SimCity and the Low Carbon Economy

No, I did not pay Electronic Arts for the use of this image, which I found in the public domain, but neither have they paid me for the promotion of their product, so I think we're even.

This past holiday season, I dug even deeper into the Christmas gift dilemma. You know the one: "what-do-I-get-for-people-who-already-have-everything-they-need-and-anything-they-want-they-can-afford-to-buy-themselves (or-I-can't-afford-to-buy-it-for-them)?"

I used to give people Oxfam goats, and Daily Bread Food Bank donations.

This year, even more heavily influenced than normal by the grim outlook of climate change, and given a heads up by my cousin in Qualicum Beach, I gave everyone on my list laundry detergent for Christmas.

No word of a lie, this was the Best. Gift. Ever. So popular, in fact, that I gave out more boxes at the office than I had originally planned, leaving me short for the rest of my list. If through this regrettable and inadvertent excess, I failed to send any of my subscribers a gift, look it up on line. You'll find that it's inexpensive and can be ordered through the mail.

So what's with the SimCity thing?

Subscribers may recall that I lost a fair chunk of my fleeting and finite lifetime to Tapped Out, the Simpson-based app that combines game concepts - including a simulated city - into a monster of a time gobbler. After a couple of months of obsessive fussing - and considerable expenditure of real money - I came to realize that I was living the "it's life-ruiningly fun!" tag line, and deleted the game from my iPad.

But that was a while ago, and I fell into a forgetful state. I lost my sense of the evils of life simulation games. 

SimCity is the mother of all God games, and, just before Christmas, I fell for it. I loaded the no-cost app onto my iPad.

In many respects, SimCity is vastly superior to Tapped Out. In Tapped Out, you just have to hang around long enough to make fake money so you can buy stupid things like the Popsicle Stick SkyScraper. In SimCity, you have to wait around to make money to buy stuff, but there are consequences to your actions and things can go horribly wrong. There are fake-life city-planning decisions and fake-life costs for parks, policing, fire fighting, education and so on.

The truly evil innovation in this game is the international trade function. The game gives you factories to make goods such as metal and plastics. You can use these to make other goods, such as nails and furniture. You need these items to continue to grow your city, but, because of the cost of the police and firemen and other city necessities, you can't grow at a pace sufficient to use up all the stuff you make. So what do you do?

You trade your surplus goods with the thousands, no millions, of people playing SimCity on their devices at the same time as you. It is mind-boggling, plus addictive. 

And then there is the found poem in the names people give their cities.

Wabbyville 
Baky 
Ist World City 
Colina 
Rising Sun Valley 
Limoges 
Raub 
Bokcoch
Boss'Erb City 
Nicol's City 
kuktown 
Pisquenopolis 
WauWau Village 
Colitown
Riv City
g-town
Tortue
Karlandia
Camaqua
Rak Kishok
Clintonville 
jeppland
Mongagua
gta 5 opine 18
Zombieland

(These are the real monikers of everyone selling something right now as I type, and whose name is in an alphabet I recognize.)

Even more mind-boggling than the simulated economy of SimCity is the real money going into the game. It is possible to play the game without spending actual cash but about one in a million humans is wired that way. 

The rest of us will spend some real money to buy SimMoney, so we don't have to wait the hours it takes to build something, or the hours it takes for the cargo ship to arrive or the hundred attempts on the global trading market it takes to get that one thing - a tape measure, say - to finish building a new house.

So think about that. Let's say, conservatively, that one million people play SimCity. Let's say, conservatively, that five per cent of them spend twenty dollars a week on SimMoney. That's math you can do in your head. A million bucks a week.

Even if these conservative estimates are off by an order of magnitude, that's still $5.2 million a year.

Used to be, in order to make that kind of money, you had to throw a couple of hundred thousand tonnes of carbon into the air.

There's a thought for a happy new year.

Thanks for reading!

Karen