Trigger Happy
Heaven in here
Oh yes, the computer can make us divine. Should you want to build a city from scratch, construct a substructure of water pipes, sewers, power lines and underground trains, populate it with citizens, determine tax levels, build museums, parks, houses and office blocks, and then destroy the whole imaginary metropolis by calling an earthquake on their heads— sure, you can do that. It’s called SimCity. Or perhaps you want to operate on a larger scale: create a neolithic tribe and over the course of thousands of years send them out to colonize the land, discover ironwork, sailing and electricity. Play Civilization. Compete against other gods in a polytheistic mythology? Populous. There are similar “God games” for the fields of global industry, railroad building and even amusement parks.
There are two basic attractions of games like SimCity. The first is that the virtual city itself, with its apparently autonomous population, functions as a pet. If neglected, it will pine and eventually die; if nurtured, it will flourish. A player might form some sort of emotional attachment to the gameworld. This is the principle abstracted and miniaturized with such extraordinary success by the Japanese company
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