Unlike SimCity players, SimHealth players can tinker with the base model and adjust hundreds of parameters. Still, tweaking the parameters wasn’t the same as tweaking the models themselves, and the game had a clear ideological bias. Much like in SimCity, there was no exact victory state. But SimHealthThe values of are 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 for The world of computer games, had one easy way to win: “All you have to do is adopt an extreme libertarian ideology, eliminate all federal health care (including Medicare!) and cut other government services by $100-$300 billion a year.” About unfortunately, this can hardly be called a health policy victory, as it has left virtual citizens entirely without health coverage. Even private insurance companies went bankrupt in the first few months. The game was a failure, and 30 years later, health care remains an intractable problem plaguing American politics.
considering that SimRefinery gave players a new perspective on a complex, albeit defined process, the US healthcare industry is so complex that SimHealth just muddied the waters. Paul Starr, who was a health policy adviser to the Clinton administration, completely rejected the game. “SimHealth it contains so much misinformation that no one could understand the competing proposals and policies, much less evaluate them on a program basis. He was concerned that people would mistake the game for a legitimate description of reality. He despaired that his daughter, an avid gamer, had adopted the game’s libertarian strategies because that was “just the way the game worked.”
All simulations are ultimately limited by the assumptions of their creators: they are self-contained universes ticking along according to a pre-programmed logic. They do not necessarily reflect anything fundamental about the world as it is, much less how we would like it to be. When SimCity players have occasionally encountered stable equilibria—the closest thing to “winning” in this non-game—they have laid bare the anomalies hidden in Forrester’s equations. An artist named Vincent Okasla, for example, created a city with a stable population of 6 million. The only catch? It was a libertarian nightmare world. There were no public services – no schools, hospitals, parks or fire stations. His dystopia had nothing but citizens and a concentrated police force inhabiting an endless plain of a bleak city block, copied over and over again.
But games can still be useful for rethinking society. In their book The dawn of everything, anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengro suggest that playful experimentation was critical to the formation of wildly creative social structures evident throughout human history. The ritual play area, they write, “acted as a site for social experimentation—even, in a sense, as an encyclopedia of social possibilities.” Centuries ago, European philosophers characterized humans as pawns in chess-like games played by gods whose decisions were as inscrutable as the roll of dice. Each person had their predetermined role and rules to follow. The advent of probability theory and later decision theory and game theory—ways of guessing what was once called fate—turned people from pawns into players.
Although these thinking tools have theoretically given us more freedom of action, they have also been used to constrain us. Games are increasingly at the heart of the architecture of our economic, technological and social systems. People participating from every corner of the Internet navigate invisible markets designed to efficiently extract money, attention, and information from consumers. Our reputation is evaluated with social media metrics, dating app recommendations, buyer and seller ratings. The age-old metaphor of life as a game is making its way into reality. SimCity is the right game for the modern age because its players become architects controlling a world of their choosing. It’s also a reminder that the illusion of control is not the same as the real thing.
from Playing with Reality: How Games 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.
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