Imagine that video games had been invented in the Middle Ages. From dawn to dusk, you have toiled in the fields for your master. Now, curled up next to the smoky fireplace of your flea-infested peasant hut, you turn on your 12th century Xbox and play your favorite game, Call of Chivalry.

Your back is sore and your belly is empty. But playing Call of Chivalry lets you escape into a virtual world where you are hero, not serf. Is your mission to free the oppressed from forced labor and starvation? No, in this game, you fight to uphold the divine right of kings. Your blade draws blood from rebels and rabble-rousers who would dare blaspheme the natural order by giving peasants the right to vote.

During your odyssey, you encounter characters spouting other crazy ideas like the king has no right to impose taxes, or that a wealthy prince should pay than a peasant. In this world, they are deluded souls to be pitied before they are marched away to the madhouse or the gallows.

Does such a game seem bizarre, even repugnant, to a 21st century American? Then consider the reaction of a 12th century peasant, conditioned from birth to submit to authority, to the murder, drugs and prostitution in a game like Grand Theft Auto. He might decide that if the fruits of a thousand years of progress is a game that glorifies thug life, maybe serfdom wasn’t so bad after all.

Games and gamers inevitably reflect the values of their times. If today’s video games are laden with violence and frenetic with high-tech weapons, that is the nature of the society that created them.

But do games change their societies? Rivers of ink have been spilled over whether violence in video games leads to the real thing. Whether the link is true or not, a genre that started with harmlessly batting around a virtual ping-pong ball in the 1970s game Pong, now requires games to carry age ratings to shield children from virtual gore. Some politicians have even called for warning labels that would treat video games like tobacco and alcohol.

Games can be criticized for being too violent, or a brain-dead waste of time. But they are not usually criticized for being political. Games are entertainment, not politics, right?

However, consider the popular computer game Sim City, which first debuted in 1989. In Sim City, you design your metropolis from scratch, deciding everything from where to build roads and police stations to which neighborhoods should be zoned residential or commercial. More than a founder or a mayor, you are practically a municipal god who can shape an urban area with an ease that real mayors can only envy.

Sim City: How to Build a Wealthy City

But real mayors will have the last laugh as you discover that running a city is a lot harder than building one. As the game progresses and your small town bulges into a megalopolis, crime will soar, traffic jams will clog and digital citizens will demand more services from their leaders. Those services don’t come free. One of the key decisions in the game is setting the municipal tax rate. There are different rates for residential, commercial and industrial payers, as well as for the poor, middle-class and wealthy.

Sim City lets you indulge your wildest fiscal fantasies. Banish the IRS and set taxes to zero in Teapartyville, or hike them to 99 percent on the filthy rich in the People’s Republic of Sims. Either way, you will discover that the game’s economic model is based on the famous Laffer Curve, the theoretical darling of conservative politicians and supply-side economists. The Laffer Curve postulates that raising taxes will increase revenue until the tax rate reaches a certain point, above which revenue decrease as people lose incentive to work.

Finding that magic tax point is like catnip for hard-core Sim City players. One Web site has calculated that according to the economic model in Sim City, the optimum tax rate to win the game should be 12 percent for the poor, 11 percent for the middle class and 10 percent for the rich.

In other words, playing Sim City well requires not only embracing supply-side economics, but taxing the poor more than the rich. One can almost see a mob of progressive gamers marching on City Hall to stick Mayor McSim’s head on a pike.

Sim City

Sim City is only a game, yet it is notable how many people involved in economics say it gave them their first exposure to the field. “Like many people of my generation, my first experience of economics wasn’t in a textbook or a classroom, or even in the news: it was in a computer game,” said one prominent financial journalist. Or the gamer who wrote, “SimCity has taught me supply-side economics even before I studied commerce and economics at the University of Toronto.”

Other games also let you tinker with politics and economics. Democracy 3 allows you to configure the government of your choice. The ultra-cynical Tropico is the game where the player—who is El Presidente of a kleptocratic Latin American government—can win by stashing enough loot in his Swiss bank account. In Godsfire, a 1976 boardgame of galactic conquest, players roll dice each turn to see what kind of government rules their empire. Extremist governments only build warships to attack their neighbors, Moderates spend less on defense and more on economic growth and Reactionaries will only spend money on planetary defenses (which also double as domestic riot suppression systems for keeping the citizenry in line).

However, the best example of politics and games is the legendary Civilization, an empire-builder and bestseller since it debuted in 1991. In Civ, the player guides a nation from the Bronze Age to the colonization of space. There are cities to be built, technologies to be researched, wonders such as the Pyramids to be constructed, and of course armies to conquer new frontiers and dangerous rivals.

One reason for Civ’s quarter-century popularity is that it captures the sweep of human progress like no other game. How captivating it is—and this writer spent many a late night being captivated—to watch your nation progress from the invention of the wheel to dispatching starships to Alpha Centauri. Indeed, Civ designer Sid Meier told me last year that parents and teachers have thanked him for getting their children interested in history.

Civ is also addictive because it is the ultimate political sandbox. Players can mix and match ideologies and economic systems to create a nation just the way they like it. You can have an eco-green police state, a pacifist monarchy, a fascist state with freedom of speech or a free-market theocracy. Call it curiosity, megalomania or a touch of control freak, but humans are fascinated by the chance to shape the fabric of an entire society.

Depending on which edition of Civ you play, every political and economic system has strengths and weaknesses. Despotism isn’t efficient but it keeps the cost of running government low, while Bureaucracy is expensive to run but it boosts production and revenue in your capital city. Theocracy gives bonuses to armies (presumably imbued by religious zeal), while Free Religion means a happier population as well as faster technological progress.

