After finishing The Road to Serfdom, I left my brain ticking over for a few seconds waiting for the start of the period where I take all its lessons to heart (you know, the period right before you begin thinking critically) and become a true Hayekian. (Un)fortunately, as usually happens when I start idling, my mind drifted to classic computer games, specifically Sim City.

Sim City is a simulation of a city-state under the grip of totalitarian socialism. You do not play the hero struggling against the leviathan. You, for evil or for eviler, are the Mayor-God running the whole show.

Your grid of land is entirely under your command. Although nominally part of a larger nation, you are for all practical purposes the head of state, unelected and undeposable save for violent revolution (sure, the game calls it being voted out, but it’s functionally identical to a mob storming city hall and executing you). You are its mind, body and soul. You lay down every road, police station, fire station, school, college, hospital, library, university and museum. You run the railways, the harbours, and the airports. You control the horizontal and the vertical. If somebody wants a service, they must get it from you, and if they want to get out of the system, then tough: they can’t.

Your citizens have granted you the power to run their lives, and you do so with glee. You run amok with your bulldozer, confiscating buildings and demolishing them to make way for the latest centrally planned megaproject. Your eye watches over the city night and day. Your information networks let you plot the very paths citizens take to and from work. The latest version of the game even lets you put your Sims into the city, having used The Sims to oversee their lives from cradle, to walled-up-in-a-burning-toilet grave.

You have a team of advisors - a central planning board, right out of Hayek - who tell you what the citizens want. You ignore them. Your thirst for power extends to emptying the city coffers to tear down a mountain that offends your eye and blocks the path through which your new Residential Zones will expand. Your citizens must live here, and nowhere else. Your power to raise taxes and enact arbitrary laws is absolute.

There is no life in your city. There is no creativity or entrepreneurship. If you leave your city alone, nothing will happen, since the means to all ends lie in you and your smothering bureaucracy.

Thanks to an incomplete economic model, the system doesn’t collapse in on itself. It’s possible to reach a state where everybody is happy (as measured by Official Government Happiness-Meters), and maintain this state indefinitely. The jackboot will stamp on the smiling faces forever. The game handily leaves out some essential tools of a totally planned society: ordinances for restricting undesirable speech, and forced labour camps for dissenters.

This game presses all the right buttons; it’s so easy to see why Planning is attractive. Not enough cash? Build a prison! Citizens dying from air pollution? Build more hospitals! Every solution is clear and inevitable and is the responsibility of the government! The game taps into the planning psychology, right down to the desire to cause earthquakes and alien invasions at will.

Sim City is the game most commonly mentioned amongst teachers as being educational, and for studying complex systems I can’t fault it. But to present it uncritically as an economic simulation is dangerous. Take this summary of Sim City 4:

Major Learning Areas: Dynamics of and strategies for social and economic planning and decision making, or what it like to build and run a city.

Holy Mary mother of Marx!

“Oh you rotter!” you say, “You know kids don’t listen to their teachers anyway!”

Perhaps. But we process media in subtle ways, as the next post hopefully suggests…

(Warning! The following is baseless speculation! Digest with caution!)

One of the great myths of the information age is that media has no impact on the minds of children (or adults). It’s a reaction against the equally mythical claims that “Doom turned my kids into Satanists!” No kid likes to be told his hobby is warping his mind, because he knows deep down that it isn’t. Or is it? Or IS it? etc.

No game is going to make a healthy mind crack and go on a shooting spree, but it’s disingenuous to think that our inputs have no effect on us. The mind is as Hofstadter’s Who shoves whom around in the careenium? essay suggests: complex, chaotic, and full of pattern. New inputs come along and disrupt the pattern. Some inputs are shrugged off as irrelevant, some are absorbed and contribute to a radical change of the pattern. Who has never laughed at a film, tapped to a tune, or experienced the cringing horror of hearing that they’re going to make Police Academy 8? Inputs matter, and violent games and films are just another input.

Anyone familiar with the theory of memes is better equipped to deal with incoming memes, but it’s inexcusable hubris to think yourself such the master that your memetic firewall can inspect all memes objectively; every metric nanoshannon of information invading your sensorium is a meme insofar as it’s an input to your brain.

It also appears that throughout life, the brain swings from being totally write-only (up to the age of about 6 months) to being totally read-only (beyond 80). This could simply be that a new input to an octogenarian is a smaller percentage change than the same input to a toddler.

What to do?

Given that all inputs change us, will it ever be safe to go outside again? I say: no, but safety is overrated. Change happens; live with it. You will not be the same person in 5 years or 5 minutes time, but that’s no reason to hold a funeral for You2004. The change is continuous and unavoidable, although meme theory potentially lets us contrive to avoid some dangerous memes. In fact as always, evolution has already figured this one out. People don’t need to understand memetics to know what they don’t like.

The Evangelical memeplex, for example, actively discourages enlightening activities such as questioning, reading, and arguing, because it knows that it can’t stand up to the Rationality memeplex. What’s the payoff for the believer? Security. Fear of new ideas taps into the primal fear of death, because changing as a person really is like dying. Youths everywhere would “rather be dead than sell out to the Man”, and in fact, the youth speaking those words will in a sense be dead by the time he’s a filthy capitalist like everyone else.

So should I play Doom 3? Of course. Will it make me a different person? Of course. I can temper this change with what powers of introspection I have, but I can’t avoid it completely, and neither can you or your children. Don’t shield yourself from culture, but don’t think a liberal viewing schedule won’t affect your kids in some way.

If it makes you feel better, think of yourself as 4-dimensional with interesting variation along your time axis, instead of 3-dimensional, perpetually dying, scared and alone.