(see Version 1.1 of this card)

Alright, so maybe third time lucky. Lets ease up on the agricultural output and the use of fossil fuels. Here’s an idea: let’s go nuclear! Maybe this is the way to have the best of both worlds, so to speak. Lots of energy to keep industry and technology cooking, but without turning on the big heat of the greenhouse toaster-oven. Run it overnight and test your nuclear gambit. Sunday morning comes. Well, this time there is good news and bad news. The good news: your biosphere didn’t cook this time. You had well and truly solved the greenhouse problem — permanently. The bad news: Rather than overheat it, you accidentally shoved it into the deep freeze. Its called “nuclear winter” and it results from letting off a few too many thermonuclear devices. The dust cloud from that keeps the sunlight out altogether. Cormac McCarthy: “Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world.”*

(see Version 1.1 of this card)

It’s not much of a game, SimEarth. Perhaps that’s why after seven days of uncreation, you became bored with it. Then uninstalled it. Then finally got around to selling it on Ebay. Perhaps I bought your old copy. I played it for a while, on an obsolete computer. It can get a little obsessive. SimEarth gamers tell amazing stories: About the time the lid blew off the biosphere, but up rose a strain of intelligent robots. Or the time it ticked over for months, populated with a million sentient cetaceans, all using nanotechnology to run their watery utopia. But there’s something disturbing about it. Perhaps that’s why there is no sequel, no updates. It is as extinct an example of game evolution as the poor sim-critters who populate its sun-blasted endgames. SimEarth is extinct, a game without sequels, but two offshoots from the same evolutionary phyla of game design lived on. One is The Sims. Perhaps it was better adapted to survive in gamespace, because it did not give the game away. The death of a Sim is not the end of the world. Another descendant line tries the other tack. In Will Wright’s much admired Spore, survival is not limited to one biosphere. Olaf Stapeldon:”It must not be supposed that the normal fate of intelligent races in the galaxy is to triumph.”* At least in Spore there’s more than one home to trash.

(see Version 1.1 of this card)

Forms of game evolve in a quasi-Darwinian manner, not unlike forms of organism. Game designers breed new forms out of existing forms, and the military entertainment complex throws the resulting variations on a waiting market, where they compete to save you from boredom. Very few forms succeed. It’s almost Darwinian: The designer proposes; gamespace disposes. Franco Moretti: “In Darwin, in other words, history is the interweaving of two wholly independent paths: random variation and necessary selection. In our case, [formal] innovations, which are the result of chance; and a social selection, which by contrast is the daughter of necessity.”* Through a subtle inversion of the logic of natural selection, gamespace claims to be the full implementation of a digital Darwinism. Here for one and all the rule is survival of the fittest. Only what actually happens is quite the reverse: the demise of the unfit. Survival has no positive value. Gamespace is a pure nihilism. The best one can hope for is merely being undefeated. Hence the unsatisfying quality of ‘winning’ in SimEarth. In the unlikely event that the game rattles on toward the death of the sun, this victory amounts to nothing. This is perhaps why SimEarth did not survive. There is something rather undesirable in this game of cruelty. But there is a difference between natural selection and ‘cultural’ selection. An ‘unfit’ game like SimEarth fails not because it bumps up against the reality principle of bare life, but quite the reverse. It fails the fantasy principle.

(see Version 1.1 of this card)

Given that you can’t really win, SimEarth is hardly a game at all. The best conclusion for most scenarios is that your SimEarthlings leave the planet in a fleet of spaceships. SimEarth lacks one of the usual criteria for a game — what we might call a satisfying “win condition” which terminates its algorithm. But then perhaps that’s the allegory. SimEarth maps the limit to gamespace. What gamespace usually excludes — the residues that pile up out of sight out of mind — are here included, and they are the source of the problem. The choices within the game — between agriculture and science, for example, appear as choices between positive terms. They take no account of their contraries, which appear without names. SimEarth’s strategy is to include every term within its agon. There are no contraries, or almost none. It posits the whole planet as gamespace. Even the power source of the sun is included. Only a blank interstellar of the angels space remains as its contrary.*