Everybody Wants To Rule The World

Yesterday evening, I sat down to spend some virtual quality time with my computer. My wife bought me "SimCity Societies" for Christmas, and I was happy to take a few moments before we went out to dinner playing this game of simulated reality. The appeal to this sort of activity is the opportunity to play God. Manipulating a culture and its twists and turns has proven to be a very effective timesink. SimCity was not the first.
Years ago, I was given a copy of "Age of Empires" by a teacher friend who told me it was his way of unwinding after a particularly trying day. The focus of this game was conquest: destroying other societies was the goal. It wasn't over until you had crushed your opponents or they had done the same to you. As described by the title, the methods of doing away with those around you was limited to swords, shields and the occasional trireme. I started out slow, but soon gathered the basic knowledge that allowed me to vanquish the pitiful wretches who sought to bring me down.
It was after several months of listening to me bombard those around me that my wife decided it was time to steer my impulses to something more altruistic. She bought me "Civilization: The Gold Edition." Now I was encouraged to build up a wealth of scientific and artistic knowledge along with the ability to eliminate nations that challenged me. But this game offered diplomacy as an alternative to war. I would spend hours exploring, colonizing and manicuring a culture that maintained a strong defense, but was also benevolent when necessary to achieve its ends. I negotiated, and only occasionally flattened cities.
Still, my wife looked to refine my baser reflexes, and with SimCity, I think she hoped that I would come around to a more civilized way of dealing with my civilizations. At least that was the message that I got. Right after Christmas, I set about making my city of Sims, and I worked carefully to balance the creative with the productive, the authority with the hedonism. I wanted the little people wandering through the maze of city streets I constructed to love me. It never occurred to me to put a sewage treatment plant next to the aquarium "just to see what happens." This was a carryover from my days with "Civilization," where I never started a war simply to "see what happens." I try to think a few moves ahead, and generally have my virtual citizen's best interests in mind.
So, when I toggled on the "weather" tab on SimCity, I wished that I would have taken the time to read the whole manual. Especially after I inadvertently caused a fiery meteor storm that destroyed four buildings and caused untold psychic damage. Well, the psychic damage was immediately visible via in the bar graph at the bottom of the screen. The majority of happy green faces were quickly replaced with angry red faces. I did that. For a moment I felt horrible. I felt as though I had really let those people down. Here I had control over not just the financial and city planning, but heaven and earth as well, and I had brought on catastrophe. How could I have let that happen?
And that's when I remembered: It's just a game. Even though what happened could hardly be described as succumbing to my baser instincts, I knew there was a simpler solution. The game has an auto-save function that allows you to return to a time where things were a little more manageable. Before the flaming boulders fell from the sky. Do over.
And now I think I should send one of these to Barack Obama.