My childhood consisted of more SimCity and SimCity 2000 than I care to admit so I was excited when a new SimCity game was announced. That hope has now been entirely dashed:
“We’re talking about a SimCity where the resources are finite,” Bradshaw said, “where you’re going to be struggling with some of the decisions that people are faced with today, where technology and advances can ultimately have global impact.”
To emphasize that point, publisher EA had An Inconvenient Truth director Davis Guggenheim speak at the announcement event. Aside from the scientific and political barriers to slowing and reversing global climate change trends, Guggenheim said, there is also a psychological barrier that leads people to disconnect from awareness of the problem and continue to simply live their life as they did before they knew about it.
So politics is being injected into my beloved series. Is nothing sacred anymore? Can’t I just load up a game and play it without some political bullshit message being force fed down my throat? Isn’t the constant propaganda we’re exposed to through the public school system, television, newspapers, magazines, and the Internet enough? No? Find, fuck you guys then, I won’t both with your shitty little propaganda title.
I wonder how far the global warming message will go? Will I be able to build concentration camps and send Sims there when they refuse to pull the party line? Can I start wars with my neighboring cities under false pretenses to acquire more resources? Is one of the goals of being mayor of you city to incite a workers revolution and overthrow the bourgeoisie and establish Marx’s utopia? If you’re going to shot propaganda in my face you might as well go the full monty and turn it into Collectivist’s SimCity.
Seriously, I just want to build a fucking city and, perhaps, call down Godzilla to smash a portion of it when things start getting a little slow. How can anybody fuck up a formula that is so easy to get right?
It’s funny that a libertarian would like a game about central control of a city, managing all the details, and making the decision from the top. I’m also a libertarian, but absolutely love games like that. I wonder what it is.
Because it’s fun.
Really, that’s all I have. Beyond that video games are fantasy and therefore allow me to act out things that would be fun but I have no interest in doing in real life.
I’m a huge fan of the Command and Conquer tiberium series (for lack of a better term of differentiation) and Kane is easily one of my favorite characters. He’s evil, murderous, and the antithesis of libertarianism but it’s so much fun playing the Brotherhood of Nod because Kane is incredibly entertaining (and their weapons are sweet too).