A Seeming Change: Quasimorph and the Critique of Anarcho-Capitalism

Abstract

This article examines how Quasimorph, a turn-based roguelike extraction shooter, models and critiques anarcho-capitalism through its narrative, worldbuilding, mechanics and economic systems. Anarcho-capitalism is a political and economic philosophy which envisions a stateless society based upon private property and voluntary contractual exchange within unfettered free-market competition – capitalism, without the state. Traditionally state-performed services (policing, defence, administering justice, etc.) would instead be performed by private companies competing for profit. Quasimorph offers a speculative, futuristic vision of anarcho-capitalism in practise in a colonized solar system. The game offers a powerful critique of anarcho-capitalist thought which, on three distinct fronts, shows that anarcho-capitalism would represent only a ‘seeming change’ from capitalism that would preserve and exacerbate its worst aspects. This paper shows how Quasimorph put this critique in playable form, affirming the video game's status as a vehicle for the critique of social and political ideologies.