Oleg Zabluda's blog
Friday, January 27, 2017
 
The Founder is a surreal startup simulator that strikes at the heart of Silicon Valley
The Founder is a surreal startup simulator that strikes at the heart of Silicon Valley
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The Founder, a free browser-based game from designer Francis Tseng. Launched earlier today thanks to a successful Kickstarter campaign, the game blends [...] The Sims [...] You start by naming your startup, choosing a co-founder, and picking a location to base your business. From there, you’re encouraged to start developing products
[...]
Tseng’s simulation is so deep and comically accurate as to be a disturbing to those who live and work within Silicon Valley and its ever-expanding orbit. Every aspect of the game contributes to the rate at which you earn or lose money. A timer in the corner tracks the passing of time, starting at the post-dot-com bubble of 2001 and speeding onward at about one month per minute.

All the while, your board of investors is represented by an expectations meter at the top of the screen that tracks the happiness of board members and the likelihood that you, as the founder, will be ousted.
[...]
To attend to impending hacks or overseas factory suicides (like I said, grim), you might have to take valuable employees off research projects and assign them to cloud computing or 3D printing or the blockchain. To stave off public outcry over privacy violations, you’ll have to launch PR initiatives that range from press releases to astroturfing campaigns to product placement and music festivals.

Tseng, in an interview with Fast Company, said the point of the game was to highlight the absurdity of Silicon Valley [OZ: famous goal, never works]
[...]
As you progress in The Founder, you’ll unlock the ability to grow beyond startup staples like social networking, advertising, and gadgets and into larger and more ominous industries like biotech, weapons development, robotics, and artificial intelligence.
[...]
"As you go further in the future, you get more and more of these crazy technologies, really futuristic ones. My hope is that at some point the player realizes, this is not a world I would want to live in." [OZ: Ha!]
"""
http://www.theverge.com/2017/1/27/14417488/the-founder-francis-tseng-silicon-valley-simulator-the-sims
http://www.theverge.com/2017/1/27/14417488/the-founder-francis-tseng-silicon-valley-simulator-the-sims

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