Greg A. Brown

Originally published 04/09/07 in the Kansas State Collegian

A single click, and several thousand people suddenly were evicted. Their homes were turned to rubble, eyesores upon the residential zones surrounding them.

A roadway soon took their places, carrying streams of cars between work and home. Buffered on either side by parks, it allowed tens of thousands to populate previously unused tracts of land.

Though this was just a game - SimCity, to be exact - I still felt kind of guilty afterward. Who is to say I wouldn’t do the same if given the chance in real life?

Luckily for my conscience, that’s likely to remain a mere possibility. Most city planning is done in a collaborative atmosphere, muddled by enough outside factors to make it nearly impossible to single-handedly pull off.

Robert Moses, the once shadow-ruler of New York City, did so in the middle of the 20th century, and his uncanny accumulation of power to that end was captured in the appropriately titled epic biography, “The Power Broker.”

But we have learned since those times, and Jane Jacobs-inspired, pedestrian-friendly, community-revitalization groups swarm any attempts to dictatorially wield influence.

It is not just city planning that has become more democratic; nearly all recent large-scale projects have been contingent upon the will of the masses.

As public awareness and concern rise about issues like climate change, so does the effort demanded by those voters. And that is before the special interest groups get involved, lobbying politicians with contributions and favors.

The Freedom Tower was envisioned as a triumphant response to Sept. 11, as vague as that sounds. And the planning committee only made things worse, turning what could have been a really cool building into anything but.

Games like SimCity and The Sims take a collaborative process and compress it into one you control.

After all, who would want to play a game like “Congress Five: Lobby Harder?”

But though the special interests always will pull the process in dozens of different directions, there is still reason to hope the voters won’t.

In most cases, we have intuitions that guide us in deciding the best solution. Called heuristics, or “common sense,” these are generally shared and coalesce public opinion into a handful of options.

A lot of contentious subjects like eminent domain or climate change don’t have any common intuitions.

But in a suspiciously convenient turn of events, the same games that delude us about the process could, in turn, partially alleviate it.

Games provide us a way to test solutions and form intuitions regarding processes most of us don’t have much contact with.

In the case of my opening example, most people do not have the attention span to continuously follow the construction of a new roadway through planning, construction and maintenance phases.

Will Wright designed both SimCity and The Sims and now serves as the Serious Gaming Guru for much of the industry. Raised on these games, a new wave of game designers are creating games and toys to simulate a bunch of things, including entire galaxies in the upcoming Spore.

Eventually, we might see games seriously accepted into the curriculum as an education tool.

In the meantime, it makes a good response to, “Johnny, stop playing those video games and do your homework!”