Unlike SimCity player, SimHealth Players could tinker with the underlying model, adjusting hundreds of parameters, but tweaking the parameters is not the same as tweaking the model itself, and the game had a clear ideological bias. SimCityit wasn’t exactly a winning situation. SimHealthThe game’s values were hard to ignore. Every time a Canadian-style single-payer socialized health care plan appeared on screen, the game belted out a mournful funeral march. As Keith Schlesinger wrote in his review: Computer games worldAt the time, there was one easy way to win: just adopt an extreme libertarian ideology, abolish all federal health care (including Medicare), and cut other government services by $100-300 billion a year. Unfortunately, this was hardly a victory for health policy, since the fictional population ended up completely without health insurance. Even private insurance companies went bankrupt within the first few months. The game was a failure, and 30 years later, health care remains one of the most intractable problems plaguing American politics.
on the other hand SimRefinery It gave players a new perspective into a complex yet clearly defined process, however the US healthcare industry is highly complex. SimHealth It just makes things more confusing. Paul Starr, a health policy adviser to the Clinton administration, completely rejected the game.SimHealth “There’s so much misinformation in this game that it’s impossible for anyone to understand the competing proposals and policies, much less evaluate them on the basis of this program,” he worried. He worried that people would mistake the game for a fair depiction of reality. He despaired that his daughter, an avid player, had accepted the game’s liberal strategy because “that’s the way the game works.”
All simulations are ultimately constrained by the assumptions of their creators. Simulations are self-contained universes that proceed according to a pre-programmed logic. Simulations do not necessarily reflect fundamental aspects of the real world, much less the world we would like it to be. SimCity Players occasionally stumbled upon a stable equilibrium state (the closest thing to “winning” this non-game), revealing hidden biases in the Forrester equation. For example, an artist named Vincent Ocasula created a city with a stable population of 6 million people. The only drawback was that it was a libertarian nightmare world. There were no public services, no schools, hospitals, parks, or fire stations. His dystopia had only citizens living in an endless plain of desolate city blocks that have been copied many times before, and a centralized police force.
But games may still be useful in rethinking society. Where it all beganAnthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengroh suggest that playful experimentation has been essential to the formation of the highly creative social structures evident throughout human history. The ritual play realm “functioned as a site of social experimentation, even in a sense an encyclopedia of social possibilities,” they write. Centuries ago, European philosophers viewed people as pawns in a chess-like game of gods whose decisions were as inexplicable as throwing the dice. Each person had a defined role to play and rules to follow. The advent of probability theory, and later decision theory and game theory (ways of divining what we once called fate), transformed people from pawns to players.
While these tools of thought theoretically give us more freedom, they have also been used to bind us. Games increasingly underpin the structure of our economic, technological and social systems. Participants from every corner of the internet operate in an invisible marketplace designed to efficiently extract money, attention and information from users. Our reputations are measured by social media metrics, dating app recommendations, buyer and seller ratings. The old metaphor of life as a game has become reality. SimCity is a game relevant to our times, as it puts players in control of a world of their own choosing, and it reminds us that the illusion of control does not equal reality.
from Playing with reality: How games have shaped our worldby Kelly Clancy, published by Riverhead, an imprint of the Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2024 Kelly Clancy.
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