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Mana Capitalism
What does capitalism look like when everything is countable?
Simulations
It is almost a pre-requisite of any strategy game to include some sort of mana system. Mana itself is a token term; a catch-all replacement for the less eloquent phrase, “amount of stuff.” In the realm of videogames, gold coins are a classic type of mana, as well as magicka, gems, hearts and even, fittingly, lives.
Mana is just an amount of stuff, so much so one might argue that all things can be reduced to the concept of mana. Money is surely mana, as is reputation (see, for example, the excellent videogame Prison Architect if you don’t believe me). Politicians have mana first in terms of poll numbers, then votes, and then seats. Businesses have mana — we call it capital.
To be sure, it is not necessarily helpful to trivially reduce every component of the world to some unit of account, and the absurdity of doing such is — perhaps — compounded by the decision as made here to name this universal unit of account after a concept born from videogames. But, only perhaps. Videogames are, Baudrillard aside, simulated worlds which from a behavioural position, one should concede, can tell us an awful lot about the activities of people within the non-simulated realm.
