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End Game The Revolution may be more or less violent and destructive. If the Virtual Billions have enough strengths the induce the Billionaires’ relatively privileged middle-class Allies to join them on the winning side, their combined strength becomes overwhelming. The final struggle is shorter and there is less violence. But if the Billions lack strength to attract Allies and the Billionaires are able to mobilise massive violence against the Billions, the process may degenerate into prolonged civil war. The fundamental Rule is: “Every revolution is doomed to fail – except the final one.”

The Virtual Billionaires have so many advantages in the Game that to win they have only not to lose. Short of a successful Revolution, they keep their Privileges. Every day is a winning day for them. On the other hand, the day when the Virtual Millions decide to unite globally, the balance of forces swings in favor of their “invisible international.” At this point the Game simplifies: Billions of virtual humans who know how to do all the world’s work are united against a small number of Billionaires who really possess nothing except the fiction of pieces of paper giving them legal title to everything.

According to the Rules, whenever the Virtual Billions refuse to submit to this elaborate paper fraud, they are entitled to take over the Virtual Planet. Corporate ownership is abolished, the value of the Billionaires’ stocks, bonds, and property titles vanish into the air like smoke. The fetishistic worship of money and commodities collapses along with wage-labor and the profit system. The race for profit is replaced by mutual aid; elite corporate management gives way to self-organised communities of producer-consumer-citizens. The Viritual Billions are now entitled to begin cleaning up and healing the wounded Game-Globe.

Having eliminated their Virtual Opponents the Billionaires, the Billions task is again simplified. To win the game and survive until 2117, they need now save the dying planet by reversing the effects of pollution and depletion of the land, the sea and the atmosphere before the Predictable Catastrophes Program flashes “Game over. New Game”. Time may run out. The difference between BvB and real life is that in BvB the players are entitled to start a new game.

“Billions vs Billionnaires” combines luck and skill. With luck, the converging destructive trends leading to social and ecological catastrophe develop slowly enough to give the Virtual Millions time to develop their strategy before the Program flashes “Game Over.” With practice, players get more and more skilled at uniting the Millions, at winning Allies, and at out-manoeuvering the Virtual Millionaires, whose moves are limited by their own contradictions. With each game, new strategies and scenarios are discovered by means of which players can reach the year 2117.

This is the challenge of “B&B.” If the players can imagine winning scenarios in a virtual game that strives for maximum realism, it means that such scenarios may be possible, realistic enough to give the Billions hope and courage.

Good gaming!

NOTE : This « Rules » section was originally conceived to follow «Collective Creation » in which folks like you got together, held a « Utopias » contest, devised various means of popularizing the idea including a « novel where you are the hero » which ultimately morphs into this multi-player online game. ANOTHER, alternate, origin story for these Rules is a graphic novel, the beginning of which is sketched in PennyNovel.doc in the DropBox under OldMaterial in the WikiDreams folder.

endgame.txt · Last modified: 2017/09/20 16:58 by Richard Greeman