Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy - Manual (Page 65)

Trigger Happy
67
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.