[NON BLOG] Why I Like Simulation Games
Mar. 4th, 2005 07:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldI rather like simulation games. First-person shooters never interested me particularly. Starting from the hacked copy of SimCity for my Commodore 64, I loved the idea of being able to simulate the foundation, growth, and expansion of complex societies. My favourite simulation game of all time is Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri: There's nothing quite like dispatching hordes of ravenous mind worms upon your terrified ideological foes even as you work on building technologies capable of communicating with Planet. The Gaians and the University were my favourite factions; the Hive and the Believers, I fear, the least. I really enjoyed exploring Planet's surface, creating a complex web of internal trade and external diplomatic relations, downloading new maps (Mars, a gas-giant moon) and scenarios (different or extra factions, specific territorial goals), and the like.
This is one reason why I didn't take that game with me to Ontario.
Instead, I picked up three new games.
Middle East Political Simulator, from 1990, is a simple game, belonging by virtue of its appearance to the era of MS-DOS. It still remains quite playable though, allowing you, as Prime Minister, to guide Israel through the 1980s and beyond. You can try for peace; you can build up your military forces, both conventional and nuclear; you can try to make allies; you can fight, and lose, wars against your enemies, as far off as Libya and Iran. Peace, or at least détente, with Egypt is always a good thing given Syria's inveterate hostility; unless Israel's war on its eastern front goes well, the only way to avoid being conquered by Egypt or being drawn into a protracted catastrophic war is to use nuclear weapons and risk a global catastrophe. The game's AI is decent enough, although it at times approaches Risk-type levels of blind geopolitical maneuvering: Why, for instance, it is so easy for you to launch massive preemptive invasions of neighbouring countries? It's still diverting.
Back when I was a pre-adolescent, I remember reading the advertisements taken out by Spectrum Holobyte for its 1991 simulation game Crisis in the Kremlin in the computer press, proudly announcing how their software had predicted the coup against Gorbachev. The game isn't that good. The figures for government spending, in particular, appear to bear mainly an indicative relationship with reality. But then, since that's what Soviet government finances were regardless, it doesn't interfere with the playability of the game. Picking one of three personas (the conservative Ligachev, the reformer Gorbachev, the radical Yeltsin), the player is supposed to try to save the Soviet Union. Politics, fortunately, does impose constraints: glasnost and perestroika too fervently adopted can provoke a counterrevolutionary coup while too strongly opposed and the People's Liberation Coalition ends up controlling Moscow state television facilities.
One respect in which I think Crisis in the Kremlin might possibly fall short is in the inertia of the events. Gellner famously observed that the worst-case scenario for the wider world, in relationship to a declining totalitarian regime armed with weapons of mass destruction, would be for the regime to try to translate its military force into economic support, to hold the world hostage. I wanted to try to play Gellner's feared policy; I was thwarted. On a limited scale, if I tried to forcibly occupy (pre-1989) Eastern Europe in the late 1980s, then my forces would be driven out regardless by local resistance. If, even as a liberal, I tried to preserve the Soviet Union, events inevitably escaped my control as Ukraine led the other peripheral republics to independence. I couldn't maintain the interity of the socialist commonwealth; I couldn't even maintain Soviet unity. It might have been impossible to do either; but then again, are we so sure about that?
Europa Universalis II and its derivatives are rather more sophisticated games that the two preceding, with engines that effectively simulate power in its various fields: cultural, religious, economic, military, technological. A French-occupied England rises against the foreigners; the Greeks of Corfu have a disaste for the Venetian schismatics who rule them; a single Spanish (or Portuguese, or Danish) conquistador unit can slaughter vast quantities of Native Americans with negligible losses.
On certain memorable occasions, at a time when I was still learning how to play, I blundered into catastrophic outcomes, my favourite of these being the partition of the English crown's territory divided between an independent Éire, Scotland, France, and the Papal States. Other forays--an attempted transformation of early 15th century Wallachia into the nucleus of a Romanian nation-state, for instance, a Bavarian effort to conquer southern Germany--likewise ended in the formation of a vastly overwhelming coalition against my rule. Efforts at stabilizing Novgorod failed owing to Muscovite treachery, while Venice's efforts to solidify the Venetian presence in the Greek east was hindered by my efforts to bring the locals into communion with Rome.
