201.
You arrive home from work one evening, only to discover your biosphere is dead. What a way to start the week! On looking back through the records, the reason is not hard to discover. A classic greenhouse-effect problem. Next time, wind down the fossil fuels a little more so your globe doesn’t cook itself to death while you’re out. Fortunately the biosphere in question is only a game, or something like a game. You have this program running on your home computer called SimEarth, which lets you model all kinds of biosphere conditions over a number of different time frames: geological, biological and sociological. The one you think you’re getting a little obsessed with is a model of planet Earth from 1990 onwards. So this week you decide that you will set up this model every morning, selecting types and quantities of energy use and expenditure. You will come home every evening and see if your world is still running. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t.
Being that I am not a huge gamer (only playing the occasional xbox and board game) I found myself a little bit lost in the book. I found it very interesting when the subject matter was a game that I had actually heard of or played (which is why I am posting on this last chapter about SimEarth), but that was only about two chapters.
The God Complex has always sparked my interest and it is incredibly accessible in SimEarth. I noticed the comments that had starting on card 217 and I thought it was a really interesting idea that we (the gamers) are “answerable to a higher power – the game itself.” If this is so, what role does the game developer play when playing his or her own game?
As a side note, this game also reminded me of the David Hume quote you always mention in class about not being able to pick apart Nature from culture. It seems as though SimEarth gave us one of our best tries of simulating what might have happened.
Hagan: yes, SimEarth is interesting from the point of view of the nature/culture divide. You could see it as an attempt to simulate nature entirely within one particular kind of culture, one that this is ‘algorithmic’.
View all comments in the book
(All comments will be moderated)
(All comments will be moderated)
(All comments will be moderated)
Typo, 2nd to last line, “are get enough to eat,” I believe that should be ‘getting.’
thanks
test.
View all comments in the book
(All comments will be moderated)
what kind of a book has only got 25 pages.
It’s about 40,000 words, so its more like 200 pages. You might be missing part of it.
typo: you lose your appetite.
Replace ‘loose’ with ‘lose’ in sentence 2.
chris, scott, thanks for spotting the typos!
one more typo:sentence 2:
“take your mind _off_ Sim Earth.”
Huh. Cow gas is a contributor to global warming. I’m hungry for steak all of a sudden… You know, gotta help the planet
View all comments in the book
(All comments will be moderated)