This is the first of a bunch of posts regarding my insights gained after a week-and-a-half of playing three simulation games in succession. We’ll start with the simplest and shallowest of insights: what I perceive to be the real dangers of simulation games. I’ll first talk about the reasons why its’ important to think about, then give an overview of what simulation games are before jumping into the topic itself.
So far, many people have been earnestly doing studies on video games… the primary two concerns have been video game addiction and violence in video games. While I wouldn’t say that the authors of these studies are necessarily biased, I do sometimes question the breadth of their studies. It seems to me that very often the reports read about in the news mention games which are studied, and these games are definitely relevant to the topic being studied – whether violence or addiction – but may necessarily bias the reader into thinking that they represent all video games. It’s like if someone does a study on the effects of whether drugs are addictive to humans, mentions that his results are based on studies of cocaine and heroin, and concludes that drugs are therefore addictive. You see the flaw in this study, of course… the average reader who is unaware of the vast majority of drugs in common usage today would be inclined to believe that “science has proven that drugs are dangerous”. Unaware, of course, of how the fact that 90% of all Western medicine and some Eastern herbal medicine is based upon effective usage of drugs, quite a number of which are not addictive.
The same thing applies to video games. The studies so far which tend to show negative results are those which study violence in action-adventure games (no duh!), particularly first-person shooters, and addiction in role-playing games, particularly online RPGs which have large social communities. Insofar as simulation games are studied, they tend to show beneficial results, as championed by the Serious Games Initiative, which holds that video games can be used to teach, train, educate, and otherwise serve useful and meaningful purposes in society. Training surgeons, soldiers or pilots to perform under stress in realistic situations by bringing it to life in a video game, for example, has been a recognised benefit of simulations for the last 15 years or so.
Simulation games can roughly be classed into two categories – those that rely on hand-eye coordination (like flying sims, soldier sims and surgery sims), and those which rely on strategic planning, management and decision-making skills (business sims, building sims, “little empire” sims). Some combine aspects of both, like football management sims, where you use hand-eye coordination in playing the game, then strategic planning in the managing the team in-between games. I want to talk about the second category – strategy / management sims – today.
This is, by far, one of my favourite genres of games to play. Essentially, these sorts of games put you in charge of building and managing something, to either express your creativity or to achieve particular goals set out for you by the game. Games in this category include the Civilization series (managing a country), the SimCity series and Caesar series (managing a city), the Patrician series and the Tycoon series (managing a business empire), the Virtual Villagers series (managing a village), the Harvest Moon series (managing a farm) and The Sims series (managing a household). Certain games also combine this genre with real-time strategy games, like the Age of Empires series or The Settlers series, requiring you to manage a city well so that your civilization can raise an army to wipe the enemy civilizations off the map.
Having adequately described the reasons behind this post and described the nature of the games we are going to study, we can now come to the topic of this post: The Dangers of Simulation Games. The main danger of simulation games is that they express the value of game units only in systemic terms, rather than humane terms.
What do I mean by this? I mean to say that in any given simulation game, a particular unit (this can be anything that can be given orders – soldiers, buildings, people, cities) is expressed by a bunch of statistical numerical values that determine it’s usefulness or contribution to the system. For example, a city in Civilization produces “50 shields, 20 food, and 100 trade”, and a military unit is expressed in terms of its’ Attack, Defense, Movement and Health points. Likewise, people in village sims or city sims are at most expressed in terms of their happiness / unhappiness, and skill levels at certain tasks. Buildings and businesses are represented by the productivity at producing a certain good, and costs (in monetary terms) to build and operate. Nothing else.
What is missing? Why, the human factor, of course. The danger of simulation games is that when they abstract all game units out to contain properties that can only be expressed in terms of usefulness to the system, they ignore the moral or human costs / benefits of any given action. When a military unit is obliterated or a building is demolished in a simulation, the player doesn’t think about the grief of the families of the soldiers who have just died, or the father who has just lost his job at the building watching his daughter starve to death because he can no longer pay for food. No, all the player thinks about is “I have one less military unit in that area”, or “My production of steel has gone down by 20 units, but my operating costs have been cut by 50%”. Humanity, to the player of a simulation game, is only useful insofar as it contributes to the player’s plans within the world’s system.
