Learning Politics in the Virtual World

I remember loving Sim City, in fact, construction games of all sorts. I spent hours of arranging elevators in Sim Tower, and built city after city in Caesar. I still love Railroad Tycoon, and am perfectly delighted to be laying track between Sapporo and Tokyo or Cairo and Cape Town in my free time for the tenth or twelfth time.

Ultimately, though, there is something just a bit unsatisfying about building games. Fun as Sim City is, no question about it. But a simulation, it's not, no, not really. Yes, the physical systems you invent interact and must coordinate or you will fail (in game terms), but they aren't real. They aren't real because you don't have to deal with people.

"Politics," Otto von Bismarck famously noted, "is the art of the possible." He knew, and we all know, that ultimately to do anything you have to deal with people, and deal with them successfully, lest you find yourself voted out office, exiled, flung in prison, or strung up by your heels and shot. In Sim City, at worst you lose the game. In Railroad Tycoon you can get fired. It's just not the same as real politics.

The best simulations are games where you have to deal with people as you make things that are bigger and better than anything you ever imagined you'd get to build. If you play games like World of Warcraft or the like you may have experienced a pale version of what I mean, because you have run into situations where you had to work with other people to do what you needed to do.

But there are other games out there. There are dozens based on the world of Pern, created by Anne McCaffery. You, and your allies...and the dragons you ride...must work together or die separately: actions you can influence and even lead.

Still more complex virtual worlds exist. Consider Firan (www.legendary.org/firan), an original, virtual, text-based world that has been running for over a decade. The world of the game, Aerval, contains several races of people but players play Firans, the good guys. The Firans have a feudal social structure: They are ruled by an absentee king and a Viceroy in his absence. Firans belong to one of eight clans, each with a clan leader, nobility, and commoners. Even ordinary citizens have a social class to look down on...the dregs of society who live in the Old City.

All the Firan clans have to unite annually to keep the evil Shamibelians at bay, and in between they have to govern and function in a simulated world, a world full not only of soldiers and lords, but also hunters and weavers, priests and poker players, entertainers and blacksmiths. If farmers don't grow people don't eat, if tailors don't sew they go naked, and if they don't find ways to put out fires the city burns.

The key difference between this game and Sim City is that the other people you encounter in the world are individuals with agendas of their own. They might be similar to yours, or completely different. They might be telling you the truth or they might be lying. They might be prepared to help you or prepared to hinder you, or prepared to say one thing and do the other!

The only way to get ahead is to learn and understand the reality of politics, to learn to understand and deal with people. And games like these are fun because there is no AI behind those people the way there is in Sim City...there are real intelligences played by real people for real reasons behind the people you need to deal with in such a world.

And the simplest way to learn how to understand and deal with people is to do it. That is what makes virtual reality games so valuable to us: They give us the chance to explore what we can and cannot do in ways that don't result in prison, or misery. Or no more than virtual prison.

Sim City? I love it. Heckuva game. But if you want to have a real simulation of a society, find one where you have to deal with meat intelligences, not just artificial ones.