”By the seventh day God completed His work which He had done, and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had done.” -- New American Standard Bible (1995)

The passage above directly reflects our own assessment of the simulation game SIM City because it perfectly assimilates a utopian society ruled by a supposed infallible being.

Since the game provides a unique perspective of (what could be) life on earth, it imbues its players a certain degree of power over everything that is worth dominating. It almost seems surreal to think of a place like that actually existing, yet movies and depictions were actually made just to show an alternative way living could be possible.

For instance, in order to achieve a perfect society, Father, from the movie Matrix created a utopia, where no crime is ever possible. Each individual is a mere shell of a human being who is laid in a water-filled cocoon to provide consciousness to the walking shell. But as soon as man began questioning his existence in a nonetheless made-up world, he breaks free of the “cable” that connects him to the overall consciousness of the matrix.

Meanwhile, Adam Smith’s famous invisible hand could very well be played out in SimCity. The invisible hand as a metaphor tried to show that, in a free market, an individual pursuing his own self-interest tends to also promote the good of his community as a whole. He argued that each individual maximizes the total revenue of society as a whole because as this is identical with the sum total of individual revenues (Wessels, 2004).

The game, in this case, accorded us the power to control everything that needed controlling. In other words, we were gods or invisible hands playing with a vast multitude of puppets in a rather utopian environment. Here, one is free to be as obsessive compulsive as he can to maintain the perfect alignment and order of things.

But is this relevant in today’s market-driven society?

In a sense, it is. “The objective of SimCity, as the creator intended it to be, is to build and design a city, without specific goals to achieve. The player can mark land as being zoned as commercial, industrial, or residential, add buildings, change the tax rate, build a power grid, and build transportation systems and many other actions, in order to enhance the city.
Also, the player may face disasters including: flooding, tornadoes, fires, earthquakes, and attacks by monsters. In addition, monsters and tornados can trigger train crashes by running into passing trains. Later disasters in the game's sequels included lightning strikes, volcanoes, meteors, and attack by extraterrestrial craft.” (WIkipedia.com)

However, the most important question is, is this sustainable?

If we look at the stories of the Bible, God created a new world after a 40-day flood because he became disillusioned of man when the latter neglected his moral obligations. This new world turns out to be the world we live in now. In a deeper sense, not everything goes according to plan, because as the game and bible passage implied, externalities may or may not cause disasters and thus would destroy the perfect harmony of the utopia we initially envisioned. Our perfect plans for a utopia would have gone down the drain.

In our case, to be more realistic, our own demise is caused by our own enterprising and proprietary actions, which of course is a facet of the invisible hand theory. If only we could look at our situation from a bird’s eye view then most likely we would achieve the same objective the author of SimCity set out to achieve in the first place.

Metro Manila’s problems can only be alleviated if the city is allowed a make-over. Our problems are deeply rooted in our colonial past. Applying the principles of SIM City would be futile because solutions provided in the present can only mask or provide a band-aid solution.

An optimistic view, on the other hand, would consider a relocation of the city into a master plan like that of Los Angeles.

Finally, as a metaphor of life, Sim City as any other simulation game, loses its appeal after several hours of being played. And if we relate this with the chaos and the alleged demise I proposed earlier to the passage I included here about God’s resting, could it be that once bored, the invisible hand ceases to maintain the status quo of the market? Such a metaphor deserves attention if we wish to perfect our current state in a utopia ruled by a proverbial hand.*


Reference:

Wessels, W. (2004). Economics. Barron’s Publishing House. USA, 2004.