Unlike simcity players, SimHealth Players could play with the underlying model and adjust hundreds of parameters. However, modifying the parameters was not the same as modifying the models themselves, and the game had a clear ideological bias. As well as in simcity, there wasn’t exactly a winning state. But SimHealthThe values of were hard to miss. The game trumpeted a somber funeral march every time the Canadian-style single-payer socialized medicine plan appeared on screen. As Keith Schlesinger writes in a review of World of computer gamesThere was an easy way to win: “All you have to do is adopt an extreme libertarian ideology, eliminate all federal healthcare (including Medicare!), and cut other government services by $100–300 billion a year.” Unfortunately, this could hardly be considered a healthcare policy victory, as it left virtual citizens completely without healthcare coverage. Even private insurance companies went bankrupt within the first few months. The game was a failure, and 30 years later, healthcare remains an intractable problem plaguing American politics.
While SimRefinery gave players a new perspective on a complex, yet defined process, the US healthcare industry is so complex that SimHealth It only muddied the waters. Paul Starr, who was a health policy adviser in the Clinton administration, dismissed the game entirely. “SimHealth “It contains so much misinformation that no one could understand the competing proposals and policies, much less evaluate them, on the basis of the program.” He worried that people would mistake the game for a legitimate depiction of reality. He despaired that his daughter, an avid gamer, would accept the game’s libertarian-leaning strategies because that was “the way the game works.”
Ultimately, all simulations are limited by the assumptions of their creators: they are self-contained universes that operate according to pre-programmed logic. They don’t necessarily reflect anything fundamental about the world as it is, much less how we want it to be. When simcity Players have occasionally encountered states of stable equilibrium (the closest thing to a “victory” in this non-game) and have exposed hidden biases in Forrester’s equations. An artist named Vincent Ocasla, for example, created a city with a stable population of 6 million. The only drawback? It was a libertarian nightmare world. It had no public services: no schools, hospitals, parks or fire stations. His dystopia had nothing but citizens and a concentrated police force populating an endless plain of a desolate city block, copied over and over again.
But games can still be useful in reinventing society. in his book The dawn of everything, anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow suggest that playful experimentation was crucial in forming the wildly creative social structures evident throughout human history. The ritual play zone, they write, “acted as a site of social experimentation and even, in some ways, as an encyclopedia of social possibilities.” Centuries ago, European philosophers characterized people as pawns in chess-like games played by gods, whose decisions were as inscrutable as dice rolls. Each person had their predetermined role to play and rules to follow. The advent of probability theory and, later, decision theory and game theory (ways of guessing what was once called fate) transformed people from pawns to players.
Although in theory these thinking tools have given us more agency, they have also been used to lock us in. Games increasingly underpin the architecture of our economic, technological and social systems. People participating from all corners of the Internet move in invisible markets designed to efficiently extract money, attention and information from users. Our reputation is scored with social media metrics, dating app recommendations, and buyer and seller ratings. The old metaphor of life as a game made its way into reality. simcity is the right game for the modern era because its players become architects who control a world of their own choosing. It is also a reminder that the illusion of control is not the same as reality.
Of Playing with reality: how games have shaped our world, by Kelly Clancy, published by Riverhead, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2024 by Kelly Clancy.
If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more.