SimCity Isn’t a Model of Reality. It’s a Libertarian Toy Land (Kelly Clancy, 6/27/24, Wired)
After Bill Clinton won the 1992 US presidential election on the platform of health care reform, a nonprofit foundation commissioned Thinking Tools to design a hospital-management simulator. Released in 1994, SimHealth was played by policymakers and the public alike—including, famously, Clinton’s daughter, Chelsea. Maxis marketed SimHealth as more than mere entertainment: It was a policy tool and could be used to explore and reason about complex systems. Players assumed the role of a newly elected politician campaigning for health care reform. They used their finite political currency to promote policies that aligned with the values on which they based their election promises. They could track their policy changes against their stated values using a compass-like indicator that pitted Liberty against Equality and Community against Efficiency—ideals that are, in reality, by no means opposed.
Unlike SimCity players, SimHealth players could tinker with the underlying model and adjust hundreds of parameters. Yet tweaking the parameters was not the same as tweaking the models themselves, and the game had a clear ideological bias. Much as in SimCity, there wasn’t exactly a win state. But SimHealth’s values were hard to miss. The game trumpeted a somber funeral march whenever the Canadian-style single-payer socialized medicine plan popped up on the screen. As Keith Schlesinger writes in a review for Computer Gaming World, there was one easy way to win: “All you have to do is adopt an extreme libertarian ideology, eliminate all federal health care (including Medicare!), and cut other government services by $100–$300 billion per year.” Unfortunately, this could hardly be called a health policy victory, as it left the virtual citizens entirely without health coverage. Even the private insurance companies went bankrupt in the first few months. The game was a flop, and 30 years later, health care remains an intractable issue plaguing American politics.
Whereas SimRefinery gave players a new perspective on a complex, though defined, process, the US health care industry is so complex that SimHealth only muddied the waters. Paul Starr, who was a health care policy adviser to the Clinton administration, dismissed the game entirely. “SimHealth contains so much misinformation that no one could possibly understand competing proposals and policies, much less evaluate them, on the basis of the program.” He was concerned that people would mistake the game for a legitimate description of reality. He despaired that his daughter, an avid player, accepted the game’s libertarian-leaning strategies because that was “just the way the game works.”
All simulations are ultimately constrained by their creators’ assumptions: They are self-contained universes ticking along to preprogrammed logic. They don’t necessarily reflect anything fundamental about the world as it is, much less how we may want it to be.
The Bible is the story of even The Creator learning this lesson, which bequeaths liberalism.