Seductions of Sim: Policy as a Simulation

["Jon A. Lambert" <jlsysinc#ix,netcom.com>]

Here's an article I found very interesting...  I thought I'd share.

YMMV

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--J. Lambert

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    Copyright 1994 by New Prospect, Inc. Readers may redistribute this article 
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    The American Prospect, P.O. Box 383080, Cambridge, MA 02238, or by phone at 
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    Preferred Citation: Paul Starr, "Seductions of Sim: Policy as a Simulation 
    Game," The American Prospect no. 17 (Spring 1994): 19-29 
    (http://epn.org/prospect/17/17star.html). 

    
    Seductions of Sim
    Policy as a Simulation Game
    Paul Starr 
    Standing around the computer, my two older daughters, nine and eleven years 
    old, scan the picture of the city we're creating and debate whether it needs 
    more commercial or residential development. My six-year-old son suggests we 
    look at the city budget. In just a few weeks he has learned enough to ask 
    the critical question: "What's the cash flow?"
    This is SimCity, one of a series of computer simulations that turn public 
    policy and ideas into popular entertainment. With the advent of dramatically 
    improved graphics and powerful, low-cost multimedia computers, a new 
    generation of "edutainment" software has finally begun to fulfill the 
    long-touted promise of computers in education. Most of the new programs use 
    interactive multimedia to make games out of traditional subjects such as 
    arithmetic or geography. In MathBlasters, for example, children solve math 
    problems in order to fuel up a rocket and find a villain in outer space. 
    However, the Sim series, produced by California-based Maxis, goes a step 
    further: it makes games out of simulations of complex natural and social 
    systems, based on advanced and sometimes controversial areas of science and 
    decision making, such as climatology and environmental science, genetics, 
    and sociobiology. Those who think designing cities is prosaic can move on to 
    simulating the development of planetary ecosystems (SimEarth) or the 
    evolution of new life forms (SimLife). Other programs make games out of the 
    management of railroads (A-Train), and farms (SimFarm), and even national 
    health policy (SimHealth). These are unlikely ever to challenge Nintendo's 
    SuperMario World in sales. Still, it isn't only policy wonks who are buying 
    the games for themselves and their kids. SimCity has sold two million copies 
    since its release in 1989 and has probably introduced more people to urban 
    planning than any book ever has.
    When my family first began playing SimCity and others like it not long ago, 
    my initial reaction was a mixture of excitement and skepticism. The new 
    simulations are certainly a lot more fun than most textbooks. Rather than 
    present information, they provide tools for inventing worlds, exploring 
    hypotheses, and stretching imaginations. Several have a public viewpoint. In 
    SimCity--unlike Monopoly--the player builds a community. One of the 
    "scenarios" in the latest version of SimCity puts the player in Flint, 
    Michigan in 1974 with the task of rebuilding the local job base and 
    community. In SimEarth and SimLife, the object is to create sustainable 
    environments and avoid extinctions. 
    But I worried whether the games might not be too seductive. What assumptions 
    were buried in the underlying models? What was their "hidden curriculum"? 
    Did a conservative or a liberal determine the response to changes in tax 
    rates in SimCity? While playing SimCity with my eleven-year-old daughter, I 
    railed against what I thought was a built-in bias of the program against 
    mixed-use development. "It's just the way the game works," she said a bit 
    impatiently. 
    My daughter's words seemed oddly familiar. A few months earlier someone had 
    said virtually the same thing to me, but where? It suddenly flashed back: 
    the earlier conversation had taken place while I was working at the White 
    House on the development of the Clinton health plan. We were discussing the 
    simulation model likely to be used by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) 
    to "score" proposals for health care reform. When I criticized one 
    assumption, a colleague said to me, "Don't waste your breath," warning that 
    it was hopeless to get CBO to change. Policy would have to adjust. 
    There are, of course, important differences between computer simulation 
    games and the simulations used to assess policy options. The games are 
    designed to be entertaining; fidelity to empirical reality is not foremost. 
