Trigger Happy
Bandai, with their keyring digital pet, Tamagotchi. Notice, however, that a SimCity or Civilization pet panders to a peculiarly narcissistic instinct in the player: if he or she does well, monuments will be erected and museums named in honor of the masterful deity. It’s a kind of fame.
The second potential pleasure of a God game is a function of the very artificiality of the soi-disant“simulation.” Now, of course, God-game variables are “kludged”—simplified and imprecise—and their reality is laughably clean compared to the infinitely chaotic and messy real world. As J. C. Herz tartly observes in Joystick Nation: “You can build something that looks like Detroit without building in racial tension.” But what they do offer by virtue of their machine habitat, and what makes them slightly different from what they would be otherwise— complex board games—is the modeling of dynamic processes. Time can be sped up or slowed down at will, and interactions of data over time can be readily visualized. In this way, for instance, fiddling with the fiscal and monetary operators of SimCity for a couple of minutes and observing the results for the next accounting period provides a remarkably intuitive way to understand the fundamentals of balancing a budget in a capitalist state.
67
