There is a popular misconception that video games bear little relation to reality. Unfortunately, this is hard to counter when the best-known characters are probably a speedy blue hedgehog and a plumber who lives in a magical mushroom kingdom. Indeed, even comparatively serious games such as SimCity, Civilization and Papers Please take a highly abstract approach to culture, society and government, which sets them apart from real-life events.
This week, however, the maker of the fastidiously authentic video game Football Manager said the game was being updated to simulate the economic effects of Brexit. The accurate portrayal of transfer costs and work permits will be tweaked, making it potentially more expensive to buy foreign players, and more problematic to get work permits for those from EU countries.
Predicting political events is rare in games – usually they are more reactive. Microsoft altered its Flight Simulator after 9/11, but only to remove the twin towers, while the release of the 2011 off-road driving game Motorstorm: Apocalypse was delayed after the major earthquakes in New Zealand and Japan, the latter also forcing the publisher Irem to cancel its Disaster Report series of earthquake survival games.
Less dramatically, it is reasonably common in the world of sports sims to use real-world data. EA draws player performance statistics from the real sporting season into its Fifa, NBA and Madden NFL titles, so your team in the game can mirror the week-by-week data of the real thing – including injuries. In Fifa 17’s popular Ultimate Team mode – a cross between Fantasy Football and a Panini sticker album – players are more valuable if their real-life counterpart is performing well. So don’t rely on any Sunderland players right now.
Plenty of games also use weather and day/night data, so that when you are playing, the conditions will mirror those in the genuine geographic location. Microsoft Flight Simulator uses real-time meteorological data to simulate conditions at airports around the world, so if it is foggy in Rio, it is also foggy in simulated Rio. Nintendo’s cute village simulator Animal Crossing has a day night/cycle tied to the data in your handheld 3DS console, so if you are playing at night, the shops will be closed and your fellow villagers will be in bed. Insomniac players can still go fishing, though, as certain fish are only around after dark. The ingenious Gameboy Advance adventure Boktai: The Sun is in Your Hand came with a photometric light sensor that required players to – gasp – go outside to avoid the game’s vampire enemies.
Unsurprisingly, the game series that gets closest to Football Manager’s appropriation of Brexit is the in-depth political simulation Democracy, from independent studio Positech Games. “Democracy 3 had a lot of changes because of political events,” says designer Cliff Harris. “Mad cow disease became a thing, as did pension-fund scandals and global credit crunch events. Also, after Democracy 3 was released, we had to update it with a bunch of new policies including the mansion tax. And we had to add police drones. And Tasers.”
Fans of the game have created their own modification for the sim, Trump Nation, which imagines a near-future America under president Donald Trump. When the magazine PC Gamer tried it, it implemented a range of the billionaire’s favourite policies and then watched how the US would react: two senior members of his administration resigned almost immediately, there was a series of assassination attempts and, finally, the presidency toppled under an armed socialist insurrection. Spoiler alert!