    But simplification is inherent in any simulation. Even "real" simulations 
    (if that is not an oxymoron) inevitably rely on imperfect models and 
    simplifying assumptions that the media, the public, and even policy makers 
    themselves generally don't understand. Both types of simulation are examples 
    of what might be called a crossover intellectual technology, one that has 
    only recently moved from academic and technical fields into popular and 
    public use. The crossover of simulation holds out the promise of an enriched 
    understanding of the world, particularly of complex systems. But there is a 
    danger too: forgetting that simulations depend on the models on which they 
    are built.
    The danger is particularly worrisome when simulations are used to make 
    predictions and evaluate policies. And when policymakers depend on 
    simulations to guide present choices--especially when legislators put 
    government on "automatic pilot," binding policy to numerical indicators of 
    projected trends-- they cede power to those who define the models that 
    generate the forecasts. This is happening in America today, most notably 
    with the rise of the CBO as a power center in national policy. In a sense, 
    Washington is already Sim city. 
    Original Sim 
    Although it has taken three decades for them to come of age, simulation 
    games-- and SimCity in particular--are really children of the '60s. Indeed, 
    their development follows a classic pattern of our time. In their infancy, 
    simulations and related advances in computer technology were nurtured by 
    government grants for both military and domestic policy purposes. In their 
    maturity, they are being turned by private initiative and investment into a 
    phenomenon of popular culture. 
    To be sure, the genealogy of simulation can be traced back to a varied 
    history preceding the 1960s. At least since their use by the Prussian army 
    in the eighteenth century, simulations of combat have been a staple of 
    military training. War games were, so to speak, the cradle of simulation. By 
    the post-World War II era, engineers and corporate managers were using 
    simulations to design and run power grids, telecommunications networks, 
    factories, and businesses. Business simulations, which began primarily as 
    training exercises, evolved into a routine management tool. And as 
    researchers gained access to computers in the 1950s and '60s, simulations 
    came into wide use for scientific purposes to understand complex systems 
    such as climates, economies, ecosystems, and international relations.
    As these examples suggest, simulations referred to at least two types of 
    activity. One kind of simulation created a role-playing game and engaged 
    participants in working out a scenario under prescribed conditions and 
    rules. The other kind projected the behavior of a complex system on the 
    basis of a quantitative model. The new computer simulations create games 
    based on models of complex systems and, in that sense, they combine the two. 
    
    The forerunners of these games were developed in the 1960s. "Social 
    simulation" took off during the '60s in several independent forms. At Johns 
    Hopkins, the sociologist James S. Coleman and his colleagues worked on 
    simulations as a means of both advancing social theory and improving 
    education, particularly for minority youth. Role-playing simulations and 
    games, they argued, would enliven the teaching of subjects as diverse as 
    mathematics and social studies. One of the games, called Ghetto, sought to 
    expose the logic of inner-city life. The hope was that as a tool of 
    research, simulations and games would enable the theorist to define and 
    grasp the underlying rules of social systems. (Economics, of all the social 
    sciences, has most used games this way.) As a tool of school reform, 
    simulations would provide a more accessible, participatory method of 
    education for children who did not respond well to traditional instruction. 
    John Dewey's educational ideals would finally be realized--or at least 
    simulated. 
    Advanced training programs and consensus-building for professionals and 
    decision makers also made increasing use of role-playing simulation games, 
    sometimes involving large groups working under a trained facilitator. Some 
    of the earliest games simulated urban conflicts over resource allocation. In 
    1964, one of the founders of the field, Richard Duke, designed a game called 
    Metropolis for the city council in Lansing, Michigan. The game used 
    role-playing to work through policy decisions and employed computers to 
    track the effects, as the group went through one cycle of decision making 
    after another. By the mid-1970s, a later version of the game, Metro-Apex, 
    gave computer simulation a central role. 
    During the 1950s and 1960s, a variety of planners and social scientists 
    concerned with urban problems had been developing large-scale computer 
    models of cities to simulate and predict their development under varying 
    policies. These models were first designed primarily for transportation and 
    land-use planning. The federal highway program provided a major impetus. 
    Modeling burgeoned in both academic and professional city-planning 
    departments and displaced older traditions that conceived of planning as 
    "architecture writ large." 
    Large-scale urban simulation models first caught the public eye through the 
    work of an outsider to the field. In 1969, Jay W. Forrester, an electrical 
    engineering professor at MIT with no background in urban research, published 
    Urban Dynamics, a book purporting to disprove common intuitions about urban 
    policy. Forrester's next work, World Dynamics, proposed a model for the 
    entire planet. A group based at MIT and led by his prot‚g‚s prepared the 
    1972 report The Limits to Growth sponsored by the Club of Rome, which 
    claimed to show that the world was reaching the end of its ecological 
    tether. 
