I’ve written at length on this topic once before, but never from this perspective:
Your respectful gardener might know a godawful lot about horticulture, aesthetics, flower-arranging, and whatnot. He might spend many a diverting hour puttering about in his (or her) garden, getting it just so. He might be positively evangelical about good and bad gardening practices. He might even corner people at cocktail parties and bore them to tears with soliloquies on the subject. But there’s one thing he won’t do: He won’t climb over the stone wall onto his neighbor’s property and rip up his neighbor’s garden. Even if he could plant a better one, he knows he has no right to do so. It’s simply not his garden to tend.
The two approaches show up all the time, and they don’t always break down along strict ideological lines. Generally speaking, though, your SimCity player will be a strong believer in government — with the crucial proviso that someone like him is in charge.
In a recent letter to The New York Times, for instance, a physician wrote: “Experience has shown that consumers do not always use their freedom to make healthy choices. So a regulation that is based on science and in the best interests of the consumer should not be interpreted as an unwarranted intrusion into personal lifestyle choices.”
That is the SimCity approach to policy in a nutshell: If some people choose poorly, then other, wiser people should appoint themselves God, and take the choice away. The respectful gardener, on the other hand, would first ask himself if he has any business climbing over the wall and dictating other people’s food consumption.
Advise, yes. Dictate, no.
I love playing wargames. Not the wargames in the sense of Doom, Wolfenstein, or Call of Duty. But wargames, the old Avalon Hill types where there are chits and counters, dice and rules, arguments over said rules, grand strategies and broken alliances.
Mrs. Kenney, on the other hand, is not a wargamer. She is a gardener and loves to spend time fixing up plants and making things grow. Our house has a little courtyard (it’s shaped like a C) that was a key selling point when we bought it, and already it has flowers while the rest of the yard desperately needs cleaning.
Now I enjoy gardening too. I have recently treated my tools to a nice, warm and dry set of storage sheds. Keeping them in the sheds protects them from the elements, meaning they don’t get rusty or the colors on them don’t fade on them, keeping them in tip-top condition. It also means they’re locked up at night, keeping them safe and it also keeps my garden nice and tidy. The last thing I want to be doing when gardening is tripping over all of my equipment. I especially enjoy it when it consists of plants I can place, leave, forget about, and either harvest later or enjoy for many years. Peas and bulbs, that sort of thing. If you’re looking for a place to get all your gardening needs and products, look into garden site and other similar websites.
Which only leaves me more time for playing my little wargames! Or spending countless hours playing Civilization IV while my wife shakes her head. I have no problem with this, as even Jonathan and Matthew now are starting to ask questions and “play along”. Multiplayer Civ IV is soon on the horizon.
Sim City 4 is a good game as well… but there is a “deus ex machina” aspect to most of these games that allow the player to asume the role of the deus in the Sim City machine. Sim City always bothered me, mostly because there was simply no room for free market economics. Drop tax rates to nothing, and a city falls apart. Raise taxes, businesses thrive? Pfft.
Almost nothing gets done unless someone (i.e. you) deems it necessary from on high, using taxpayer dollars to do it. So if you need a baseball stadium, you build it. Libraries? No one dontes it, you build it. Education? Better start raising taxes for the kids.
At least in Civilization, there is a tradeoff for free market economics, and penalties for other systems. Sure you have to build libraries and universities still, but the populace builds them faster (or slower) depending on your tech rate and civics. I can accept that.
But all of this diverges. What’s the difference between gamers and gardeners? If some of you gamers fancy learning more about it, check out california lawn care. They are informative. Bart Hinkle over at the RTD brings my rambling rant to a point in an opinion piece I will laminate and stick to the fridge, the difference between the god-like masters of Sim City environments and the deistic free-marketeers that are gardeners:
OK, it’s a simplistic analogy now beaten to within an inch of its life. The world’s a complex place — and it needs SimCity players to manage it.
But for every SimCity player there should be a respectful gardener to whisper in his ear: ‘Is this really your garden to tend?’
This is a great article everyone should get a chance to read. I’m sure it will be a conversation piece in the Kenney household this weekend.