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These are two simulations of a democratic politics that suppress or obscure the grittier,
violent disagreements that democracies must regularly face up to. As Turkle suggests, seeing the
local democratic politics through the lens of a simulation game can be harmful politically in at
least two respects. Players come to believe that political decisions are made best by technical
experts, in this case city planners, not by democratic citizens. More worrisome, the assumptions
of the game (for example, raising taxes leads to riots) become assumptions players gradually
accept in actual democratic politics, even when there are good reasons to question the legitimacy
of these assumptions outside the simulation game. Not unlike SimCity and its offspring (including
the genetic engineering game, Simlife,
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but more serious and sophisticated), are the simulations
that policymakers themselves use to determine combat strategies in war and budget strategies in
bureaucratic politics. While simulators are used to train fighter pilots and other combat soldiers,
strategic simulations are used to determine the advisability of larger troop movements. The same
kind of formal modeling is used to determine strategies for combating infectious diseases,
developmental disabilities, the dilapidation of urban housing stock, and economic downturns.
The concept of a cultural re-enactment has two distinctive features that distinguish it from
simulation. A cultural re-enactment is
1.
a dramatic, literary, poetic, or other artistic interpretation of a prior political effort to
control mass violence, such as the Nuremberg Trials and the South African Truth and
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See, Ken Karakotios and Michael Bremmer, Simlife: The Official Strategy Guide
(Secrets of the Games) (Prima, 2003).
Convention