    Because of their dramatic conclusions, Forrester and the Club of Rome report 
    captured the public imagination, but the reception accorded their work by 
    researchers and professionals was much cooler. Forrester's urban model was 
    not based on empirical evidence and had no spatial dimension. According to 
    Britton Harris, a leading exponent of modeling and emeritus professor of 
    planning, transportation, and public policy at the University of 
    Pennsylvania, Forrester's model had little influence on urban planning. The 
    Club of Rome report did incorporate data and had real influence, though it 
    too had no spatial dimension. From the vantage of the Club of Rome, the 
    world consisted only of aggregates and averages. While undoubtedly 
    contributing to public awareness of global environmental problems (and 
    better subsequent research), the report itself has not withstood the passage 
    of time. For example, nearly all the resources that it predicted would be in 
    short supply at escalating prices in the 1990s now have larger known 
    reserves and are available at lower prices than they were in 1972. 
    Professional disillusionment with large-scale models was already setting in 
    at the time of the Club of Rome report. In 1973, a leading journal in urban 
    planning published a "requiem" for large-scale models. The emerging 
    consensus was that the models had overreached; both the theory underlying 
    the models and the available data were inadequate to make the kind of 
    predictions the modelers were attempting. The modelers' "loss of faith," as 
    one of the leading urban modelers, William Alonso, calls it, became part of 
    a broader collapse of confidence in planning in the 1970s and 1980s. In the 
    same era, efforts to apply simulation and games to the education of minority 
    youth were also proving a disappointment. Critics questioned whether the 
    educational payoff was worth the effort. 
    But while social simulation flagged, work on simulation models and games did 
    not actually disappear. Rather, it retreated into more specialized circles. 
    Role-playing simulations have become a standard technique for professional 
    training and conflict resolution. During the next two decades, the 
    development of computers, software, and data resources transformed both the 
    scientific and popular potential of computer simulation. By the late 1980s, 
    there was talk of a "renaissance" of large-scale models in urban planning, 
    even though many in the field are still as wary as ever about the models' 
    predictive powers. 
    The spread of desktop computers and advance of visualization techniques have 
    been particularly important for the revival and popular crossover of 
    simulation. Early computer simulations and games required access to 
    mainframe computers and skills that were, to most people, esoteric. Improved 
    graphics made simulations and games not only more accessible and absorbing, 
    but also more "playable." 
    Much of the research behind advances in computer graphics was originally 
    sponsored by the Department of Defense and space programs and grew out of 
    work on flight simulation, which in the 1960s and '70s was centered at the 
    University of Utah. The defense and space programs had a similar catalytic 
    role in the development of the Internet. Virtual reality has followed the 
    same route. 
    Improved graphics hit the home market with the growth of video games and the 
    advent of the Macintosh. Even flight simulation has crossed over to become 
    home entertainment.
    It was while working on a video game for bombing islands that Will Wright, a 
    Macintosh programmer, came up with the idea for SimCity. Wright told me 
    recently that while designing a "terrain editor" to create the landscape, he 
    discovered that he had "more fun building the islands than bombing them." 
    Wright had never studied urban planning--his background was in robotics and 
    computer games--but on his own he found his way to the planning literature, 
    including Forrester and Jane Jacobs. The subject became interesting to him 
    only after he began simulating urban development. (Many people who have 
    since played SimCity have probably had the same experience.) Drawing on 
    research begun decades earlier, Wright fashioned the models of land use, 
    traffic, power systems, and other aspects of urban development that underlie 
    SimCity. He says he conceived of SimCity not as a game but rather as a "toy" 
    because at least in its standard use there is no preset goal or contest. The 
    player decides what kind of city to build--whether to emphasize its size, 
    wealth, beauty, or harmony with the environment. In 1987, unable to find a 
    software publisher who thought there was a market for such a toy, Wright 
    joined with a businessman, Jeff Braun, to start Maxis and develop SimCity. 
    The company now has more than 20 titles on the market and has spun off a 
    separate firm to create business and public policy applications. 
