Cutthroat Capitalism: too soon?

Wired magazine recently published an article called "Cutthroat Capitalism: An Economic Analysis of the Somali Pirate Business Model." There's nothing particularly novel here: that historical pirates are economic actors has already been observed, and this article is a clear-cut analysis of how that applies to Somali pirates. The article is based upon an interview with a Somali pirate and includes some rather nice charts and graphs. (I would like to contest, however, the idea that just because pirates are economic actors that this makes them capitalists: Like their historical antecedents, there is no production or exchange of goods and services going on; just extortion and robbery.) Wired has included "Cutthroat Capitalism: The Game" along with their article. Computer games about pirates are hardly new, and indeed, LucasArts has a new Monkey Island game out, but the goofy Guybrush Threepwood from Monkey Island is a far cry from today's Somali pirates.

In the Wired game, you are a pirate captain in the Gulf of Aden, sailing around and attacking different vessels. After a successful attack, you are supposed to negotiate for the release of the ship and hostages by choosing different tactics that include beating and killing your hostages to prove to the pirate negotiator you are serious about your demands. If you "successfully" negotiate, you are allowed to go back to roving the high seas. There are no EU or NATO ships, monsoon weather patterns, or possibilities for shipwreck and drowning in the game, and while not all attacks are successful, every vessel is presented as a potential target.

It's probably a testament to my incredibly limited experience with computer and video games that it took me six or seven negotiations before I overcame my squeamishness about clicking "beat" or "kill" as a negotiation tactic even for purely experimental purposes, but even without doing so, the whole game seemed more than a little sick to me. (Notice to potential voters in the incredibly unlikely event I ever run for anything ever: I do not think playing violent video games makes you a bad/evil/violent person.) So why am I perfectly happy to fire cannons at the bad guy pirate LeChuck in the Monkey Island game and so incredibly uncomfortable hijacking colored dots in the Cutthroat Capitalism game? The obvious difference has to do with the tone of the two games: Monkey Island is silly while Cutthroat Capitalism is deliberately realistic in approach (if not in graphics). Although both actions are something pirates "actually do/did," Somali piracy has yet to be tempered with that temporal distancing that we have identified as a condition of possibility for the romanticization of Golden Age piracy. Until this happens, I suspect the game will continue to feel a bit "off" to me, though judging from the comments posted below the game, this is not the case for many people who have played it.

That the game would involve acting as a pirate rather than as a US Navy SEAL or a NATO commander was equally puzzling to me, since first of all, there's precedent for this kind of thing and second, increases in piracy have historically resulted in nationalist opposition to the threat. Indeed, there is plenty of evidence that this happened when the Somali pirates hijacked the Maersk Alabama, Captain Phillips and the Navy SEALS were frequently described as heroes, and the media response was quick to draw upon the "pirate-fighters as patriotic heroes" commonplace we identified as prevalent in the early 1800s, with TV shows and movies featuring the Somali pirates as the villains. I think a possible answer to this puzzle is that the "pirates as cool and edgy" and "pirates as free from the constraints of society" commonplaces that coexist today alongside the "pirates as a security threat" have created conditions of possibility for the appeal of this game, since they have opened up a space in which pirates can be protagonists -- and enviable ones at that. If this is indeed the case, "Cutthroat Capitalism" is a telling example of how our perceptions of contemporary piracy are shaped by historical representations, since I do not think that this game (or a non-electronic version of it) could have enjoyed the same popularity before piracy came to be seen as a purely historical phenomenon.