In “The Logic of Failure” Dorner discusses the cognitive methods in which we make decisions, both good and bad. He uses information from an experiment done where a handful of participants were asked to play a game. In the game, participants had dictatorial leadership over a region called Tanaland. Their objective was to make decisions about farming, water irrigation, livestock and much more to ensure the survival of the people in the area. It seemed like a simple task, but the biggest takeaway from his analyzation is that it was anything but.
This is how it felt to play the Millennium Village Simulation. I’m a HUGE fan of Sims, Tropico and other popular life simulation games, but this one was by far the hardest. I tried the demo, and both of my characters died from the flu in a whopping two seasons. After a few more attempts, I realized that many of the decisions I was (and was not) making were similar to concepts present in Dorner’s analyzation of the Tanaland experiment. One of the “good” things that I was doing is that I consistently made a decent amount of decisions each round. There was never a round where I didn’t change at least half of my village’s parameters so I could try out different scenarios. One of the “bad” things, however, is that I tend to jump around from one objective to the next as it comes to me. This generally results in me forgetting the task I originally set out to do.
I think your response to the game if pretty interesting. I found it very difficult to make lots of decisions, and I found that I tended to balance everything for as long as possible, which lead to a fairly fine first few seasons, but later on was a problem. I’ve never played any life simulation games, and I’m curious about the similarities. I thought the ability to switch between the individual family and the wider community iwas also an interesting touch, and I’m wondering if the life simulation games typically orient around a community, or individuals?