Monica Potts may be a feminist graduate of an all-women’s college who has vowed to never change her name or end her career to raise children full time, but when she plays sim games, she plays them as a conservative:
As a Sim City expert, I can tell you that things function much more smoothly if taxes are low and city government caters to corporate interests. In the most recent version of the game, low-income housing is associated with higher crime rates, which necessitate more police stations. Low-income housing, however, packs in more workers per block, and I need all those workers in order to generate more revenue. To keep them productive — if employees are unhappy, they go rogue, which, in the game’s terms, means striking and shutting down their textile factories or meatpacking plants — I have to lull them into complacency with plenty of movie theaters, bowling allies, and pizza shops where they can “blow off steam.” These workers produce until the city’s coffers are full enough for me to raze their tenements and put in expensive brownstones instead. My cities become a checkerboard of tony lofts and corporate office buildings, peppered with the occasional opera house or art gallery no working family could afford to visit. Those cities also always end up polluted: Wind energy is fine in theory, but old-fashioned petroleum and coal facilities really make them run.
In another computer game, Civilization, players start with a prehistoric nomad and re-create the cultural and societal evolution of humankind by harvesting natural resources, growing crops, and studying science. There are many ways to out-compete other civilizations and win the game, but the surest is to become a war hawk: I devote all of my resources, early on, to building a massive army — of warriors, then knights, then musketeers, then tanks, and then guided missiles — and destroy weaker cities, one by one, until they all belong to me. Building a society on diplomacy and technological development sounds great in theory but takes thousands of years before I can reap rewards. Again and again, I choose war.
I blame some of my right-of-center leanings on the structures of the games themselves. Having children has the added bonus of extending game time in The Sims, because I get to continue to play the same family as the generations roll by. Maternity leave is mandatory for pregnant Sim women because of a long-standing technical issue within the game, but that replicates a long-standing real-world assumption about which partner should care for newborn children. The result is that my Sim women often leave work permanently because they’ve taken more time off than their Sim husbands, which actually mirrors the results of gender discrimination in the real world. If the game were set up in a less traditional way, I would likely play it in a less traditional way.
It’s downright peculiar how these reality simulations, in which players have limited resources and must make a series of trade-offs, have this conservative bias…