    Inside SimCity
    The seductive power of computer simulation games lies partly in their 
    extraordinary variety and intricacy. Generating complex variation is one 
    thing that computers do especially well. But interest in such games was 
    limited as long as the "user interface" was text. Adding stereo sound and 
    three-dimensional graphics enables people to handle greater complexity at a 
    faster pace. This is what makes multimedia simulation such a powerful 
    communication medium. SimCity shows why. 
    Like several other programs in the Sim series, SimCity offers a choice 
    between two types of play: building a system from scratch or solving the 
    problems in a specific scenario. (All references here are to SimCity 2000, 
    the more elaborate, three-dimensional version of the game released in 1993.) 
    The player who builds a city de novo receives a starting fund and a randomly 
    generated, five-square-mile terrain whose features can be chosen and 
    modified at no cost prior to the start of play. For example, the player can 
    decide whether to locate the city on a coast or river and how much area will 
    be covered by water, hills, and forests. The terrain will be different every 
    time. Once play begins, the development of the city is open-ended, with no 
    fixed objectives or time limits, except as the player defines them. In 
    contrast, in the second type of play, the player loads a scenario with a 
    given map and limited time to accomplish a specific task, such as 
    revitalizing Flint, rebuilding Charleston, South Carolina after a hurricane, 
    or turning "Dullsville, U.S.A.," into an exciting community.
    As mayor of SimCity, the player has extraordinary powers; there is no city 
    council, state government, or public employee union to worry about. (Weep, 
    Rudolph Giuliani, weep.) The mayor can set local tax rates and locate and 
    build various community facilities and services, such as power plants, water 
    systems, roads, highways, rails, airports, police and fire stations, 
    schools, and hospitals. The mayor can also control annual spending on city 
    services, adopt ordinances on matters ranging from pollution control to the 
    promotion of tourism, and zone areas for industrial, commercial, or 
    residential use. 
    SimCity operates on a "field of dreams" principle. If as mayor the player 
    creates the right environment, the Sims--the imaginary inhabitants of the 
    city--will come and build factories, shops, and homes. When they do, 
    buildings and factories pop up on the land and change as the city develops. 
    But if things turn sour--if unemployment rises or high crime rates in a 
    neighborhood drive people away--the icons on the screen change or go dark to 
    indicate population losses or building abandonment. All this takes place in 
    vaguely historical time (the player can set the starting data at 1900, 1950, 
    2000, or 2050), which primarily affects the available technology and rate of 
    energy consumption. 
    To help make decisions about zoning, taxes, expenditures, bond issues, and 
    other policies, the program provides a wealth of constantly changing data in 
    maps and graphs showing the city's population growth and density, demand for 
    residential, commercial, and industrial land, unemployment, power and water 
    supply, crime, traffic congestion, pollution, and various other aspects of 
    the city's development. The same sources report changes in interest rates 
    and the growth of the national economy and neighboring cities. Newspapers 
    periodically deliver reports of local sentiment, including the latest public 
    opinion polls and inane, jumbled stories about local and made-up 
    international events. A hallmark of the Sim games is a light touch. (My 
    favorite example: In SimAnt, which translates the sociobiology of ant 
    behavior into game form, one ant curses a group from another colony, "Your 
    queen mates with termites.") 
    The key to SimCity is the interaction of private land values with the public 
    budget. As the player constructs a city, the value of property zoned for 
    development is continually changing. These changing values are critical, for 
    they affect property tax receipts and determine--as my six-year-old quickly 
    discovered--whether the cash flow in the city budget is positive or negative 
    and therefore whether the player has to raise taxes, cut spending on city 
    services, and skimp on public investments. 
    Will Wright aptly refers to the basic conceptual framework of SimCity as a 
    "capitalistic land value ecology" and argues that it fits the development of 
    American cities in the twentieth century but would not account for the 
    development, for example, of St. Petersburg. In fact, SimCity is somewhat 
    more constraining; the game seems to require a particular type of American 
    city built on an industrial base. 
