Games: So You Want to be a Dictator?

When Helmut Kravitz was spared from execution in a last-minute reprieval in 1943, he embarked on what would prove to be a lifetime of literary achievements, the like of which our fair Kyrgysztan hasn’t seen before or since. Or at least he would have, if his every endeavor had not been thwarted by the firm hand of Communist censors. During the prime of his life it is believed that he wrote as many as six novels and three operas, all of which were destroyed or lost before they could see the light of day, leaving the Penguin Republic his only legacy from those potentially glorious years.

It wasn’t until the 1980’s, when Helmut’s health was already declining, that his gorged literary desires were finally given a party-sanctioned voice. It was the peak of the Cold War; the Kremlin had already lost the Space Race and was quickly losing the Arms Race, and now faced pressure on yet another front: The Nintendo Race. As video games from Japan rapidly swept North America, the Communists realized that securing the loyalty of the next generation hinged on complete control of all mediums; Russia could not afford to be outdone by Nintendo. For all of their faults, it could not be said that the Soviets weren’t forward-thinking.

And so, in 1982, the Communist government cancelled The Penguin Republic and forcefully transfered Helmut Kravitz to the ominously secretive Kyzl Tyzl compound in northern Siberia. As Kyrgysztan's most popular author not already in the service of the Party, Helmut was to begin work on a new project of great importance to the Communist mission. Only eighteen months later, Kyzl Tyzl released the first of several video games designed to secure cultural supremacy in this new and misunderstood field. “So You Want to be a Dictator?” was its name.

This was superficially a game of resource management. Within the confines of its sixteen colors and crude interface, ‘Dictator’ gave players the tools to create and manage their own civilizations -- build cities and towns, leverage forests and fisheries for their resources, wage war and micromanage battles, even assign zoning allocations and bylaws. In its time, the philosophy of “sandbox” gaming was unheard of, and though the game had only a very narrow audience during its release, a few thousand at most, it spawned many imitators in its wake. American games such as SimCity and Civilization took the infrastructure-simulator concept and expanded it to great success. Despite its massive influence, however, this basic premise was the aspect of the game that interested Helmut the least. In fact, hidden beneath the facade of civilization-building, Helmut had nurtured in ‘Dictator’ a completely different gaming experience altogether.

In private journals that were discovered after his death, Helmut reported a deep depression upon his initial transfer to the isolated and barren Kyzl Tyzl. As the weeks wore on, however, and Helmut familiarized himself with his new responsibilities, the tone of the entries began to change. He soon realized that because video games were so new a medium, the Soviet government did not yet comprehend the breadth of their potential or significance. As such, there was no firm precedent for censorship, and Helmut was now privy to a creative freedom that he had always been denied. He immediately set to work with renewed vigor, often going several days without rest. He approached his video game as he would a novel or play, infusing it with the themes that obsessed his mental life. And as was true for his spiritual predecessors Pushkin and Doestoevsky, chief among these themes was the gnawing problem of moral ambiguity.

Anyone who had the privilege of playing ‘Dictator’ will tell you that the fundamentals of the game were fairly easy to master. Once a small civilization had been established with a solid infrastructure, local government and trade routes in place, the simulation essentially ran on autopilot, and required very little further input from the player.

It was at this point in the game, usually about twenty minutes in, that the player’s attention was directed only towards those choices that the simulated society could not make for itself. When the micro-civilization’s researchers discovered abortion, the simulated population would fall into violent debate over its legality, and this issue would then fall to the player. If abortion was made illegal, cities would become increasingly violent as unwanted youth reached maturity and turned to criminal activity, and back-alley abortions occupied most every corner. If it was made legal, the civilization suffered from unchecked sexual proclivity and moral ennui, and suffered violence against abortion clinics and their patients. Either way, the player’s approval rating within his empire immediately dropped to fifty percent, with either one half of society or the other clamoring for his immediate repudiation.

The remainder of the game consisted almost solely in wrestling impossible but necessary grey-area issues. Much of this took the form of legislation, introducing no-win policies for gun control, prostitution and drug legality, but from there it crept into every aspect of the game. Within the boundaries of the simulation, the dictator’s primary responsibility was to the growth of his empire. If he showed any restraint or conservatism in this matter, neighboring empires quickly conquered his own, resulting in a Game Over for the player. And yet, the prosperity of his civilization was also proportionate to the devastation its population wreaked on the inhabited environment. As the empire grew and spread, it became invariably more corrupt and polluted, until its simulated citizens occupied a complacent society squatting on top of a noxious industrialized wasteland. To battle depression and nihilism and maintain civil obedience, the player was forced to choose between restrictive state religions or rampant alcoholism or other ineffective distractions.

The most fascinating aspect of Helmut’s simulation is that it posed no conditions for victory. If the player endured warfare with every other nation on the planet, he was left to manage an increasingly ineffective bureaucracy, and from there the game lagged on. In the last two or three hours of the simulation the player would find himself with less and less to work towards, until eventually being ousted by his oblivion-minded populous or watching his society self-destruct on barren and toxic soil, at which point the game abruptly ended.

The only form of reprieve that “So You Want to be a Dictator?” did provide was strangely muted. Every fifteen minutes the game offered the player the option of dressing as a commoner and walking amongst his citizens along the bustling streets of the capital city. This interlude had no measurable impact on the game, nor did it change each time the player chose it. What did transpire was simply a pause in the simulation, during which the game switched to a very brief and ostensibly pointless side-scroller mode. This section had no enemies or pits, but simply invited the player to walk slowly across a swath of the urban landscape. There was no time limit, and no way to fail. At the end of the 'level' the dictator character stops, heaves a world-weary sigh, then resumes governing. This was very likely an important sequence for Helmut, the only small catharsis he could justify in the face of unlikely salvation.

Not many people ever played ‘Dictator,’ and it didn’t fare particularly well in the arcades even after it was made free to play. It did, however, set a precedent for quality which manifested itself in the other titles Helmut oversaw during his few productive years helming Kyzyl Tyzl.

More importantly, ‘So You Want to be a Dictator?’ captured the intractable problems of governance perhaps better than any other video game released in the 1980’s. Its lifeless palette of greys and browns echoed the pallor of spirit that dominated Soviet Kyrgysztan. It failed in the commercial market not because of any mediocrity in the simulation, but because it struck too realistic and hurtful a chord with those who played it. I do not believe that Helmut had any wish to furnish a means of escapism, but hoped simply to put forth the titular question to any future Stalins who might emerge from the rabble of the USSR. And by that criteria ‘Dictator’ is a resounding success, as there isn’t a person alive who could play it through to the end without arriving at the emphatic and resilient response of, “no, I suppose I don’t.”