You ever wonder if our politicians have played games like Civilization IV? Where they have to make the right decisions at the right time, and allocate resources to meet the needs of their population AND progress? (Or even something like Planet Defender?)
I'm thinking that they haven't.
One of the things you've GOT to do in games like that is push research forward. In Planet Defender, for example, you've got to put money into economic growth, robotics (though that one's not of much real utility in most cases), nuclear fusion, 'advanced energy', and the ever-useful 'planetary shield'.
If you do not put money into research on these things, you will lose the game. (Aliens win, everyone dies. Oh, the embarassment.) But after you play a few rounds, and watch your population get killed off, you begin to understand where your priorities should be. Yes, you could build and upgrade lots of bunkers for your population to hide in - but if you don't destroy the ships shooting at the bunkers, you're going to lose the game when your population dies. If you don't boost your economy, you don't have money to research and advance your weaponry. If you don't have enough weapons at the proper time, your population is going to be killed. You have to find a balance, but you have to grow your population so you'll have the money to play the game.
If you look at the global oil situation as a game - we're losing big-time. But that's making the assumption that a 'win' state is where there's enough oil to go around at a price that's affordable, OR enough available so we can bootstrap ourselves up into the next level of energy production. (Figure the levels are roughly defined by how concentrated and useful the power is - you'd start off with wood fires, then eventually build windmills and waterwheels. Coal would be discovered, and with that the Industrial Age begins. Electricity and electric lighting becomes widely available to the population, and about the same time gasoline and the IC engine become popular. Solar power and nuclear energy is then theorized, but sit on a back burner until both techology needed to exploit it and a pressing need for it comes along. Then the hard stuff - cold fusion, antimatter, zero-point energy...)
Each level needs to have exploited the previous one, and have a technological understanding of the science necessesary to advance. For example - it wouldn't have been possible to develop atomic power during WW1 - the technology and scientific knowledge base simply wasn't there, and no amount of money could have created it and gotten it to a point where a nuke could be created prior to 1918. (Or even 1940...) The only reason we developed it at all was for military purposes, and power generation was pretty far down on the list of spinoffs from the effort. For example, Nanosolar wouldn't have been able to develop their ideas without a whole lot of very expensive R&D being done in a whole lot of other fields - but that R&D was VITAL to their efforts.
To put it another way, you need to make the tools to make the tools to make the tools to make the tools... repeat until you have the item you want.
But what if the desired 'win' state by the major players in our little game ISN'T a scenario where there's enough energy for all? If getting a 'win' means gaining autocratic power over a population and deciding who gets how much, as opposed to "there being enough enough for that population, and more besides"?
I'm beginning to wonder, watching the maneuvering in Washington, whether that's what they're trying to grab. I'm not seeing any publicized attempts to SOLVE the problem by government agencies. Instead - what are the proffered solutions?
And what sort of 'win' will it be if those solutions are implemented?
The time we have left to exploit hydrocarbons as an energy source is going to be ending - unless we either ramp up exploration and exploit areas and items that are currently politically off-limits, or do a serious, serious cutback on our usage of the stuff. That's going to blow the economy, which will make developing the alternatives that are becoming visable much, much more difficult - if not impossible.
You have to exploit what you can when you can - or you lose the game. And in this game we're all playing, the stakes are a technological civilization. I don't really think we want to lose - but we won't win by refusing to play the game.
J.
Comments (1)
The AI of CivIII was a bit cranky, and it cheated all the time... you could pop a diplomat in to view a city that was not producing a Wonder and the very next turn: A Wonder Would Appear. Still, after playing normally for a long while, finding it boring, I started doing weird things. Did you know that all cities are ports? That all ports connect, by definition to water? That cities diagonal with corners touching form a water connection? By the time I finished playing Civ III the maps looked like a city infestation where every other square was a city. Literally.
Still the basics are sound at the lower levels, even if the rules are a bit strange when you exploit them... fair is fair, the computer cheats.
Playing Civ or SimCity or any of the major simulations tell you a lot about planning, expenditures, infrastructure... a ton, really. What you don't get, though, is the face-to-face phenomena of multi-player boardgames. Dune is good for that so is Pax Brittanica or the old SPI game Outreach. Facing time pressures, face-to-face needs, interactions across factions (ahhh... Kingmaker!), any game that would provide a multi-player competition with substantial moderation via interaction (outside of the rules) would be a far better experience for what you are going to handle in government and internationally. Actually playing Pax Brittanica is a recognition that there will be a winner in the form of Great Britain, and so that is the worst player who gets that... everyone is then vying for the second slot and trying to also work to keep the British from getting too expansive once the player gets the hang of playing. In no time at all half-way decent players were whipping up mutual defense pacts, trade agreements, strategic CoDominions... just like actually happened in our world. An aggressive game also gets you WWI early, no two ways about it. I have yet to see *any* computer game that can give you that depth, as it must all be pre-programmed into it.
There were and are some very good games, and Civ III was pretty much at the top... its successor was nice, tightened things up a bit and got just a bit too cute for my tastes. Still the strategies didn't change much, save for ethnic inter-rivalries if you weren't a fast mover. So very good was Civ IV. The various Warcraft II, Age of..., and similar games were also a hoot. Nothing beats a horde of Chinese crossbowmen in Age of Empires, I think it was... nasty! And the gatherer AI always sucked like an electrolux... of course it did that for the computer players, so a lone distance attack outpost could quickly stop an enemy's economy.
Ah, my misspent youth.
Posted by ajacksonian | June 25, 2008 5:35 PM
Posted on June 25, 2008 17:35