    The model in SimCity, as Wright describes it, consists of a series of 
    "concentric rings." At the core is a so-called "basic/nonbasic" or 
    "export/import" model, borrowed from the traditional urban development 
    literature, that describes the evolving relationship of the industrial, 
    commercial, and residential sectors. SimCity assumes that while 70 percent 
    of industrial production is exported outside of a city, 70 percent of 
    commercial production is consumed internally. Thus in the early stages of a 
    city's development, while its internal market is small, the industrial 
    sector must predominate. As the city and its internal market grow, commerce 
    begins to expand, ultimately overtaking industry as the main source of 
    employment. The demand for residential space depends on the growth of other 
    sectors. If jobs outnumber potential participants in the labor force, people 
    will move to the city and demand for residential development will increase. 
    If the local economy is doing badly and there are fewer jobs than workers, 
    unemployment will rise and people will leave the city.
    According to Wright, SimCity uses a "bid rent" model to determine land 
    valuations. Property carries different values depending on its use; for 
    example, proximity to the urban center is valued most for commercial and 
    residential purposes and least for industry. The actual numbers used in 
    SimCity for land values, city investments, and other items bear no relation 
    to the real world. However, the overall valuation of SimCity and thus its 
    tax base will depend on how the player distributes and locates different 
    zones and allocates resources among roads, schools, and other public 
    services.
    Wright says SimCity is built "from the inside out." In the outer rings are 
    models for traffic, energy, water, and other systems, which react back upon 
    and modify the land-use model at the core. The hardest problem, according to 
    Wright, is not what to put in but what to leave out. He is disarming about 
    the game's limits. Inevitably, SimCity is a "caricature" of reality. The 
    models deliberately exaggerate effects to provide feedback to the player; in 
    real life, the effects of many decisions would be imperceptible. The purpose 
    of SimCity is not accuracy or prediction but communication. "Unless it's 
    entertaining, the educational value is irrelevant." Asked how he handles 
    controversial choices, like the effects of tax rates on development, Wright 
    dodges the question and says, "We go for game play"--whatever is most fun. 
    Still, when players make decisions in SimCity, the game generates effects on 
    employment, crime, population growth, tax revenues. I would be more worried 
    about too easy an acceptance of the validity of those effects if SimCity 
    worked with real data. Games of that kind may well be on the market not long 
    from now, enabling players to download real maps and data into a game with a 
    visual interface like SimCity. But, as now designed, SimCity is clearly a 
    fictional world and the effects seem only as real as points scored in a 
    video game. This is even true of the Flint scenario because of the patently 
    fictional quality of all the numbers used in the game. 
    SimCity's players learn not from any particular aspect of the model but from 
    the process of being forced to make choices and face the consequences. Most 
    immediately, they confront choices of spatial design in distributing land 
    among potential uses and locating community resources like schools and 
    NIMBY's like power plants. These choices have a temporal as well as spatial 
    dimension. Players who overinvest too early in costly capital projects like 
    an airport or stadium will quickly find themselves in fiscal trouble. 
    The important payoff comes from struggling to master complexity. Wright 
    observes, "Playing the game is the process of discovering how the model 
    works." Of course, few players will be able to give any formal expression to 
    the model. But much of it is implicit in the manual that comes with the 
    game, and many players will be able to figure out critical relationships 
    from the signals that the game provides. To keep up with a city's changing 
    size and demands, the game requires constant monitoring of the city's power, 
    water, transportation, budget, and other systems.
    If there is a "hidden curriculum" in SimCity and other Sim games, it lies 
    here. Shoshana Zuboff's 1988 book In the Age of the Smart Machine describes 
    the confusion and alienation of workers in factories and offices as 
    computers were first introduced over the previous decade. Physical contact 
    with the production process had been an important source of practical 
    knowledge; for example, workers at pulp mills that Zuboff studied had been 
    able to tell whether anything was wrong merely from the color and odor of 
    the pulp. Now the workers were asked to make decisions based on information 
    flashing on a computer screen. This shift deemphasized sensory knowledge and 
    put a premium on more abstract, "intellective" capacities. This is exactly 
    what SimCity teaches: the management of complex systems based on 
    "intelligent scanning" of streams of constantly changing information. 
    As SimCity has evolved, it has incorporated increasing levels of complexity. 
