We recently posted a new gameplay video for Pax Narcotica: The Line, showing the businesses that can be purchased to launder drug profits. This is an important milestone for us as it allows the player to ‘bank’ their cash and build up something akin to a HIGH SCORE.

An early design choice we made was to separate ‘dirty cash’ from clean capital. When the player makes money from selling illegal goods we did not want the money to just be added to a counter in the top corner of the GUI. We wanted the issue of handling dirty cash to be as much of a challenge as handling narcotics or weapons.

Thanks to the Netflix marketing machine you’ll have heard the story of Pablo Escobar, on the run from the authorities, burning $2million in cash to keep warm in a cabin. Whether this is a true or not (and I’ll never let the truth spoil a good story) what better allegory for the fleeting value of money, and how quickly it becomes no more than inked paper when it cannot be spent?

At the higher tiers of any criminal enterprise the money makes itself. Plenty of money for flash cars, gold AK-47s, and shiny suits. Changing those piles of street cash into capital, that’s the real challenge.
It is also a source of some of the more insidious and damning stories of the drug trade. If you are a multi-national bank, and are not obliged to justify or even explain where a client’s liquid deposits come from, why would you not agree to handle billions of dollars in cartel funds? Why would you not cream off 40% commission for washing this money and funnelling it into State-side real estate holdings? Legally, it is complicated. Morally, it is grotesque. Financially, it is lucrative enough to ignore the legal and the moral.

And that right there is the drug war, distilled.
As gamers, there is a completionist thrill at seeing a vast map of UI icons that can be claimed and checked off a list. There is an appeal to building up an empire of nightclubs, strip joints, and laundromats. However, we designed this mechanic to develop the narrative as much as the gameplay, to show the how the corruption of the drug trade rots deeper than the veins of the addicts.

As an example, along with traditional ‘front’ businesses used to launder profits, drug dealers often buy up derelict properties for cash, then report the rent as legitimate income (James R. Cohen, Abandoned Housing: Exploring Lessons from Baltimore).
Beyond the obvious short-term implications on poor residents struggling to pay rent to violent drug offenders, the long-term consequences are just as damaging.

This kind of ownership often prevents initiatives to revitalise areas of cities, given the public outcry that would emerge if tax dollars were handed over to drug traffickers to purchase their properties. This is not a concern that private investors need be concerned, any more than they need be concerned with rejuvenating neighbourhoods for the residents.

For drug traffickers, buying up real estate and businesses is an efficient way to clean their money, to have their cash turned into an untouchable HIGH SCORE. Yet the long term consequences can complete the job of breaking a community, and keeping it broken.
So if you play our game and decide to try and build up an empire of business and real estate, do not be surprised if there are unexpected consequences. And that right there is Pax Narcotica, distilled.