Cole Sletten • May 20, 2025

For those who grew up on Nintendo classics, you probably remember a screen like this:

This is the continue screen. I saw this a lot. You start with a finite number of lives or hearts or whatever, and when you ran out the game was over. Except the game designers quickly learned that the punishment of losing all your progress when the game was over was too great. If you had to start over, people would give up. So they gave you the bare minimum you need to start again and let you continue.

You probably also remember this:

This is the beat the game screen. You’ve conquered every level and beat all the bosses. You have 999,999 points and there are no more digits on which to count your winnings. It was the ultimate satisfaction, and also the license to move on with your life. You had done it all.

The logic of video games were simple: you could keep winning until you reached the end, or you could lose, and use a continue to try again. There was a maximum score, after which you might as well play a different game.

That structure let us get really damn good at what we were doing, it maximized our enjoyment and sense of accomplishment and minimized our fear of failure. Game design has long understood the fundamentals of human nature, and has developed principles whose power works well beyond the pixelated walls of any game.

Right now we have economic inequality problems and power imbalances in our society that are about the get exponentially worse. I think game design might point the way for a solution. What if we took that classic video game structure seriously—not just as nostalgia, but as a framework for a fairer and more resilient economy for the future?

I propose we embrace a “video game economy.”

The Structural Problem

We are entering an economic era shaped by artificial intelligence and extreme capital efficiency. A small number of individuals and corporations are going to be able to generate enormous wealth with relatively little labor input. The traditional mechanisms for income redistribution—progressive taxation, public services, and philanthropy—are proving insufficient against the accelerating tide of wealth concentration and its associated political power. With fewer people needed to produce more value, the gap between capital and labor is no longer going downhill—it’s going off a cliff.

Unchecked accumulation isn’t just economically inefficient; it’s politically destabilizing. When a handful of individuals wield more financial power than most nation-states and huge chunks of people are unable to provide economic security for their family, the democratic project itself comes under strain. On an economic level, the fear of falling into poverty discourages experimentation, entrepreneurship, and long-term thinking among those with less. Risk, in a system without safety nets, becomes something only the wealthy can afford.

The Proposal: A Game With End Conditions

The Video Game Economy proposes a rules-based approach to constrain economic extremes at both ends. It consists of four core mechanisms:

1. A Billion-Dollar Beat the Game Cap Individuals can accumulate up to $1 billion in net personal wealth. After that, additional wealth is redirected into structured public trusts—managed independently, democratically, or by non-profit stewards. These trusts could fund climate infrastructure, education, healthcare, or direct innovation grants. There could be a market for these trusts, each with their own purpose and goals, but all would be non-profit entities with the sole purpose of benefitting humankind. This cap also limits the transformation of economic success beyond the cap into outsized, systemic political influence.
2. A Continue Mechanism If a person’s net assets fall below a defined threshold—say, poverty-level income with no access to housing or health care, relative to their locality—they receive a reset: debts cleared, access to basic housing, job placement support, and healthcare coverage. This reduces the permanent consequences of failure, allowing more people to re-enter the economic game. Each person would be entitled to one reset in their lifetime at minimum.
3. Balanced Power By limiting excessive wealth accumulation and providing structured support for those at the bottom, this system rebalances power toward groups and institutions rather than individuals. It preserves innovation without creating permanent hierarchies of influence.