    For example, in the original SimCity, the fiscal options were limited. There 
    was one tax rate that players could raise or lower, no possibility of 
    floating bonds, and just three types of operating 
    expenditure--transportation, police, and fire protection. In SimCity 2000, 
    the player can vary property tax rates by class (residential, commercial, 
    industrial); offer tax incentives to specific industries; impose a sales or 
    income tax; borrow funds; refinance bonds; budget a wider variety of 
    programs now including education, health, and welfare; and vary expenditures 
    within each budget category (for example, primary and secondary schools 
    versus higher education) and even by neighborhood. 
    This degree of complexity may seem astonishing in a game for children. But 
    when children play SuperMario World and other popular adventure games, they 
    must learn the most intricate facts about the many imaginary places they 
    navigate. These worlds are typically filled with strange creatures, hidden 
    passageways, and special treasures. Going from one level of the game to the 
    next demands an extraordinary mastery of detail. Compared with these 
    demands, managing SimCity is surprisingly straightforward. 
    SimCity makes complexity manageable partly by enabling players to ignore 
    much of it when they are first learning the game. For example, players can 
    turn on "auto-budget" and let the program follow its default options until 
    they are ready to take up fiscal alternatives. When they do, they will find 
    that SimCity allows the mayor to get advice from various city council 
    members--or are they consultants?--who appear at the click of a mouse. Their 
    recommendations may not, however, always be consistent. As I was playing, 
    one adviser urged me to raise taxes to cut the city's deficit, while another 
    said I should cut taxes to stimulate growth. This difference seemed to me a 
    truly real-world touch. 
    Wright says that the next stage in SimCity's development may enable the 
    player to dive into a city to run a business inside it. He also wants to 
    give players the ability to modify the model's assumptions. "We want the 
    user to be able to define more and more of the model." Ultimately, he says, 
    the game could allow players to build the models themselves. Whether many 
    people would use this opportunity is unclear. But the option would permit 
    mastery of a simulation in the more fundamental sense of being able to 
    manipulate the assumptions and relationships behind it. In its current 
    version, the model is an unreachable black box. A new Sim game, SimHealth, 
    does allow players to modify assumptions and define the governing values. 
    But in practice, SimHealth shows some of the limitations of the genre.
    A Simulation Muddle
    The premise of SimHealth is that you have been elected to Congress in 1992 
    and seek to get reelected by choosing policies for health care. The game and 
    the voters then rate your performance not against an independent standard 
    but rather against your own--the values you have selected at the outset. 
    This is an attractive concept. However, the framework for "clarifying" 
    values adopted by SimHealth is based on hackneyed and misleading premises. 
    SimHealth asks players to define their values in terms of two 
    dualities--liberty and equality, and community and efficiency--on the 
    premise that more of one value in a pair necessarily means less of the 
    other. 
    But is this the case? Historically, many societies that have denied basic 
    liberties have also had extreme inequalities. When we talk about rights, we 
    generally mean equal rights; thus the two concepts overlap, often 
    reinforcing one another. For example, does the right to assemble peaceably 
    for redress of grievances express the value of liberty or equality? What 
    about equal educational opportunity? Compared to the U.S. system today, is 
    Canadian-style national health insurance an expression of equality (since 
    everyone is covered) or of liberty (since all are guaranteed individual 
    choice of physician and no one suffers from job lock)? 
    To assume a zero-sum relation between liberty and equality, and community 
    and efficiency, obscures a central challenge of policy--how to achieve 
    progress on more than one value at a time. For example, few would disagree 
    that by eliminating administrative sources of inefficiency, we are better 
    able to carry out aims benefiting the community as a whole. But in 
    SimHealth, efficiency and community are counterposed. Perhaps even more 
    fundamental, SimHealth's framework fails to appreciate that the main 
    political differences in health policy, as in other areas of American 
    politics, concern conflicting interpretations of widely shared values. Those 
    who take different positions do not necessarily differ in the value they 
    place, for example, on liberty; they often disagree about what liberty means 
    in relation to health care (freedom to change jobs without fear of losing 
    coverage, freedom to pick a health plan, freedom to pick a doctor, freedom 
    to consult alternative healers, and so on). 
    SimHealth's philosophical muddle is inadvertently apparent from the 
    arbitrary connections it asserts between values and particular statements 
    that are supposed to embody them. The value of community supposedly calls 
    for "restructur[ing] health insurance to provide the highest quality care." 
    But it is obscure to me why "community" should mean an emphasis on quality 
    of care rather than, say, careful stewardship of resources, priority for 
    public health measures, or universal coverage. 