What this leads to is a dehumanization of … well, humans… in the eyes of a heavy simulation player. If this carries over to real life (and from personal observation I can tell you it does), this means that the player of simulation games tends to think only in terms of the system and systemic goals, and how to use people as Human Resources to achieve that goal. Feelings don’t matter, individuality and the inalienable right of every human to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is ignored. What matters is using people to get the job done. People are valued insofar as they make contributions to the goal, not because of their intrinsic worth. Why? Because in 99% of most games, free will and self-determination is not provided for. In fact, it’s counterproductive to the game’s fun – the game doesn’t want its’ characters to be able to get along fine without the player’s help… otherwise, there would be no reason and no use for the player to intervene.
But does that situation sound familiar? Isn’t it the same thing we hear about big corporations or the government, sometimes? That they don’t care about individual people – that we’re just cogs in a machine to them? That the bottom line, or production quotas, or national policies, is all that matters? So I guess a bigger question is… is this a real danger? Or is the reason why nobody is calling it a danger because it is an acceptable social norm? Why doesn’t anyone protest about the depiction of human workers in simulation games, if they’re all so hot and bothered about how video games can influence the young? Is it because they’re “not real”?
But here I think people make a big mistake. They see simulations as more inherently abstract (it’s just numbers and figures, isn’t it?) than a photorealistic graphically-violent first person shooter game, and they call foul on the second. But what they miss out is that realism can be enforced in two ways – photorealism, and behavioral realism. In other words, looking like it’s real and behaving like it’s real. Management simulations may not be as photorealistic (looking like real) as first-person games, but they sure are meant to behave more realistically. And to be honest, it’s the behavioral realism that’s the most effective in the formation of behavioral habits in a player. If you get used to behaving in a certain way every time in a game situation that models a real-life world, you are more likely to behave the same way in real life. Whereas the chances of you meeting up with real-looking zombies/terrorists/aliens/enemy warriors and shooting them are a lot slimmer.
But video game violence and photorealism in games makes for better 5-minute news stories than in-depth research on behavioral studies in simulation games, I guess.
One can argue that first-person shooter games also dehumanise people. After all, don’t we hear reports that many soldiers often have to pretend that they people they are killing are not human, in order to be able to do the job at all? Yes, that’s true. And so, you dehumanise the enemy, pretending that the guy standing in front of you is not someone with a home, a family, loved ones… all so that you can stab him in the chest or shoot his head off. But simulations are worse. At least, with the first-person shooter, most of the people you dehumanise are, in fact, your enemy. But in simulations, the people you are dehumanising are your own side. The subordinates who work for you. You have to ignore they have lives, hopes, dreams and feelings because you need to use them for your purposes instead of theirs. Generals do this all the time, in war games. If you need a position to be won or held, you have to ignore the human cost and send hundreds to millions of young men to die. And these are on your side. You use up your own people to achieve a goal. So, which is worse – a line soldier’s dehumanization of the enemy in front of him in order to kill him, or a backseat general’s dehumanization of his own troops in order to use them? I don’t know which is more dangerous. I do know which is more acceptable in society, though.
All right. To be fair, I have to say that there has been some progress made. Peter Molyneux and Will Wright, and some of the Japanese game designers too, have been increasingly focusing on games which provide models for game character personalities, moral choice, and moral consequences for humane/inhumane actions. However, there really hasn’t been much in commercially-successful simulation games that has really looked at the effects of humanitarian values or moral consequences for the player’s choice. It’s been a longstanding tradition in the role-playing games genre, and recently many first-person shooters are now also starting to include elements of ethics and the re-humanization of game characters, but simulation games haven’t yet come to that stage. But maybe they should.
So the challenge lying before us is this: Can a simulation game be created which portrays the full costs / benefits of any given action, including social and moral consequences as well as economic and systemic consequences, such that the player also learns to consider the humanitarian aspects to his own decisions in real life? And if one is created, will it be any fun to play?
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