Thursday 11 April 2002

Pic of the day: The world of Kebir Blue. In one of the tiny corners of the world resides my peaceful little country.

Sim Country

No, it is not another smash hit by Maxis, famous for Sim City and The Sims (and less famous for Sim Earth, Sim Ant, Sim Farm, Sim Life ...). SimCountry.com is a massive multiplayer online strategy game. As you sign on, which is free but somewhat confusing, you are allowed to pick any small country not currently played by anyone else. To the best of my knowledge, there is no list of free countries. You just click randomly on the map until you find one of the few free spaces in between hundreds of countries already in play. Then you start simulating.

Unlike most such strategy games, this is set squarely in the present. No middle ages, no halberds and sorcery. No castle visuals. In fact, the visuals are utterly unimpressive and should work well in most browsers that support cookies and frames. The use of maps to get into the game in the first place probably means you can't play it if you are blind, but it isn't far off. There are menus, help texts, and statistics with optional graphs. In fact, these features are interwoven in such a way that the actions you may take are often found in the statistics, which are often found by links in a plain text that gives you an overview of your country.

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The countries are rather small. The one I eventually found was a piece of coastal strip with slightly above 4 million inhabitants ... about the same as Norway when I grew up. Ironically, the economic situation of the country was also strikingly similar to Norway today: There is a lack of labor, keeping most businesses from achieving their potential. And state ownership is even higher than in Norway. I immediately closed down one of the businesses that had once been profitable, but now faced an overflowing market. The next day I closed another, and may continue to do so if necessary. I have ordered upgrades of efficiency in the state-owned companies that produce goods or services for which there is an unmet demand in the world market. These upgrades should kick in after two months (16 hours real time) and alleviate some of the workforce shortage. Increasing corporate taxes may be the third tool, pressuring some privately held companies to relocate abroad.

After the first night, I was in the top 300, up from 1200 at start. I guess it is time to take a peek at the defense.

Statistics are updated every month, which is 8 hours of real time. You can see the days passing while you are logged in, the date is visible in the upper right corner. But only at the change of the months do things actually happen. Until then, all trade is just orders and offers. Trade deals are reported by the 1st of the month.

Because of the large number of countries, the economy works as a real market. You can make deals in two ways: Either place an order/offer on the world market, or deal directly with another company, owned by yourself or a fellow player. Of course, the latter option requires that your fellow player is interested. Most likely, they want at least world market prices for the products they sell, so you may as well go to the market. There is one exception, though: Multinational corporations.

Instead of picking a country (or in addition to doing so) you can choose to become CEO of a corporation. As such, you build or buy companies wherever there is money in doing so. For instance, Porcupine Products (my corporation) built a coal mine in a country where there is lots of idle labor force. No wonder, because the corporate tax there is 95%. So I have no interest in making a profit there. I would be perfectly willing to sell at production cost to someone who could offer me a good deal elsewhere where the tax is lower. First of all, however, I want to supply my own factories.

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This interplay between numerous nations and corporations makes for a realistic and vibrant economy. And the economy even has loops: A coal mine does not just employ laborers, it also uses services and hi-tech services. We are talking about a 21st century coal mine, after all. So a shortage in hi-tech could hamper the production of coal, and all products that depend on it. It is truly a tangled web. And the tangles, often as not, come from the stupidity of the players. I mean, take this guy with the 95% corporate tax. That could have been a good idea – except that like 40% of his workforce is idle. Even if he set taxes down to 30% now, it would still take years of game time (weeks of real time) before enough multinationals had discovered this. He could start his own, state-owned industries, but that would divert investment from his precious military. But if he keeps up the current policy, he will eventually be unable to support his military, and probably lose interest.

(Rulers of North Korea, you may want to play this game before you continue your current policy. ^-^)

The slowness of the game means that you will probably want to check only once a day (3 months of game time) once you have the operation up and running with your preferred policies. So it is not likely to take over your life, the way some other online games do. As a case study of politics and economy, however, it should be quite interesting to the bright and curious reader. After all, "politics ought to be the part time profession of every citizen." (Dwight D. Eisenhower.)