#simhealth

Produced in collaboration with the public innovation non-profit The Markle Foundation, SimHealth was marketed as “a tool for national debate” rather than a fun game. Its public service intentions stand in contrast to the playfulness of the rest of Maxis’s titles: it feels more clinical, no pun intended. The game harnesses the experimental discovery structure powering the Sim series into something more productive, revealing the strengths and limitations of games as hands-on learning tools and flashpoints for cultural conversations.

Some interesting comparisons! The original preview version of SimHealth (1.0, right) has higher-color SVGA graphics compared to the final version that was released (1.1, left). The graphics in the city don't line up exactly since the buildings change during the game, but you get the idea. I’d argue that least on the policy selection screen (bottom), the reduced colors look better and cleaner.

After Maxis, John Hiles advised and inspired a program called the Quasi-Understandable Ecosystem Scenario Tool, a sustainable urban living simulation by researchers at the University of British Columbia. QUEST eventually evolved into MetroQuest, a platform for building public engagement about city planning.

John Hiles (1946–2016)

New interview: I spoke with John Hiles, the developer of SimHealth and SimRefinery and the head of Maxis Business Simulations and Thinking Tools. He had a lot to say about how learning cognitive science and linguistics can help us understand the alluring potential of games – and he responded to criticisms that simulation games that claim to have real-world applicable value can be misleading or dangerous.

Certainly discussing the relation between justice and liberty doesn’t calculate the amount of money you should spend on improving Medicare. It doesn’t calculate the number of citizens that you want to cover who don’t have catastrophic disease protection in their insurance. None of that is present in the value projection. But when you project it and you keep your eye on the fact that you’re going to have to make tradeoffs between those values, it can guide your thinking.

Now, if you’re not thinking, then you’re just using the tool to either bullshit other people, make them think that you’re smart, or to just occupy your time and, you know, twiddle. So I’m not responsible for how people want to misuse human thought. I want to help them to do a better job of applying and projecting their concepts into the domain that they’re either arguing about or doing work in shaping policy craft. So I’m unapologetic about taking some of the wonderful things that are present in the world of games and translating them or projecting them into an area of real discourse and real social concern.

And you know, the people – I think in some cases – people were threatened by the idea that laypeople could see a connection between the decisions in health care and the decisions that shaped our Constitution. I think that bothered some of them. They wanted it to stay policy wonk-y and the reserve of a small elite group that had command of the technical details, and that’s absolutely wrong!

He also talked about some games that really, really upset people and never saw the light of day...

We built another simulation called SimElection. The sponsor, who I won’t name, was horrified when it came out! I made the mistake of bragging that SimElection would help people to understand that given enough money and a dog that looked like Rin Tin Tin, you could make Rin Tin Tin become the president. And they were horrified and shocked and said, “We can’t have our name associated with that!” And they actually had it destroyed, the entire stock, the entire product. No copies. No copies survived.

Interesting… (link here)

I’m really curious to see how it’s used, because there aren’t a lot of concrete examples of that on the website just yet. I have heard stories at library conferences of teachers using the game for virtual archaeology or to reconstruct historical locations, and it would be cool to see that formalized. The idea of building atop familiar interfaces for education has a ton of potential, then and now. It’s fun how things come full circle!