The only thing dorkier than attending an event at a think tank is playing a video game, and I am here at the Brookings Institution’s offices in Dupont Circle to do both.
At the front desk a woman wearing a captain’s hat signs me in. When I sit down after helping myself to a plate of crackers and samosas and an Amstel Light, I notice that the table is covered with seashells and little buttons emblazoned with the logo of Fiscal Ship, the game that is making its debut at tonight’s reception.
Fiscal Ship, a joint production of Brookings, the Wilson Center, and various other nonprofits, is being advertised as a strategy title that addresses the problem of federal spending. Government simulation is not a new theme in the video game world: Sim City, Civilization, and Age of Empires are among the most popular franchises in gaming history. Most games in this sub-genre have been about maintaining the frontiers of the Roman Empire with aqueducts and quinqueremes or uniting Japan during the upheaval of the Sengoku via ninja assassinations. Some have been more prosaic. Players of 1993’s Shadow President had to serve as commander-in-chief, managing the dissolution of the Soviet Union and winning the Gulf War while getting reelected, a pretty tall order when you consider that in real life George H.W. Bush managed to pull off only two of these things. A title focused solely on bringing the debt-to-GDP ratio to an acceptable level by the year 2041 per Congressional Budget Office estimates is probably a first, however.
The woman who sits next to me looks like a cross between Miss Frizzle of Magic School Bus fame and my Marxist Latin instructor from college. I want to ask her what her other favorite PC games are, but she pretends I don’t exist and starts chatting with another woman about her homemade rosé. Neither of them is a fan of the Woodbridge Chardonnay on offer tonight. "It’s very oaky." I assume this is code for "costs four dollars for a bottle." When I come back from a smoke break my companion is on her third plate of snacks. She eats her chocolate chip cookie using a fork.
A video plays on the screen in front of us. Everyone quiets down, and we watch Alice Rivlin, Ben Bernanke, a woman who might be Janet Yellen, a guy in a radio booth whom I don’t recognize at all, and various other luminaries answer their cellphones. The lighting is dramatic and so is the music. Then we hear a voiceover: "In a world where rising national debt threatens to overtake all we hold dear, the nation’s greatest minds are being called upon to save the day—" Suddenly there is the sound of a turntable scratching a record. A woman with long brown hair wearing another captain’s hat starts talking. "Actually, we use a combination of tax and spending policies to bring the long-term debt down to about today’s levels." Then it’s the voice actor again. "Yeah, like I said, do they have what it takes to get the job done before it’s too late? Do you? Play Fiscal Ship."
People seem to find this video very amusing. "Oooh, this is the extended version!" someone behind me says. I feel impatient. I’m ready to start mashing some buttons.
After the video we are given a brief tutorial on how to play the game. We are told that there are iPads scattered around the room. We are also invited to try playing it on our own devices at fiscalship.org. Fiscal Ship does not work on my phone. Twice I get an "Aw, Snap" message in my browser when I hit the "New Game" button and another one after playing for about a minute. Meanwhile the lines for the iPads look brutally long. I’ve come all the way here for nothing.
I return to my office in Virginia where, to the developers’ credit, the game fires up immediately on my laptop. At last: It’s playtime.
On the first screen I am asked to choose at least one priority from a list of seven: "Fight Climate Change," "Protect the Elderly," "Shrink Government," "Strengthen the Safety Net," "Invest in the Future," "Strengthen National Defense," "Tax Cutter," "Rein in Entitlements," "Reduce Inequality," and "Deficit Hawk." (It’s weird that some but not all of these begin with imperative verbs.) Because "Abolish Infanticide" and "Restore the Stuart Line to the Throne" are not among the options, I go with "Protect the Elderly" (who doesn’t want to do that?), "Strengthen Our National Defense" (ditto), and "Invest in the Future." The more priorities you select, we were told in the tutorial, the more difficult the game is. I guess picking three is the equivalent of playing the game on "Hard" mode as opposed to "Easy" or "Normal."
Next I find myself looking at a series of screens with boxes that say things like "Defense & Foreign Affairs" and "Corporate Taxes." When you click on one of these, additional boxes appear, all of them identical save for the text.
"Increase Social Security Eligibility Age" and "Boost Low-Wage Workers’ Social Security." You can look at these options in any order you want. I look around the screen expecting some kind of clock or maybe a calendar telling me what year or month of my term I’m on. But there is no pressure. I have all the time in the world.
The first thing I decide to do is increase the child and earned-income tax credits. This is sort of expensive, so I have to offset it by adding a 5 percent surcharge on the income of everyone making more than $5 million per year. My guess is that they can afford it. Then I reverse the sequester and then some, boosting the number of active-duty servicemen and upping the size of the Navy fleet. I don’t want to touch Social Security or Medicare, so I poke around and decide to slash things I don’t like—the redundant Department of Homeland Security, farm subsidies—but this doesn’t go very far. I end up soaking the rich some more, imagining with glee small-plates restaurants and yoga studios across the country shutting their doors. No one will be entirely happy with a Walther administration, least of all my wife, who would be furious if she knew that I am cutting funding for NPR.
