Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, You're listening to upstream. I'm Dela Duncan and today we're in conversation with David Cripp,

the creator of the Marxist educational video game, Crisis Theory.

Welcome, David.

Can you?

Welcome, David. Welcome David Cribb.

Can you introduce yourself to our listeners?

So I'm David Cribb. I'm an undergraduate student from Australia at the Australian National University, fourth year now, studying

law and Middle Eastern politics and yeah, I make video games in my spare time.

And yeah, obviously a particular interest in Marxism.

So David, you recently developed an interesting educational

video game called Crisis Theory. I'm wondering if you could explain the name and the basic premise of the game.

Yeah, sure. So the basic premise of the game is to put forward Marx's theory of accumulation, which in a nutshell Marx takes the ideas

about how capitalism is supposed to work from classical political economists.

So having a perfectly functioning market, no monopolies, everyone acting in their

own self-interest, takes those assumptions and basically says that if you start with those assumptions,

they will lead capitalism inevitably into crisis.

So while people like Adam Smith and people on the right would say start with these assumptions,

you end up with the best possible outcome for everyone, Mark says no, leads you into crisis.

And hence the name, crisis theory, it's the area of Marxist thought, which explains why capitalism

always tends towards crisis and what form those crises take.

So in the game you play as the kind of fictional spirit of capitalism and you try and stop capitalism

falling into crisis for as long as you possibly can.

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