Building Syndical Crossing is a fascinating experiment for so many reasons. Since the game is ostensibly a revolutionary unionist critique of Animal Crossing: New Horizons, I find myself compelled to re-imagine every one of the game’s premises and mechanics.
Let’s take for example the very beginning of any AC:NH game. The player is greeted by Timmy and Tommy Nook, and presented with a randomly generated array of islands to settle. Each island is completely new—unexplored and undeveloped. Under even rudimentary scrutiny, there is and never has been such a place in this world—at least in the historical epoch. Just about any environment that could cultivate life has become the ancestral home of a human population. The myth of an empty, virgin landscape is a fantasy born utterly of a settler colonial mindset.
The player gets to do what they will on a canvas of unspoilt wilderness, which they are encouraged and actually required to pave, deforest and essentially monetize for the advancement of a broader market economy.
Syndical Crossing must deviate immediately, from the jump, if it is to successfully represent the conditions for a collective, liberated society. Industrial Unionism has at its foundation the notion of historic materialism. The goal of our movement is not to carve out a new life for ourselves in some uncharted utopia—like the Anaressti of LeGuin’s The Dispossessed—but to take what exists and re-purpose it democratically to fulfill the needs of all.
In the world of Syndical Crossing, the workers have secured their emancipation from the ruling class after generations of hard organizing. They find themselves in a world decimated both by a vindictive state, hellbent on crushing revolution, and the effects of extractive, destructive capitalism. They have finally seized the means of production that remain in this embattled landscape.
I need to devise a way for players to work together, using what already exists, to provide for one another. The core mechanics of the game must be transformative, and collaborative. I think that starting from this condition can be just as much fun as starting “from scratch”, so long as I can successfully build tools for players to cooperatively realize their creative vision.
As always, I am very open to discussion around this topic.