I wish there was more going on here. The graphics are kind of cute, I guess, but most of what’s here is text. The most exciting things onscreen are the little white line that goes down as I inch closer to the required spending target and the little green stars next to my priorities on the right side of the screen—these at least make popping noises as they appear or disappear based upon my choices. None of the people in sunglasses from the video make appearances. Even the nautical theme is barely played up.
Playing Fiscal Ship from start to victory screen takes about 20 minutes. This doesn’t compare very favorably with, say, Sim City 3000, single games of which can last days, even weeks. Hoping to get more for my buck, I play a few times, spicing things up by roleplaying as various memorable figures from recent American history.
In my second run, I adopt the persona of Rep. Dennis Kucinich. For my priorities I select "Reduce Inequality," "Invest in the Future," and "Fight Climate Change." (I wish I had room for "Strengthen the Safety Net" as well.) Then I double the subsidy for Amtrak and increase infrastructure spending, instantly netting me the elusive three green stars for "Invest in the Future." After that I begin to select every tax increase option available and, bingo, I’ve got my three stars for "Reduce Inequality." The white line begins to drop very quickly, and by the time I complete my triple-whammy of ratcheting up taxes on cigarettes and sugary drinks and imposing a new carbon tax, I’ve already hit my deficit target.
I’m just getting started, though. I still have to double funding for the FDA, expand unemployment benefits, cancel the construction of new carriers and submarines, end the F-35, cut active-duty personnel by half, increase foreign aid, implement free tuition at public colleges and universities and preschools, mandate increased paid family leave, double the EPA budget, and increase funding for the National Institutes of Health. I do all this without the white line getting anywhere near deficit levels—did I break the game’s funding mechanism, or is it possible that this all checks out on paper—and have more up my sleeve, but when I get my third star for "Fight Climate Change," the game ends automatically. I imagine the streets lined with college-educated people singing "Imagine," their lungs full of clean air and their joyful faces lit from the glow of solar-powered streetlights. It is a beautiful future.
For my third play-through, I head in the opposite direction. This time I go full libertarian. I try my best to remember everything that was on the Ron Paul campaign literature I handed out to voting-age relatives at our family Christmas party in 2007. I think I’ve got this. I’m going to "Shrink Government," "Cut Taxes," and become a "Deficit Hawk." No sooner have I selected my three goals than I hear an alarm bell. A message pops up advising me to choose a different course of action. "Looks like you’ve chosen a really tough combination!" it says. "With the policies available, you may not be able to achieve all these goals and bring down the debt to the target." Pshaw, I say. Bring on the revolution, statists!
I hit "Continue." The taxes part is easy. Renewable fuel subsidies are gone in an instant. Then I set a flat income tax rate of 15 percent. The orange line soars up past the top of the screen to infinity and beyond. Boom. Three stars for "Tax Cutter" already! Then it’s bye-bye time for the EPA. When I get to healthcare I hit a brick wall. Where is the "Repeal Everything" button? I don’t want to means test Medicare; I want to dismantle it. I have the same problem with Social Security and food stamps. Instead I settle for slashing benefits across the board in all of these areas—charity will make up for the rest—and cutting spending on law enforcement, the Department of Homeland Security, and infrastructure. Now I’ve got all my stars for "Shrink Government." I run through the screens clicking everything I can that is not a tax or spending increase. I repeat all of my previous moves on military expenditures. The line barely moves. Eventually there is nothing else to do. I am at 14 percent of my deficit goal and have no stars for "Deficit Hawk." It looks as if I’ve accidentally bankrupted the country, but there isn’t a "Game Over" screen. I’m stuck.
That’s when it occurs to me that, unlike in Civilization IV, which I have fond memories of playing as Montezuma (I was usually able to lead the illiterate citizens of my theocracy to a position of total world domination by about A.D. 1000), it doesn’t really make sense for me to be able to make all or even most of these decisions myself. What role am I really supposed to be playing in this role-playing game? Am I the president? What happens if a party other than mine takes control of the Senate and House and shoots down my proposal for cutting funding to NPR? What if the Supreme Court decides that something I’ve done is unconstitutional? What if people are so angry with me that I get kicked out of office at the next election? How about national security consequences? What do I do if North Korea invades South Korea but there aren’t enough troops for me to go to war? A game that incorporated all or even some of these not exactly unforeseeable contingencies would be more realistic and, educationally speaking, more useful. It would also be more fun.
Maybe I’m missing the point here. To the kind of people who might enjoy this game, which is to say, the kind of people who read Congressional Budget Office reports and attend think-tank panels on the pros and cons of block-granting food stamps to the states and bundling Medicare payments for post-acute care, you sometimes get the sense that the human side of politics—elections, deal-making, emotion, patriotism, morality—is a regrettable aberration, a grotesque distraction from the cold mathematical beauty of policy itself, the antiseptic thrill of selecting the perfect utility-maximizing combination of inputs and outputs! If only benevolent tech-savvy youngsters with good taste in graphic design, all of them loaded up on white wine and tapas, were given unlimited power over all three branches of government! No opposition, no messy feelings getting in the way. You know. Just like in a video game.