    SimHealth does no better a job of explaining health care policies and 
    proposals. Indeed, the game is littered with crude simplifications and 
    outright errors of fact. It mixes up the concepts of managed care and 
    managed competition, confuses an individual's share of premiums with the 
    coinsurance rate (the individuals' share of payments for covered services), 
    and misstates the basic arrangements proposed in the Clinton and other 
    proposed health plans in Congress. The effects of particular policies on 
    public opinion seemed entirely arbitrary and capricious. I did not detect 
    any particular political bias. But SimHealth contains so much misinformation 
    that no one could possibly understand competing proposals and policies, much 
    less evaluate them, on the basis of the program. And although SimHealth 
    enables users to modify some assumptions, the model is never clearly 
    explained and the basic architecture is beyond reach. 
    The oversimplified values framework and misinformation in SimHealth could be 
    fixed, but the bigger problem is false pretensions. Unlike the plainly 
    fictional SimCity, SimHealth claims to simulate the effects of different 
    real-world proposals, which it cannot do. I suspect that if SimCity 
    purported to help evaluate policies toward the homeless, it would seem 
    equally inadequate.
    SimHealth is a case of overshoot. The Sim games generally achieve their 
    impact by engaging players in concrete tasks. SimHealth, however, seeks to 
    engage players in formulating policy, which is entirely different. A child 
    can start playing SimCity without any conceptual understanding of urban 
    development. But to choose among various policy options in SimHealth, the 
    player needs to understand their relation to one another. The conceptual 
    threshold is too high, and it is not clear that a game can overcome it. On 
    the other hand, for those who are familiar with the elements of health 
    policy, playing SimHealth quickly becomes repetitive; it lacks the complex 
    variation and intricacy of SimCity and other Sim games. Once the novelty of 
    making health policy into a game has worn off, I doubt SimHealth will hold 
    much interest. It certainly has no value in assessing health care reform.
    Simulation in Reality 
    The critical problem raised by simulation is the black-box nature of the 
    models. In the "real world" of policy simulation, the models are subject to 
    criticism and debate, at least among professionals. Opposing sides in policy 
    disputes often come armed with their own simulations, ready to fight numbers 
    with numbers. However outrageously biased some of these may be, there is 
    nothing remarkable or offensive about the practice--it is simply one aspect 
    of today's pursuit of politics by other means.
    The troubling questions, in my view, concern the use of simulation as an 
    element of statecraft. In principle, models used for official purposes are 
    more open to scrutiny than are those in the private sector, and that is 
    enormously important. Within and across the branches of the federal 
    government, the validity of the models and assumptions is subject to intense 
    scrutiny, and a strong sense of professionalism limits political 
    manipulation. However, to most participants in policy debates as well as the 
    public at large, the models are opaque. Only a few can penetrate the black 
    box and understand what is inside. This has two opposite effects. At a 
    conscious level, many people are distrustful of official projections, like 
    much else about government. In practice, however, the numbers take on 
    immense importance. As a result, those who have technical authority over the 
    black boxes acquire an extraordinary degree of influence in the political 
    process. And technical authority matters because the outcome of simulations 
    often depends on what is assumed in the first place. 
    There is no obvious remedy to the black-box problem, and it affects 
    conservatives as much as liberals. Conservatives who are wary of planning 
    still depend on large-scale models for budgetary projections. Indeed, the 
    most recent version of the balanced- budget amendment would require Congress 
    to balance not actual outlays and receipts but projections of future 
    streams. Since those projections would be produced through computer 
    simulations, the amendment would give unprecedented authority to whoever 
    served as official simulator--a role that sounds like the modern equivalent 
    of court magician, and perhaps is. 
    The official simulator today, CBO director Robert Reischauer, may now be as 
    powerful a figure as any member of Congress. The CBO has no veto over 
    legislation, but it has a power that is nearly as great--the power to 
    "score" legislation to determine compliance with budget rules and future 
    effects on the deficit. When someone in Washington today claims savings for 
    a proposed change in national policy, people ask not whether the savings are 
    real but rather, "Are they scoreable?" This aspect of national policy has 
    all the features of a game with arcane rules and assumptions. (One of the 
    staff economists at the Council of Economic Advisers joked last year that 
    after leaving he would write a kiss-and-tell book called How to Score in 
    Washington.) 
