The Millennium Simulation game turned out to be much harder than I expected.. Considering I play a lot of games and simulation games as well, this seemed to be one of the more realistic and challenging ones I have played before. In my first go around, I focused on keeping Fatou and Kojos’ health as high as possible. This meant allocating time and resources in order to make sure that they stayed healthy. Although this was a good strategy for a while and kept them alive, eventually this caused them to get sick anyway due to lack of money.. Also, I constantly thought I had finally found the right balance of allocating time for fishing, farming, gathering fuel and water, but everytime I found the right balance for a round or two, the simulator would tell me the next round that the food or water needs were not met. This really shows that with the changing world, especially in a time where you are trying to stay alive, what you do one year will not always work the next time. It also really shows me the complexity of allocation of time and resources, something that many of us in America and the world who do not have to worry about this allocation of resources take for granted sometimes.
Besides just keeping the characters alive and making sure they had enough wood and water (and it got continuously harder to do this), the thing I struggled with the most was earning money. No matter if I put more time into the small business, farming, wood collecting, etc, for some reason I could never get it to bring in a decent amount of money which was really frustrating. I thought I figured out which crops were better than the other, but then it would tell me there was a really bad season of collecting crops, something me nor the characters I was playing as really had any control over. It really shows you that survival is not always completely in your control, and trying to make money in such a rural setting is very difficult. It also showed me the difficulty of needing to try to make money without having any funds to allocate in order to increase profit.
Your response made me think of how difficult “survival” is for third-world countries. South Sudan only has two seasons: an extreme summer without rain and an extreme spring season with rain. Even though Water for South Sudan drills more and more wells each year, I now wonder if the affected communities’ economic benefits have improved over time or are still being disproportionately impacted because of various things out of their control, such as climate change.
I too felt that I was getting the right balance on the simulator for my allocation of time on the various tasks only to be met with messages that my food or water usage was not met. It felt like there was no right answer on how to best spend my time and no matter what I did something went wrong for my villagers. When thinking about the practical application of the simulation, it is scary to think there are real people in communities around the world that are facing the difficult decisions we had to make in the simulation.
I think it is interesting how you bring up how it is necessary to have funds to increase future profits. In this simulation, yes, I believe that is true. However, looking at America and other well-off countries, you can increase profits even when you have limited funds by creating connections that lead to opportunities. I know it would be tough to do, but adding interpersonal relations to this simulation would help tremendously, especially when trying to trade or borrow machinery from a friend for a season.