A long time ago, in 1945, there was a book that had just released, which became popular due to its satirical take on politics and its use of the animal world to create an allegory of certain ruling systems used throughout the world. That novel was George Orwell's Animal Farm, which has since become a staple piece of literature in many classrooms. Now, 75 years later, that book is getting a video game based on it. Orwell's Animal Farm is a story-based game developed by Nerial, known for their prior work on the Reigns series, where you'll be able to interact with the world from the novel by choosing how to rule your animal-based republic.

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The game is set for a release later this year sometime in the fall, to celebrate its source material's 75th anniversary, and will be available on mobile devices and Steam.

 

[Xzi]

What Orwell didn't understand, since those concepts were fairly new and untested at the time, is the fact that communism is the ultimate conclusion of socialism as in order to enforce wide-spread and centralised resource management one must necessarily also deploy the element of force, as not everyone is going to enthusiastically give what is rightfully theirs for the "greater good". This is why every attempt at implementing wide-spread socialist economies had its ultimate conclusion in the establishment of a totalitarian state - it happened in the U.S.S.R, it happened in China, it happened in Cuba and countless other states.

This is only true under the assumption that your starting point is monarchy or oligarchy, where obscene wealth and power has already been concentrated into the hands of a select few. In which case, yes, you're correct that those individuals of course won't give up their wealth and power willingly, and a violent revolution would most likely be required before you could begin implementing socialist systems in the truest sense. If you're starting from scratch (say a governmental and economic collapse), then the idea is to keep things as de-centralized and worker-driven as possible.

Orwell supported socialism up to a point, and that point was freedom to self-determine, freedom to choose and freedom to speak. I think we can all get behind those three basic principles.

You can support socialism to the fullest extent and still have all these things, as it's simply a set of economic principles that meshes far better with democracy than it does with autocracy. For real-world examples of socialism-based successes, you can look to most Scandinavian countries, or even the US during the 30-40 year period of New Deal style politics. Hell, even with all the interfering the CIA and US did with Cuba over the decades, it still ranks ahead of us in a number of important metrics.

 

[Foxi4]

This is only true under the assumption that your starting point is a monarchy or oligarchy, where obscene wealth and power has already been concentrated into the hands of a select few. In which case, yes, you're correct that those individuals of course won't give up their wealth and power willingly, and a violent revolution would most likely be required before you could begin implementing socialist systems in the truest sense. If you're starting from scratch (say a governmental and economic collapse), then the idea is to keep things as de-centralized and worker-driven as possible.

You can support socialism to the fullest extent and still have all these things, as it's simply a set of economic principles that meshes far better with democracy than it does with autocracy. For real-world examples of socialism-based successes, you can look to most Scandinavian countries, or even the US during the 30-40 year period of New Deal style politics. Hell, even with all the interfering the CIA and US did with Cuba over the decades, it still ranks ahead of us in a number of important metrics.

Scandinavian countries are, for the most part, very isolationist and their economic models are strongly based on capitalist principles, but that's a conversation for another thread. As I said, I won't delve into that, since doing so would inevitably spiral the thread into oblivion.

 

[Xzi]

Scandinavian countries are, for the most part, very isolationist and their economic models are strongly based on capitalist principles, but that's a conversation for another thread. As I said, I won't delve into that, since doing so would inevitably spiral the thread into oblivion.

They're social-democracies, not full-on democratic socialist countries, but more specifically I was referring to certain policies when I said "socialism-based successes" rather than their economies as a whole.