    From the formative stages of policymaking, the effects are substantial. For 
    the past several years, the CBO has cast a broad shadow over the debate 
    about health care reform. Among the cognoscenti, cost-containment proposals 
    have been classified in two ways--"scoreable" and "unscoreable"--depending 
    on whether the CBO was likely to smile or frown. The prospect that the CBO 
    would frown on a policy and deem it "unscoreable" has been a grave, 
    sometimes fatal strike against it. 
    When the CBO finally made its report on the Clinton health plan, it was 
    front-page news, and again the black-box problem was apparent. Now it was 
    time to hear the score, though few understood what went into it. The 
    president's critics heralded Reischauer for saying that premiums paid to 
    health alliances should be counted in federal receipts (albeit as an 
    "off-budget" item) and that the plan would raise the federal deficit by $70 
    billion in the years prior to 2004 before reducing it. It almost did not 
    matter that the CBO estimated a near-term increase in the federal deficit in 
    part because it projected larger savings to state and local government 
    (indeed, recapturing those savings for the Treasury would make the plan 
    virtually budget-neutral). Nor did conservatives who were praising 
    Reischauer seem to appreciate the implications of CBO's general view of cost 
    containment. While casting a skeptical eye on the market-oriented measures 
    generally favored by conservatives, CBO has endorsed the effectiveness of 
    regulatory measures that conservatives dislike. CBO accepted the Clinton 
    premium caps as 100 percent effective. It has favorably assessed the impact 
    of single-payer plans, particularly on administrative costs. This is by no 
    means to say that CBO's judgments will be decisive, only that they have come 
    to hold unprecedented influence. 
    CBO has emerged as a power center as the influence of Congress has grown 
    relative to the executive branch over the past two decades. But CBO has also 
    become a force in its own right, apart from the Congress, because of the 
    predominance and persistence of budgetary issues in national politics and 
    the search by the Congress to find ways to bind itself, like Ulysses to the 
    mast, to resist strong impulses within. The official simulator is now called 
    upon to provide not just clairvoyance but collective self-discipline. The 
    discipline will hold only if the simulations do--only if there is one 
    authoritative mechanism for defining the future in the present. The power of 
    CBO has become an institutional necessity. 
    In the wider world, there is no comparable imperative to find a single 
    mechanism for simulating alternative policies and theories. If there must be 
    black boxes, at least we should have many of them to discourage faith in any 
    one. Even better, we need to open up the boxes by making the models more 
    transparent.
    Transparency ought to become both the objective of simulation designers and 
    a critical basis for judging their success. Richard Duke--the pioneer who 
    first introduced computers into urban simulation games in the 1960s--is now 
    deeply skeptical about models embedded in computers that oblige the user 
    simply to accept an outcome as valid. Currently a professor at the 
    University of Michigan and president of the International Simulation and 
    Gaming Association, Duke says, "If a simulation hides the model, it's of 
    little interest to me. If a simulation exposes the model, I'm much more 
    interested." His own work now emphasizes role-playing policy simulation 
    exercises that allow different players to engage each other, not just a 
    black-box model. Besides allowing participants to practice skills in 
    negotiation and group problem solving, the role-playing approach is much 
    less deterministic: it introduces an unpredictable element of human choice 
    into simulation games. 
    Computer simulation games with many simultaneous players linked through the 
    Internet may also introduce more unpredictability. Moreover, as computer 
    games become more elaborate and widely used, their sheer multiplication and 
    increasing plasticity may promote a healthy skepticism about their 
    predictive power. Playing with simulation is one way to see its limits as 
    well as its possibilities. 
    For better or worse, simulation is no mere fad. Indeed, to think of 
    simulation games as mere entertainment or even as teaching tools is to 
    underestimate them. They represent a major addition to the intellectual 
    repertoire that will increasingly shape how we communicate ideas and think 
    through problems. The advent of this new medium has escaped the attention of 
    cultural critics because it has come in the form of children's games. But 
    the computer simulation game is an art form; when combined with 
    three-dimensional graphics and sound, it is an extraordinarily powerful one. 
    We shall be working and thinking in SimCity for a long time. 
    
    
     
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    © 1995 New Prospect, Inc.