More subtly played games had different results. Playing France in the early 16th century, for instance, I conquered Lorraine, annexed southern England and made Éire a vassal state (thanks to the auld alliance with a Scotland that now stretched south to the Mersey), and then proceeded to rob the Spanish of the Low Countries. Another time, I completely ignored central European affairs, allowing Austria to conquer most of southern and central Germany while I instead sought to expand France's colonial glory, not only solidly establishing New France and the sugar-island colonies of the Caribbean Sea and Indian Ocean far more strongly than the Bourbons ever did, but colonizing new territories: California, Australia, Virginia. I followed much the same policy when I played Portugal, allowing Tangiers to fall to Morocco and its own Muslim rebels and neglecting the dynastic politics of Europe so as to favour overseas expansion. The result? Before the game crashed in the mid-17th century, I'd established a solid belt of Portuguese colonies in the south Atlantic, from Patagonia to the mouth of the Amazon on that ocean's western shore and with a well-developed South Africa on the eastern.
There are very good structural reasons why the alternative histories I created with these three simulations never occurred. An Israel actively imperialist during the 1980s would have provoked a global catastrophe, and Israelis knew this. The preservation of even a democratized Soviet Union would have been a difficult task at best, given the ongoing collapse of the Soviet economy and the growth of local nationalisms. France never developed an interest in colonizing California and Australia because it never needed to establish many Pacific-front colonies of settlement, given low population growth and more Europe-centred policies. Portugal's transitory presence at the Cape explains why South African Portuguese is not a everyday vernacular but a language brought quite to the country within the past generation and a half.
Despite these structural factors, though, there were also possibilities. Taking the single example of France's failure to echo Britain and Spain in intensively settling extra-European territories, if there had been some population movement in France that echoed the 17th century flight of religious dissidents from Stuart England or the 16th century out-migration of the newest generation of conquistadors from the new Spanish kingdom's recently conquered south to the lands on the other side of the Atlantic, New France might have grown as quickly as New Spain or New England. Had elite personalities in 17th century France been different--had Louis XIV, say, sought to consolidate the Canadian frontiers and clear up social blemishes at home by sponsoring the settlement of urban poor and rural peasants on the shores of the St. Lawrence--then there would at least be more Canadiens, and despite the structural issues tending to militate against an especially populous French colony.
Back on the 23rd of February, I noted in my CFTAG report that the perfection of human knowledge about the functionings of human societies would let us have exceptionally good simulation games. It's also true that the expansion of human knowledge would let us know about the contingent nature of our present-day circumstances. There are reasons for the way that things are; these reasons, though, are not nearly so certain, or nearly so inevitable, as we might want to believe. The progressive improvement of simulation games just provides an entertaining face on this reality. And besides, a Portuguese Cape is just fun.
This is one reason why I didn't take that game with me to Ontario.
Instead, I picked up three new games.
Middle East Political Simulator, from 1990, is a simple game, belonging by virtue of its appearance to the era of MS-DOS. It still remains quite playable though, allowing you, as Prime Minister, to guide Israel through the 1980s and beyond. You can try for peace; you can build up your military forces, both conventional and nuclear; you can try to make allies; you can fight, and lose, wars against your enemies, as far off as Libya and Iran. Peace, or at least détente, with Egypt is always a good thing given Syria's inveterate hostility; unless Israel's war on its eastern front goes well, the only way to avoid being conquered by Egypt or being drawn into a protracted catastrophic war is to use nuclear weapons and risk a global catastrophe. The game's AI is decent enough, although it at times approaches Risk-type levels of blind geopolitical maneuvering: Why, for instance, it is so easy for you to launch massive preemptive invasions of neighbouring countries? It's still diverting.
Back when I was a pre-adolescent, I remember reading the advertisements taken out by Spectrum Holobyte for its 1991 simulation game Crisis in the Kremlin in the computer press, proudly announcing how their software had predicted the coup against Gorbachev. The game isn't that good. The figures for government spending, in particular, appear to bear mainly an indicative relationship with reality. But then, since that's what Soviet government finances were regardless, it doesn't interfere with the playability of the game. Picking one of three personas (the conservative Ligachev, the reformer Gorbachev, the radical Yeltsin), the player is supposed to try to save the Soviet Union. Politics, fortunately, does impose constraints: glasnost and perestroika too fervently adopted can provoke a counterrevolutionary coup while too strongly opposed and the People's Liberation Coalition ends up controlling Moscow state television facilities.
