SUMMER 1999

The Lure of the Sim

It all began with Sim City - the original one. I like the Sim games because they give me both immediate and long term results from my decisions, the games increase in complexity as I play, and they give an improved score from experience. As a result I find them utterly absorbing. The hours pass unnoticed as I am immersed in decision making for which I will never be truly accountable.

Since Sim City I have never looked at urban development the same. Now I believe a strategically placed sports stadium will result in urban growth, that housing along waterways will bring in more taxes, and that traffic jams may not be solved by building more roads. In my version of the game more roads bring more cars. My factories can have unbridled growth, I can have a coal fired power station and I never have to face an environmental impact study. Life is simpler with the Sims.

I attempt to control a simple medieval rural life in Lords Of the Realm 2. While it is packaged and sold as a fighting game I take of the option of allowing the computer to calculate the outcome of battles. I concentrate on building a well fed, populous society. We build castles, farm cows and wheat, cut wood, quarry stone and mine iron ore. Travelling caravans come by irregularly to trade produce for arms and materials to defend my kingdom, or go conquer another. If I am careless my population starves and gets sick. The sure sign of market success in the real world, the game add-on, was unfortunately designed to increase my fighting prowess, so I ignored it. Sometimes I wonder if I play a completely different game from the one intended.

For a time I played Sim Farm, watching the weather, planting and harvesting in season, spraying pests and distributing bags of fertilizer. I always failed to make a profit. I just don’t know if this farming reality is what the game intended. Or maybe I just couldn’t bring myself to seriously take up farming with chemicals, even virtually. A friend was kind enough to put me out of my poverty stricken misery by showing me something the manual omitted - the short cut to putting extra cash into my account. From then on I was in clover, building paved highways into town to encourage sales, buying up the land next door, and putting up fancy buildings for all that new farm machinery.

I never got to play Theme Park, but now there’s a new version with the doubtful title of Roller Coaster Tycoon. I build rides, set prices, employ entertainers, handymen (yes, men) and technicians. I even get to virtually clean up after others - sometimes games do have a relationship to real life. I’ll tire of this game before the others, and I found the learning curve irritating. At first I found I just wasn’t intuitive enough to understand some of the game (and aren’t I a woman?). I get to select and build the rides and concessions in a park. The object is to attract people and encourage them to spend money. They start out happy to ride the merry go round, but only big, fast and dangerous rides make me rich. Last week I injured 12 people on a ride. The concern of the game is to get the ride profitable again as soon as possible. While I’m happy not to see the virtual blood, I’m not keen on those values.

Civilization always looked racist to me, so I was interested in its successor, Alpha Centauri. I can select to develop one of seven stereotyped societies. My subsequent decisions are bound by my initial choice. If I select an ecologically sound society I cannot relentlessly pursue capitalist growth. I have to negotiate with the other 6 societies, through either cooperation or warfare. My guess is that the game is designed on the assumption I’ll choose to fight. I hate the game’s electronic noises other than the mix of question and protest when I click on someone irrelevant to the action. It’s complex and interesting enough that the lure of exploration, finding what is around the next corner, brings me back to this game. Unfortunately, as I improve my playing skill I get to conquer the neighbours. At this point the game plays a short video clip of torture, before killing, of the leader of my neighbours - the one I was previously negotiating with and “talking” to. It feels as if someone was trying very hard to make this game more graphic, thinking this was synonymous with interesting. They also tacked on some boring audio quotations which seem to be about the nature of life, the universe and everything, which pop up at odd moments. I really wanted to like this game, I paid good money for it, but as my play improves the game deteriorates.

Once there was Sim Health. Based on the options put forward in the early days of the first Clinton administration. I got to run a health system within a set of parameters I selected at the outset. I could choose anything from Canadian style universal health care to user pay for everything. There was no winner, and it was a little more intellectually stimulating than most sim games. Short on fancy graphics it made you think about how computer simulated societies and situations can be developed to explore possibilities and carry decisions into real life. The game didn’t last long on the market, but it held a treasured part of my hard drive for years.

I still search for sim games, but most are based on warfare and Barbie’s shade of pink is enough to drive me away. I long for a sim game based on social justice, fairness, smart and quick decision making, with the same foresight necessary to play chess, the adventurousness and derring do of exploration, the quick reactions of an arcade game, and the feeling of making the improvements we all long for in the real world. An ideal one would teach me something valuable, so that I could go to bed at 3 am a better person.