Unsoft's List

s i m s h i t t y

When I was in undergrad engineering, I had a software oddity called SIMLIFE. This old program was the foundation on which modern simulation games (SIMCITY, The SIMS, etc.) were constructed, and it was a neat way to wile away several minutes, hours, days and weeks of critical study time.

Besides that, I believe it was instructional time, of sorts. Kinda my SIMsociology 101.

The version I had was what is now called Open Source, but back then it was just called uncompiled. It had many of the benefits of today's open source software, like an entire library of interactive rules, added by hackers, fans and other geeks, which could be implemented to various degrees in the program simulation. It was also completely customizable to the extent the player could follow the Fortran77, but I admit that I couldn't follow the program flow well enough to implement my own complex rules.

There were so many options already in the library, I could usually find a method of forcing the conditions I desired on to my little population without extraneous programming, recompiling and linking.

I suppose I need to describe the game and its functions a little so today's object oriented geeks will understand what I'm trying to say.

There were any number of virtual organisms, set by the user as a value called INITPOP, and visually represented by rotating ASCII characters. There were male and female organisms who traveled through their world by certain mathematical formulae governing their motion and limitations. Highly customizable rules allowed them to gather food, which occurred randomly in the universe, and to breed.

The user could, for example, set rules on the length of the maximum lifespan for a SIM, what percentage of the max lifespan was the age of sexual maturity, how efficiently procreation could take place, and there were a whole host of rules governing the accumulation and distribution of food, including transferability, shelf life and consumption rates.

You could either watch the visual simulation - male and female characters moving about, gathering food and bumping into each other creating offspring, or you could just run the equations and jump straight to the results - how many generations it took for your organisms to acheive, and then lose a stable breeding population, and how much simulated time it took for your sims to die out altogether.

Eventually, I got bored with watching them and I went about creating and destroying civilizations at the rate of several per day. Some of the things I observed in that data were downright educational.

Food was food, but it was also wealth. Modifying the default rules for food accumulation produced the most interesting effects. If you allowed food to be accumulated with no set maximum, and removed the ability for food to "spoil", certain organisms became "rich" fairly quickly. No matter how you tried to modify the individual organisms strengths and weaknesses to level the playing field, the majority of the wealth found its way into the "hands" of relatively few organisms fairly quickly. This is no surprise - once an organism is wealthy, it remains wealthy.

Allowing wealth to be accumulated with no restrictions invariably cut the time a population remained healthy pretty much in half. That was only if the wealth dissappeared instantly when the organism which collected it died.

Changing the distribution rules yielded even more interesting results. If you allowed wealth to be willable - when one organism dies, its wealth is distributed evenly among its past mates...when both parent organisms are dead, accumulated wealth is distributed evenly among progeny - the civilization collapses in about one eighth of the time the same population could have held out with default limits on how much food could be accumulated.

So, when you hear me ranting about how personal wealth wrecks society, remember I'm just a stupid liberal, and I learned my biases by playing games in college when I should have been studying - just as you suspected.