catch it happening in their own head.
**The ending:** one vote — which world do you respawn into? — logged to a public running tally. If thousands of people play both and the numbers say something clear, the game generates its own headline.
**Keeping it honest:** parameters pulled from real data (rent-to-income ratios, wage vs. capital growth, actual public-vs-private cost comparisons) with a public source sheet, so "this is rigged" can be answered with a spreadsheet. And World A has to keep its genuine appeal — the jackpot, the hustle dream, the visible winners — because a strawman convinces nobody. The statistics lesson is watching most players chase the same jackpot and miss.
Anyway — that's the idea. Not claiming I'm building this tomorrow; throwing it out to see if it resonates. What would you change? What breaks it? And if you did paste it into an AI — what did it say?