If you’re going to discuss the hidden politics of video games, perhaps a long list of explicitly political simulations isn’t the way to go:
Games can be criticized for being too violent, or a brain-dead waste of time. But they are not usually criticized for being political. Games are entertainment, not politics, right?
However, consider the popular computer game Sim City, which first debuted in 1989. In Sim City, you design your metropolis from scratch, deciding everything from where to build roads and police stations to which neighborhoods should be zoned residential or commercial. More than a founder or a mayor, you are practically a municipal god who can shape an urban area with an ease that real mayors can only envy.
But real mayors will have the last laugh as you discover that running a city is a lot harder than building one. As the game progresses and your small town bulges into a megalopolis, crime will soar, traffic jams will clog and digital citizens will demand more services from their leaders. Those services don’t come free. One of the key decisions in the game is setting the municipal tax rate. There are different rates for residential, commercial and industrial payers, as well as for the poor, middle-class and wealthy.
Sim City lets you indulge your wildest fiscal fantasies. Banish the IRS and set taxes to zero in Teapartyville, or hike them to 99 percent on the filthy rich in the People’s Republic of Sims. Either way, you will discover that the game’s economic model is based on the famous Laffer Curve, the theoretical darling of conservative politicians and supply-side economists. The Laffer Curve postulates that raising taxes will increase revenue until the tax rate reaches a certain point, above which revenue decrease as people lose incentive to work.
Finding that magic tax point is like catnip for hard-core Sim City players. One Web site has calculated that according to the economic model in Sim City, the optimum tax rate to win the game should be 12 percent for the poor, 11 percent for the middle class and 10 percent for the rich.
In other words, playing Sim City well requires not only embracing supply-side economics, but taxing the poor more than the rich. One can almost see a mob of progressive gamers marching on City Hall to stick Mayor McSim’s head on a pike.
Sim City is only a game, yet it is notable how many people involved in economics say it gave them their first exposure to the field. “Like many people of my generation, my first experience of economics wasn’t in a textbook or a classroom, or even in the news: it was in a computer game,” said one prominent financial journalist. Or the gamer who wrote, “SimCity has taught me supply-side economics even before I studied commerce and economics at the University of Toronto.”
Other games also let you tinker with politics and economics. Democracy 3 allows you to configure the government of your choice. The ultra-cynical Tropico is the game where the player—who is El Presidente of a kleptocratic Latin American government—can win by stashing enough loot in his Swiss bank account. In Godsfire, a 1976 boardgame of galactic conquest, players roll dice each turn to see what kind of government rules their empire. Extremist governments only build warships to attack their neighbors, Moderates spend less on defense and more on economic growth and Reactionaries will only spend money on planetary defenses (which also double as domestic riot suppression systems for keeping the citizenry in line).
However, the best example of politics and games is the legendary Civilization, an empire-builder and bestseller since it debuted in 1991.
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Admittedly, some Civ political depictions are debatable. Communism in Civ 4 increases food and factory production and reduces waste from corruption? Someone should have told this to the Soviets in 1989, or China’s rulers today. Authoritarian regimes can’t create new technologies? Cheery news for Londoners who watched their city destroyed by Nazi V-2 rockets in 1944. Democracies embrace science? In Civ 3, the first nation to discover Darwin’s Theory of Evolution gets a science bonus, a game feature that some Kansas school boards would disapprove of.
What is most remarkable about the politics of Civ is how unremarkable all this seems to an American like myself.
Some interesting work using games/simulations for the study of decision-making has been done by Dietrich Doerner: The Logic of Failure.
Chris Crawford’s “Balance of the Planet” was my first introduction to ecology and environmentalism. It played a major part in making me a greenie leftist for about 10 years (basically, until I became an adult).
A few years back (and well after I’d become a horrible reactionary caveman nazi racist homophobe etc), I dug up a copy on an abandonware site and took a second look at it. Discovered things like “total grassland = last year’s grassland – loss from erosion”. That’s right, grassland always shrinks. Never grows. Then there’s the communist economic model where the player is rewarded for massively taxing energy use in the developed world and subsidizing food production for all the poor people (deaths from starvation are a huge negative on the scorekeeping).
I had a book on game design by Crawford lying around and decided to see if the game was a one-off in terms of the dishonesty involved. Opened it to a random page, read a line, I don’t remember the specifics but it was about nuclear power and was both incredibly smug and self-congratulatory and incredibly wrong (both traits which Crawford displays consistently on his blog). I tossed the book in the trash.
If/when I have kids though, the game will definitely form part of their education, as a lesson in propaganda and how to see through it.
Crawford’s “Balance of Power” was better even if it relied on equivalent assumptions; tough to disagree with his assumption that nuclear war would be a lose-lose proposition. Still, he did stack the deck pretty hard against the player.
He also published a book explaining the logic of the game from his point of view. Pretty much concurs with his worldview as you describe it, at least at that time. Although to this day I remember the best bit — the international affairs awards he made up and handed out at the end. The memorable one was for best terrorist group name, which he awarded to “Shining Path”, specifically “for avoiding trite acronyms about people, liberation, and fronts”.
Today he wouldn’t have that problem. We have far more creative people in the terrorist industry.