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Official development blog for the PARANOIA roleplaying game. No description is available at your security clearance. The Computer is your friend.

Monday, November 21, 2005

Soviet consumer products 

Comrades! Vitness, as rrrecommended by Boing Boing, excellent Czech photo gallery of now-defunct Old Rrreckoning Czech people's consumer products in glorrrious Soviet era! After Alpha Complex Rrrevolution is to be overthrowink capitalist pig-dog Computer (ptui!), soon vill all peoples be enjoyink such delights equally, da!
Posted by: Allen Varney / 3:13 PM

Comments:
First and second edition Paranoia assumed Alpha Complex had a society structured (and strictured) so tightly that it was indistinguishable from the Communism it was dead-set against.

The current edition (I guess 4th is the best word for it, though a case could be made for 3rd) tries to paint a much more mercantile face onto the Alpha Complex structure, which is just as rigid but far more colorful.

Question: Is it assumed in the current edition that it was always this happy financial version, or did it change to the happy financial version when it realized it became what it was fighting?

I ask because I'm considering the implications in design. What if a group of clones find a crate of these products from the Bad Old Alpha Complex, which might even resemble some of these? (Of course, there's no telling; the new ones may resemble them too.)
# posted by Anonymous Anonymous : November 23, 2005 3:27 PM
 
Insofar as PARANOIA has a continuity (always a bad idea, I think), the current pseudo-capitalist market system is considered to be a recent innovation on the previous command economy -- say, within the last 10-20 years. It's easy to envision sectors that never embraced the capitalist idea, and still to this day manufacture the old kind of Orwellian Airstrip-One crapola. And then presumably there are collectors in other sectors who sell that socialist crapola on the Gray Subnets....
# posted by Blogger Allen Varney : November 23, 2005 10:38 PM
 
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