One respect in which I think Crisis in the Kremlin might possibly fall short is in the inertia of the events. Gellner famously observed that the worst-case scenario for the wider world, in relationship to a declining totalitarian regime armed with weapons of mass destruction, would be for the regime to try to translate its military force into economic support, to hold the world hostage. I wanted to try to play Gellner's feared policy; I was thwarted. On a limited scale, if I tried to forcibly occupy (pre-1989) Eastern Europe in the late 1980s, then my forces would be driven out regardless by local resistance. If, even as a liberal, I tried to preserve the Soviet Union, events inevitably escaped my control as Ukraine led the other peripheral republics to independence. I couldn't maintain the interity of the socialist commonwealth; I couldn't even maintain Soviet unity. It might have been impossible to do either; but then again, are we so sure about that?
Europa Universalis II and its derivatives are rather more sophisticated games that the two preceding, with engines that effectively simulate power in its various fields: cultural, religious, economic, military, technological. A French-occupied England rises against the foreigners; the Greeks of Corfu have a disaste for the Venetian schismatics who rule them; a single Spanish (or Portuguese, or Danish) conquistador unit can slaughter vast quantities of Native Americans with negligible losses.
On certain memorable occasions, at a time when I was still learning how to play, I blundered into catastrophic outcomes, my favourite of these being the partition of the English crown's territory divided between an independent Éire, Scotland, France, and the Papal States. Other forays--an attempted transformation of early 15th century Wallachia into the nucleus of a Romanian nation-state, for instance, a Bavarian effort to conquer southern Germany--likewise ended in the formation of a vastly overwhelming coalition against my rule. Efforts at stabilizing Novgorod failed owing to Muscovite treachery, while Venice's efforts to solidify the Venetian presence in the Greek east was hindered by my efforts to bring the locals into communion with Rome.
More subtly played games had different results. Playing France in the early 16th century, for instance, I conquered Lorraine, annexed southern England and made Éire a vassal state (thanks to the auld alliance with a Scotland that now stretched south to the Mersey), and then proceeded to rob the Spanish of the Low Countries. Another time, I completely ignored central European affairs, allowing Austria to conquer most of southern and central Germany while I instead sought to expand France's colonial glory, not only solidly establishing New France and the sugar-island colonies of the Caribbean Sea and Indian Ocean far more strongly than the Bourbons ever did, but colonizing new territories: California, Australia, Virginia. I followed much the same policy when I played Portugal, allowing Tangiers to fall to Morocco and its own Muslim rebels and neglecting the dynastic politics of Europe so as to favour overseas expansion. The result? Before the game crashed in the mid-17th century, I'd established a solid belt of Portuguese colonies in the south Atlantic, from Patagonia to the mouth of the Amazon on that ocean's western shore and with a well-developed South Africa on the eastern.
There are very good structural reasons why the alternative histories I created with these three simulations never occurred. An Israel actively imperialist during the 1980s would have provoked a global catastrophe, and Israelis knew this. The preservation of even a democratized Soviet Union would have been a difficult task at best, given the ongoing collapse of the Soviet economy and the growth of local nationalisms. France never developed an interest in colonizing California and Australia because it never needed to establish many Pacific-front colonies of settlement, given low population growth and more Europe-centred policies. Portugal's transitory presence at the Cape explains why South African Portuguese is not a everyday vernacular but a language brought quite to the country within the past generation and a half.
Despite these structural factors, though, there were also possibilities. Taking the single example of France's failure to echo Britain and Spain in intensively settling extra-European territories, if there had been some population movement in France that echoed the 17th century flight of religious dissidents from Stuart England or the 16th century out-migration of the newest generation of conquistadors from the new Spanish kingdom's recently conquered south to the lands on the other side of the Atlantic, New France might have grown as quickly as New Spain or New England. Had elite personalities in 17th century France been different--had Louis XIV, say, sought to consolidate the Canadian frontiers and clear up social blemishes at home by sponsoring the settlement of urban poor and rural peasants on the shores of the St. Lawrence--then there would at least be more Canadiens, and despite the structural issues tending to militate against an especially populous French colony.
Back on the 23rd of February, I noted in my CFTAG report that the perfection of human knowledge about the functionings of human societies would let us have exceptionally good simulation games. It's also true that the expansion of human knowledge would let us know about the contingent nature of our present-day circumstances. There are reasons for the way that things are; these reasons, though, are not nearly so certain, or nearly so inevitable, as we might want to believe. The progressive improvement of simulation games just provides an entertaining face on this reality. And besides, a Portuguese Cape is just fun.
