Imagine that video games had been invented in the Middle Ages. From dawn to dusk, you have toiled in the fields for your master. Now, curled up next to the smoky fireplace of your flea-infested peasant hut, you turn on your 12th century Xbox and play your favorite game, Call of Chivalry.
Your back is sore and your belly is empty. But playing Call of Chivalry lets you escape into a virtual world where you are hero, not serf. Is your mission to free the oppressed from forced labor and starvation? No, in this game, you fight to uphold the divine right of kings. Your blade draws blood from rebels and rabble-rousers who would dare blaspheme the natural order by giving peasants the right to vote.
During your odyssey, you encounter characters spouting other crazy ideas like the king has no right to impose taxes, or that a wealthy prince should pay than a peasant. In this world, they are deluded souls to be pitied before they are marched away to the madhouse or the gallows.
Does such a game seem bizarre, even repugnant, to a 21st century American? Then consider the reaction of a 12th century peasant, conditioned from birth to submit to authority, to the murder, drugs and prostitution in a game like Grand Theft Auto. He might decide that if the fruits of a thousand years of progress is a game that glorifies thug life, maybe serfdom wasn’t so bad after all.
Games and gamers inevitably reflect the values of their times. If today’s video games are laden with violence and frenetic with high-tech weapons, that is the nature of the society that created them.
But do games change their societies? Rivers of ink have been spilled over whether violence in video games leads to the real thing. Whether the link is true or not, a genre that started with harmlessly batting around a virtual ping-pong ball in the 1970s game Pong, now requires games to carry age ratings to shield children from virtual gore. Some politicians have even called for warning labels that would treat video games like tobacco and alcohol.
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. In Civ, the player guides a nation from the Bronze Age to the colonization of space. There are cities to be built, technologies to be researched, wonders such as the Pyramids to be constructed, and of course armies to conquer new frontiers and dangerous rivals.
One reason for Civ’s quarter-century popularity is that it captures the sweep of human progress like no other game. How captivating it is—and this writer spent many a late night being captivated—to watch your nation progress from the invention of the wheel to dispatching starships to Alpha Centauri. Indeed, Civ designer Sid Meier told me last year that parents and teachers have thanked him for getting their children interested in history.
Civ is also addictive because it is the ultimate political sandbox. Players can mix and match ideologies and economic systems to create a nation just the way they like it. You can have an eco-green police state, a pacifist monarchy, a fascist state with freedom of speech or a free-market theocracy. Call it curiosity, megalomania or a touch of control freak, but humans are fascinated by the chance to shape the fabric of an entire society.
Michael Peck is a writer in Oregon. He can be found at https://twitter.com/Mipeck1 and http://www.facebook.com/michael.peck.967.
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