I’d like to write a video game called “Josef Stalin”.
It’s 1935. You’re the Soviet head of state, a position that faces no re-elections and you have complete control of the media. You also have the right to arrest, imprison, or kill anyone in the country at your whim, without trial. You also just happen to personally be a bigger asshole than anybody else you’ve ever met in your whole life.
But you, and you alone, possess the true insight, and the courageous leadership capability to make communism work and leave the Capitalist West behind.
Unfortunately, nearly everybody in the country realizes, deep down, what a prick you are. 20% of the country would love to see you die, 5% would kill you if they could get away with it, and 0.1% of them (that’s 100,000 people) would sacrifice their lives to kill you.
The country has made great strides since you took office, and every bit of that, every iota, is due to your exceptional ideas. All hope for the country is lost if you die.
Plots are always happening, conspiracies to kill you pop up every day, and they must all be sought out and eradicated lest they kill you, and with you, any hope for communism.
All these people who want you dead just don’t understand. If only they could be shown your each and every decision in context, they would realize that you were motivated only by your ever so deep love for mankind. The future you are creating is so wonderful, so perfect, that achieving it justifies any conceivable crime. But most people are idiots who couldn’t possibly comprehend the big picture. There’s no hope of being liked all the time. In the absence of liking, fear will have to suffice.
In this video game, you get points for how long you live. Just killing everybody won’t work, because you need the Soviet Union to be as strong as possible when Hitler attacks in 1941. But you’ll die before 1936 unless you kill a lot of people, including a lot of people you aren’t at all sure are the slightest bit guilty.
And of course, in history Stalin dies in 1953 partly because he had purged the doctors who’d been taking care of him. So in the video game you can live longer than that, but you have to somehow manage to kill enough people to survive while at the same time being able to find physicians you can trust.
If you can do things right, you can organize it so that 20% of the country’s GDP is spent on medical research specifically aimed at the few specific illnesses that you personally are particularly likely to get, so they could extend your life to 100 years old, which would be 1978.
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