By Andrew SheivachmanThe Daily Northwestern

Last July, in a short brief on Will Wright’s new game Spore, Newsweek magazine asked “Why fight the debate over evolution when you can play it?” Wright is a game designer who has been creating digital sandboxes for gamers to tool around in for almost twenty years. Beginning with his seminal urban planning simulator Sim City,Wright has regularly churned out simulations of life on Earth; SimAnt, SimEarth, and SimHealth are among his most celebrated titles.

But contrary to Newsweek, Wright doesn’t really create simulations of our world: he creates his own individual computerized universes, crafted specifically to express his beliefs and intentions. God games do not allow the player to become God since every game world is subject to the rules and limitations imposed by a game’s designer. God games, in other words, serve to herald their creators like a deity and enslave their players through deception. Why do these God games fail so miserably?

Although Wright achieved unbelievable financial success with 1999’s The Sims, essentially a simulation of humans living in a modifiable dollhouse, he owes a great amount of his inspiration to the games of other visionary designers. The first God game is widely believed to be Don Daglow’s Utopia, a competition in island development. In Utopia, you plopped down buildings and utilities in order to create a better island than your opponent. It wasn’t quite up to snuff and didn’t sell, either. Another game called Little Computer People in 1984 gave a player direct control over a series of human blips in a house. A lo-fi precursor to The Sims, it never met much success despite being published on multiple platforms.

Peter Molyneux’s Populous, on the other hand, was wildly popular since it deems you a semi-omniscient deity. Published in 1989, Populous is played on the inside of an open book where you cultivate an adoring culture. The Book of Life aside, a player can only affect his culture in very specific ways and is forced to protect his followers from hostile enemy deities. You can adjust the environment to make your followers happier and throw biblical plagues at your enemy’s zealots, but it was impossible to keep track of it all at the same time. So much for being an all-powerful God, right? Populous proved a tremendous success and spawned a few sequels. Peter Molyneux’s next original God game, 2001’s Black and White, would prove to be similarly limited in scope.

A new genre labeled Real Time Strategy emerged during the time between Molyneux’s games. These strategy games give a player near-direct control over a series of units from a military commander’s perspective. The genre began in the early eighties, but became popular in the early nineties with Warcraft and Command and Conquer. Players could click on a unit and directly order it to do their bidding, regardless of moral qualms or violent consequence. But a “fog of war” would obscure your view of unexplored territory and ruin any feeling of omniscient prowess.

Empire-building titles also became popular around the same time, with Sid Meier’s Civilization 2 being a model example of the genre. The player serves as an immortal god of war who guides a single civilization from ancient pastoral village to futuristic metropolis over three millennia. One could even select individual governments, economic systems, and military structures for his country to adopt. Your sphere of influence, however, remains in your territory and lacks a global or universal focus. Microsoft’s Age of Empires series would later combine the empire building and RTS genres together to create a popular fast-paced strategy game.

But none of these games actually create any sort of omnipotent control over the game world. There are always limitations – you can’t view enemy territory, you can’t go off the map, you can’t imbue your troops with superhuman strength, etc.- that keeps the experience within certain, expressly selected parameters.

There is an odd paradox here for a gamer. To be more secure and satisfied in his role as a God in any game, the game world the player inhabits needs to be structured and designed to permit the expression of his desires. If not, the game would not be any fun. A deity mightier than a gamer needs to shape the gamer’s experience to be fulfilling and seamless in a reality that does not exist. For someone to feel truly free, they have to exist in an intensely controlled environment. These limitations serve to keep gamers both in check and challenged. As long as you think you are a God, it really does not matter that you aren’t. After all, we certainly don’t have the multitasking ability of God. I can barely play games and study at the same time.

Game designers are the ones playing God here. They force the audience into a framework that makes players believe that they alone have free will in an extremely linear and focused game world. Technological weaknesses and design flaws limit the expansiveness of modern games, so the most important aspect of any game’s design is how well it tricks a player into forgetting both his separation from the game world and the limitations of the game world itself.

For someone to truly play God, they need to create their own universe from scratch. Or, at least, alter someone else’s.

Reach Andrew Sheivachman at [email protected].