Colony Collapse - Real Life

If a player gets time-sucked by the game, there’s certainly less time to actually put feet to pavement, look someone in the eye, feel the endless heatwave. Wilson wrote that we are “terribly confused by the mere fact of our existence,” and god games appear to mitigate that. But we do play against ourselves during that “private time” of reverie, rez... See more

Our relation to god games is like this: straddling between the wonderment of the small that makes us feel powerful and the knowledge that we do not (and might not want to) wield that power in the world outside the frame.

“It would not be good news to learn that we are all roped together intellectually, droning away at some featureless, genetically driven collective work, building something so immense that we can never see the outlines,” biologist Lewis Thomas writes in The Lives of a Cell (1974). Humans understandably prefer to believe in their own agency, even if ... See more

God games invite us to peer at human society like it is an ant farm. In playing god games, we replay the systems that have failed us, in shrunken-down, simplified form. The repetition of these systems at miniature scale sustains the notion that they are natural, the infinite complexity and incalculable possibility that characterizes human society o... See more

Because we can find algorithms in the universe, because everything can be broken down into bits, our technology is simply a matter-of-course pathway — linear, like the technology tree in Civilization. It suggests too that hard work can be found in nature: If ants labor tirelessly, mindlessly, then why wouldn’t human workers do the same, under capit... See more

God games — made specifically to be abstract, simplified, and ambiguous — invite this sort of loss as a kind of mastery.

“the viewer gets lost in [miniature] objects, and that in the process of projecting mental scenarios onto them they lose sense of themselves physically.” This disorienting disembodiment might account for god games’ lost-time effect, their inducement of compulsiveness. By entering that “private time,” a player is “disarticulated from embodiment and ... See more

Likewise, players lose hours inside god games. They are sometimes referred to as “time-sweep” games and noted for their addictiveness. Crucially, time moves faster in the god games. Years pass with one turn of Civilization or SimCity. One Sims day is equal to 24 minutes in our world. There is also a particular kind of time-abolishing focus required... See more

It’s not just about the experience of control, though. The minuscule provokes both awe for its mechanisms — the technical means by which it was brought into existence; the details of its structure — and the distortion of time. In On Longing, Susan Stewart argues that the miniature is a space unattached to “lived historical time”: diminution contort... See more