I've recently been playing this game on my Kindle-it's one of those games where you have to serve all your customers before they leave the restaurant, give them the right kind of food, make money, etc. Like quite a few other "game" apps, it's free in that you don't have to pay to download it. Instead, the app makers make money by charging for "Garfield Points," which enable you to hire certain characters and upgrade in specific ways in the context of the game. Inside the game, you can also make (fake) money by selling food at your diner--and that enables you to hire enough Garfield characters and upgrade enough to keep you going at a basic level. You just can't expand beyond that level or hire the cuter characters (it's notable that Garfield, Odie, and Nermal are characters you can only buy with "Garfield Gold," while Liz, Doc Boy and Jon are the ones you can hire with the in-game currency).

I've been thinking a lot about how the game provides a great metaphor for American capitalism, why people claim it's a meritocracy, and why it's not. The theory of those who believe that anyone can get ahead in America goes like this: if you pay attention in school, work hard, stay away from the "bad crowd," get good scores on the SATs, work hard through college, and work hard in your job, you can get ahead and be successful. Such a person could even claim that we make the means of success available to everyone, by providing public schooling, Pell grants, and federal financial aid. According to this logic, the only possible thing that could prevent someone from being successful is something they have control over-i.e., whether or not they work hard.

In reality, though, even if an individual works really hard throughout his or her life, and thereby manages to acquire all those (tenuous and inadequate) benefits, there are benefits that you just can't get in this country unless you're born into a family with a decent income-that's the Garfield money, which you have to pay for. And the Garfield money, just as in the game, is what actually allows you to become successful. For example, you can work really hard against all odds as a poor student at school, but if you can't buy Garfield gold, you can't live in a neighborhood that has a really good school. You can't afford to get tutors if you need help. You can't go to Kaplan classes to prep for the SATs. You may not be able to have easy access to a computer or the internet at home. If you have a learning disability, you can't pay to get properly evaluated or to get the proper help. You can't go on expensive school trips. Those are all the things that really allow individuals to progress through the system in America and become successful-but you have to have Garfield gold to get them. Same thing for college. You can work really hard, go to your local community college using Pell Grants (if you're lucky enough not to be an undocumented immigrant), move on to a four year state school, and graduate with a good GPA. (That's if you have sufficient academic background to do well, or the sheer intensity of will to figure out how to catch up on your own, even if you haven't had the educational advantages provided by Garfield dollars). But who really gets the jobs, especially if they're scarce? The kids who were able to go to expensive private colleges and didn't have to work while they were there. Both things that you can't get just by working hard to get the in-game money. You have to buy Garfield money to get those things.

So while it is technically possible to progress through the system using only the things provided to you by that system, and by what you can bring to your life in the way of hard work, you can't really get past a certain level unless you get incredibly lucky. Just like in the Garfield game, where you can play the game without buying anything, but you can't expand past a certain level (where you have Liz, Doc Boy, and Jon, and they've all been raised to about a Level 3. After that you seem to have to pay in Garfield gold to upgrade them). In the game it doesn't matter because games don't matter--but in the game that is the American economy, it matters desperately, to the many people for whom success is essentially out of reach barring luck. In the Garfield game, you can keep the restaurant running decently at the basic level without Garfield gold, but in American life, the level of non-success that you end up at without that gold is increasingly below subsistence for lots of people. It all looks like competition and "freedom," but anyone playing the "free" version just can't win.