Local Politics: An Unforgiving Game : Playing Sim City on your computer can be an exercise in frustration. Thank goodness you can turn it off, unlike the players at our own urban chessboard.

I recently learned all about city politics by playing a computer game called Sim City. Then I got out.

Sim City is a popular game that simulates a city, with all its problems. It’s a less painful way to govern a city than actually becoming a politician. Still, you learn that politics is nothing but a trap.

The idea of Sim City is to create a prosperous city, attract new residents and avoid complaints. And, of course, stay in office. As mayor you make all the decisions, though you can ask the City Council for advice. You can play as long as you want to. For five months I played the latest version, which among other things allows you to create subways.

As everybody knows, the bigger a city is, the more people it attracts. And money comes with them. You start with a population of zero and try to make it grow. I got up to more than 1 million.

Unfortunately, the things that make the city big, such as airports, cost a lot of money. So where is that money supposed to come from?

You start off with a city treasury. But that money quickly disappears as you have to build more buildings and roadways, maintain power plants and keep other vital utilities working.

To pay for all these expenses you need money. The only way to raise money in Sim City is through taxes (you can’t sell the airport). But the more you raise taxes, the more people hate you and the more they leave.

So how are you supposed to attract people and make the city prosperous? The answer is, you can’t. You are on a roller coaster that seems headed permanently down.

As you sit at the console, you make all the decisions: granting permits, buying improvements, sweating over money.

But the minute you create an attractive building zone that is a beautiful area for people to live in, they all want to come and live there, and the area becomes overpopulated. Then they turn the area into a slum if you don’t build more buildings than you wanted to, and you lose the balance between industrial versus residential areas.

The people of Sim City are never happy. They want more jobs and more hospitals and houses and everything, but they also want you to keep pollution low. They want open space and growth at the same time. They want you to build, but they also want you to tear down parts of the city to make roads and improve transportation. They want you to fight crime (everything decays into slums), but they don’t want to pay for more police officers. There’s no real answer for problems like that.

And if you become too unpopular, you’re thrown out of office and you lose the game.

I learned that politics is an unforgiving game. Once you mess up, it’s hard to get back on your feet.

In a recession, you can’t borrow money to buy anything that could jump-start the economy. You have to wait for a whole year to go by to get tax money to pay off your debts. But, during that recession period, the more you spend on the city the deeper you get into debt.

The least painful way to get out of the recession is by raising taxes, but there go your popularity and your people. So then you have to raise taxes even more.

On top of all that, there are disasters built into the game. When disaster strikes, you are supposed to handle it. The main expense when a disaster hits is reorganizing the city’s main utilities. If, let’s say, a big fire burns up one of your power plants plus a sewage treatment plant and a large industrial zone, you must decide whether to merely buy new ones or replace them with more modernized ones. Modern utilities would be more expensive in the short term but would help the city in the long term.

There is such a fine line between glorious prosperity and utter chaos. And the way the game is played, you can’t be sure what the outcome of any decision will be.

It was too much for me. I switched to a much easier game called Iron Helix. All you have to do is stop a robot on a spaceship from burning you to a crisp, then save a planet from destruction.