Simulated Cities

SIMULATED CTTÏES/Jeffrey Hammond THE FANCYAPARTMENTbuUding near the shore, a gleaming white tower withblackbalconies, suddenly transforms Ulto a pinched gray hulk scarred with graffiti. Single-famUy homes nearby start doing the same, their green lawns flickering Ulto dusty lots. I glance at what was, a few moments ago, a water tower, but in its place stands a pUe ofbrown rubble. This calls for fast action. I ctick on the utilities button and the demotition button, and my cursor changes into a tiny bulldozer that I aim at the rubble. Ctick: blam! I race back to utilities, ctick on "water structures" and choose "water tower." I swing back to the site, ctick and watch as a new water tower appears. I ctick on the underground view, verify that the new tower is hooked up to the water system; the parched areas of lightbrown gradually turn blue. When I return to the surface, the neighborhood is already starting to rebuild. To my relief I see that a new apartment building, this one in red brick with bay windows, has just popped Ulto sight. This is great fun, though not without the unease that comes from doing something that goes against the gram. For nearly twenty years, ever since buying a boxy Kaypro Tv* for my writing, I have steadfastly regarded computers as working tools, dismissing the gaming world as the proper turf of Gen-X slackers—no place, certainly, for an adult with work to do. It was only last year that I finally got a machine with a sound card and CD-ROM, mostly because it has become nearly impossible to find one without these things. The mania for multimedia has always puzzled me. Haven't we always had natural multimedia, our eyes and ears ready to gratify us plenty at the appropriate time—that is, when the computer is off and we're not working? The animated city on my screen is proof that our deepest desires run counter to our deliberate choices. It's not the rehearsed speech that reveals the soul but the Freudian slip. Not the firm handshake but the quavering voice and averted eyes. My superego might be gratified whenever Tm clattering away Ui WordPerfect, but my sullen, persistent id seems most at ease when no one is looking and a simulated city fills my screen. My Freudian cyberslip is SimCity 3000, and it is hardly a new vice. Despite my long-standing insistence that computer fun be rigorously subordinated to computer work, this weakness dates back to the Pleistocene days of SimCity Classic. Sound card or no sound 34 · The Missouri Review card, SimCity has always been one computer game—the only computer game—that has seemed to me worth playing. Now I mark out a residential zone Ui green and watch, mesmerized, as tiny houses and yards pop Ulto view. I can do this for hours, suspending my precious work Ui favor of the deep, hypnotic timelessness of barely conscious play. What horrible truth ties beneath so blatant a betrayal of deliberate selfimage and best intentions? If ancientAthens had developed multimedia computers, Socrates might have insisted—to everyone's irritation—that the unexamined game is not worth playing. It's probably true that all games should be examined, and closely. Psychologists and anthropologists teU us that play offers a teUing key to our deepest natures, and who am I to argue? As I ctick a marma Ulto place, it occurs to me that something must be going on here. A middle-aged man's addiction to SimCity is not, at first glance, terribly reassuring. Megalomania is a distinctly possible cause if you find yourself hooked on watching tiny people make their way through a city that is under your complete and exclusive control. Given that these tiny people depend on their "mayor"—on you—for their very existence, SimCity might seem an ideal pastime for a frustrated control freak, a small person playing a very big God. Indeed, the box copy for the latest version calls the game "The Ultimate Power Trip." The documentation breezily invokes the underbeUy of gamesmanship when it urges the user to "get creative and unlock that shady Machiavellian...