Of all the government types, democracy provides the most economic and scientific bonuses; for players who want to win by creating a wealthy, high-tech nation, it’s the political system of choice. The downside of democracies in Civ is that they are more susceptible to war weariness; like America during the Vietnam War, the longer a war lasts, the more likely that citizens will riot in the streets.

On the other hand, for those who prefer to win victory at the point of a sword, authoritarian systems like Fascism, Communism and Theocracy are the way to go. In Civ 3, a Communist empire suffers no war weariness, which means it can fight forever without provoking draft riots. Civ 4’s Fascist government allows creation of the Police State, which boosts military production. Both Fascist and Communist states also get espionage bonuses useful for stealing technologies as well as fomenting rebellions in rival states.

Does all this sound familiar? It should to Americans and Europeans, because it fits the modern Western view of politics so nicely. Democracies are creative and wealthy, but not suited for war. Authoritarian political systems are warlike, not prosperous, and they get their technology by stealing it from the democracies. Translate Civ into a book, and it could serve as a text in an American high school civics class.

At a time when the West is shaken by self-doubt about its values and vitality, how reassuring it is that even space aliens buy into the liberal vision. In Master of Orion 2 and 3, which are Civ-like games of galactic conquest, democratic races such as the Humans who receive scientific and financial bonuses. The insect-like Klackons and their totalitarian government produce more goods than other races, but are less adept at researching new technologies. It’s a wonder the game didn’t name the Klackon homeworld Beijing Prime.

Admittedly, some Civ political depictions are debatable. Communism in Civ 4 increases food and factory production and reduces waste from corruption? Someone should have told this to the Soviets in 1989, or China’s rulers today. Authoritarian regimes can’t create new technologies? Cheery news for Londoners who watched their city destroyed by Nazi V-2 rockets in 1944. Democracies embrace science? In Civ 3, the first nation to discover Darwin’s Theory of Evolution gets a science bonus, a game feature that some Kansas school boards would disapprove of.

What is most remarkable about the politics of Civ is how unremarkable all this seems to an American like myself. Of course, a game should show democracies as being advanced and prosperous. Of course, democracy is evidence that a nation has progressed beyond primitive and brutal form of government. How could it be otherwise?

Yet suppose Civ had been developed in Saudi Arabia. Would theocracy be depicted as the highest form of government? Would free practice of religion be a sign of an enlightened society or a symptom of an immoral one?

Or if Civ had been developed in China, would bureaucracy offer the fastest path to progress? If Sim City were based on the Swedish economic model, wouldn’t the game encourage taxing the wealthy at a higher rate than the poor?

Civilization 5: Democracy for Everyone

Agree or disagree with the political and economic theories in a game, it is important to remember that games that attempt to simulate reality have to make assumptions. When Pentagon wargames conclude that X number of interceptor rockets can shoot down Y number of North Korean missiles, or that Y number of F-22 fighters can destroy Z number of Chinese jets, these conclusions are based on estimates of weapons that that have never been fired in anger, or might not even exist yet. But without making those assumptions, planners cannot test new weapons and strategies short of war.

Civilization 5: North Korea vs. The Rest of the World

The same applies to video games. Sim City could just as easily have gone Keynesian and made higher taxes and public spending the key to a thriving economy. Whether Laffer or Keynes is correct does matter for a real economy, but not a virtual one. What counts is that as an economic simulation, Sim City has to include some kind of tax system; as a game, it has to reward or penalize players for making decisions such as choosing a particular tax rate. Until all economists agree on the One True Tax Rate and all politicians on the One Best Form of Government, games will inevitably favor one set of theories and beliefs over another.

Ultimately, the question boils down to whether games influence political beliefs in the same way that they allegedly induce violence. Just think of all those budding economists playing Sim City, or aspiring politicians and policy-makers building empires in Civilization. “Videogames can disrupt and change fundamental attitudes and beliefs about the world, leading to potentially significant long-term social change,” writes games scholar Ian Bogost in his book Persuasive Games. Bogost co-designed the Howard Dean for Iowa computer game to drum up support for Dean in the 2004 election.

Already, games have become propaganda tools. During last year’s Israel-Gaza conflict, several games were released by supporters of Israel and Hamas. Google ultimately removed them from its app store, while Apple has refused to allow games on the Syrian civil war to be sold on its store. The Pentagon considers the five domains of warfare to be air, land, sea, outer space and cyberspace. Perhaps games will be a sixth.

But the most likely answer for the relationship between video games and politics is that there won’t be a definitive answer at all. Proving causality between virtual and real violence is hard enough, but at least violence manifests itself in some measurable physical action such as murder. How do you prove that someone changed their vote from Democrat to Republican because they played Sim City? How do you prove that playing Civ converted someone to a realist, or a neo-con, or a progressive belief in politics?

Beliefs are the most intangible and fluid of things to measure. They are formed and shaped by all sorts of forces, from parents and coworkers to books and television ads. However, high-level strategy games like Civ and Sim City have one unique attribute: They let us get hands-on with things we could never hope to control in real life.

It’s not that most of us will ever blast terrorists or fly jet fighters like we do in video games. However, we can partly experience the real thing by going to a shooting range or taking flying lessons. But guiding a nation over 5,000 years of history? Experimenting with political and economic system to find some optimum blend? Tinkering with the growth and financing of a major city like some kind of civic watchmaker? No president or dictator has that kind of power.

But the ordinary gamer does. How realistic the experience is can be argued. Nonetheless, at a time when so many feel powerless at the hands of vast and impersonal forces that seem to control our lives, from spy agencies to big corporations, virtual reality may be the closest we can come to feeling like we can shape the world as we would like it.

If games have the potential to change political and economic beliefs, then they may indeed become a part of the political process. The Xbox and the keyboard may yet become as important as the voting machine.