You were just selling lemonade.

⚠️PLEASE, PLAY THE GAME BEFORE READING THIS TEXT.  IT WILL TAKE LESS THAN 5 MINUTES TO FINISH.⚠️

In popular media we usually see portrayals of antagonists as evil businessmen, symbols of capitalistic greed, willing to do anything for a bigger profit. These people are, of course, bad and if the good protagonist somehow manages to stop them, everything would return to normality.

Of course there are evil people in the world that should be blamed and made accountable. However, with capitalism, I believe the issue is greater than individual rotten apples. 

I hate billionaires as much as any left-wing person. However, the existence of billionaires is just a logical conclusion of the free market. If we manage to somehow remove them (or just take all their money), eventually new billionaires  would just take their spot in a matter of years. 

That’s the beauty of the free market.

THE CAPITALISM VIRUS

The biggest strength of capitalism is that it’s a self-regulating system. Meaning that the supply and demand will naturally regulate it. If a company doesn’t succeed, it will just go bankrupt while another more popular company will naturally grow. There is no external input, which makes it resistant to reform, but also blind to ethical considerations like environmental destruction and free of any accountability for its consequences.

We wish there was a monarch, like in the olden days,  that, upon dethrone, we could plant a new, more fair system. However, capitalism is a faceless virus, spread among the imagination of all the CEOs, workers, shop owners and venture capitalists of the world. It can’t be defeated by taking over a single institution or company like we used to.

It’s a virus that has infected us all. We are all constantly making decisions encouraged by capitalism, even if we don’t realise it, even if we feel like we don’t have a choice.

I’m not saying that global warming is the fault of the working class, the consequences of their decisions are meaningless on a climate scale compared to the ones of billionaires. I’m just saying that both the big CEOs and the small workers are all making those decisions driven by capitalistic rules, we just didn’t realize it’s a made up game.

MY GAME

In my Lemonade game, if you reached the final ending, you were simply following my rules. I constantly pushed you to grow, and if you didn’t, you were punished. I’m not trying to say you are wrong if you finished the game. I’m not blaming you, particularly, for not choosing the thrifted bike or using an electric squeezer. You just chose the option that made you more money because that’s what the game was about. At some point, maybe you didn’t even read the questions and just picked the option with the bigger numbers (that’s actually great, and I hope you can see why).
My main point is that, in capitalism, there is no single direct responsible person for the damage that we do to the world. The CEOs can always say they were just "doing their job" as car sellers, cloths manufacturers or app developers.

I believe there are many more points that can be made out of my game and explaining them would make them less interesting so I’d rather let you –the player, reach your own conclusions. I wish to read your opinions in the comments.

Also, just in case, obviously the game is an oversimplification of the market and it may come off as naive at many points. I had to make some decisions for the sake of gameplay and not stretch the game too complex for its purpose. I hope you can understand that.

ANY SOLUTIONS?

After all that rambling, I know I'm not proposing a solution, just pointing out a massive problem.

I hate capitalism, but personally I don't believe in the idea of communism either, it's too centralized and slow to compete agains capitalism.

A successful capitalist company is the one that makes the most money—not the one that worries about their people, improves the earth's health, saves more animals, pollutes less, or simply makes more people happy. Money is the only measure of success. Some companies may address some of these issues, but that's only because they managed to make money out of it. There has to be a market to exploit, or a company cannot exist—or at least it can't grow big enough to make a significant change in the world.

I know what I'm going to say will sound overly utopian and ridiculous, but bear with me for a second. I dream of a socio-economic system that values subjective happiness over monetary value.

A self-regulating system that bankrupts companies for bringing hatred and pollution and raises companies that make the world a better place.

A system in which center we do not find the dollar, but a more abstract concept, like peace or harmony. If your company brings peace to the world, then you will be considered a successful person, the same way we currently call billionaires "successful capitalists". A socio-economic structure that, with no need for external input, would naturally stir us into a more fair and cherished world.
It's ridiculous, I know. Human wellness or peace are subjective variables that can’t be measured, prone to ethics and morals of different cultures and people, not like the universality of money. But I just hope to live long enough to see someone more intelligent than me come up with something even remotely similar to that, or at least a proper alternative to capitalism, I've seen enough of that already.

You were just selling lemonade.

A game by Jordi Milian Yamada made for the F*CK CAPITALISM JAM 2025

Music: "Bark Technology" by YesNoMaybe, JonEcks