Want to take your part in the national health care debate? Take a look at SimHealth, from Maxis, the creators of SimCity, SimEarth, and - my favorite - SimAnt. Because the health care debate lacks the commercial sparkle of, say, dinosaur making, Maxis had a sponsor in creating it: the Markle Foundation, an organization interested in supporting high-minded mass media efforts, with the noble ideal of preventing digital technology from coming to resemble the wasteland of commercial television.
SimHealth's tone surfaces in the opening screen, with its WPA-style images of street and hospital. The program's aim is to bring home the complexities of the choices involved in health care reform, and it runs from 1992 to 2008. The premise is simple: You are in a car accident, injured less by the impact than by the shock of dealing with the health insurance system. So, still lightheaded after the accident, you run for office, and win. You are then faced with an intimidating bookshelf of choices on policies, financing plans, and so on, along with a pile of literalized political chips. According to the choices you make, you get feedback: poll results, graphs of costs and medical practice, and, most vivid of all, visible evidence of prosperity or deterioration in a bird's-eye view of Main Street, USA disturbingly like that provided in Persian Gulf War videos of smart bombs meeting their targets.
The game's basic assumptions can vary. But the most vital part of the game is making the highly variable choices between democracy and efficiency, individual rights and equal access. Not even a good dose of MacNeil-Lehrer can bring home as well as SimHealth the issue's inherent combination of vital importance and skull-crunching tedium.
It all makes me nostalgic for SimAnt, where the choices are simpler and the values clear cut: survival of the nest, expansion across the lawn, and expulsion of the humans from the nearby ranch-style house. "An ant," reads our favorite line from the SimAnt manual, "has roughly the processing power of a Mac II." But who could formulate a similar equation for a member of Congress?
SimHealth for DOS: US$29.95. Maxis: (800) 336 2947, +1 (510) 254 9700.
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