What is Balance of the Planet?

Intended as a learning tool for adults, Balance of the Planet is an ecological-simulation game with the player cast in the role of a UN administrator responsible for improving the ecology by levying taxes on polluting industries and setting subsidies for energy research, family planning, and other programs.

Balance of the Planet has three levels of play. Level One, the main interface to the game, is essentially a spreadsheet where you click on various tax or subsidy items. You are then shown a screen (the Beef Tax screen, for example) where you drag a slide bar to niise or lower a tax or subsidy. After all the variables are set, you select Execute Policies from the Game menu. Suddenly it’s five years later and you go to the Results screen to find out the effects of your policies. Usually the results are rather grim. Chris Crawford, the designer of both this program and the popular Balance of Power, notes in the manual that it is difficult to “win” the game at the Level One stage due to the state the world is already in. After some experimentation (be sure to tax those evil CFCs to the max!) you’ll get some improvements in the state of the ecology, but you’ll mexst likely get the soul-shivering message that millions have starved to death during your administration.

Button, Button. That's Not the Button

After you’ve experimented for a while and failed miserably, you’ll want to explore the HyperCard stack that describes many of the planet’s problems. Although the individual cards have a pleasing appearance, with color borders showing interrelated scenes from nature, the scenes themselves and the arrows pointing from one scene to another were confusing, because I expected them to be HyperCard buttons but they are simply illustrations. None of the small square illustrations are buttons, and there is no “click on text” instruction to tell you that the text fields are the only buttons.

After I finally found the cards that explain the various ecological relations, I thought, “Oh, here’s all the information on how the taxes and subsidies work, and how the parts of the simulated ecology affect each other.” Not so. Each card discusses a pollutant, an industry, or a species, but typically doesn’t help you understand how the simulatitjn really works. For instance, does the subsidy category Nuclear Research mean research on building higher-capacity power plants, on making weapons, or on cleaning up nuclear waste? All of these require nuclear research. The problem is, you don’t know whether you are subsidizing research on safety, efficiency, weapons, or all of the above. When you get to the card that explains nuclear technology, it explains some of the benefits and detriments of nuclear energy but doesn’t say anything about how your research dollars are being used. Surely if you were the UN administrator responsible for saving the planet you would have access to that information. The same lack of information exists with the other energy-research subsidies, although several of the other subsidies (for example, Debt for Nature) are well explained.

The most obvious way to find out the gross effects of any one of the more than 20 variables is just to slog it out with the empirical method: change only one variable to its maximum value, step through all nine stages of the game, note the results, start over, change the same variable to its minimum value, and repeat the process. Although it might work, this is too much like backing up your hard disk.

Balance of the Planet has two other levels of play. At Level Two you can set the game to run using one of the four different world biases: Industrialist, ProNuclear, Environmentalist, and ThirdWorld.

The Industrialist bias is easy to win because the basic assumpiion is that there is “regally no problem, it’s just a matter of fine-tuning.” The ProNuclear bias simulates a world in which nuclear powder is essentially safe. The Environmentalist bias is extremely difficult to win because of the seriousness and multiplexity of problems challenging the environment. The ThirdWorld bias puts the greatest value on preventing starvation anywhere in the world. At Level 3, you can create your own biases and save them.

The World Turned Upside-Down

I found it strange that Balance of the Planet lets you alter reality in some unrealistic ways, but prevents you from taking a longer-term point of view. That means you can change reality so that coal smoke is not a prxjblem, but you can’t look at the really long-term results of your policies because the game always ends after nine turns that represent a total of 45 years.

But I think the main problem with Balance of the Planet is that, one way or another, it will fail to hold the interest of all but a few players. Crawford states in his introduction to the user’s manual that the game was not designed for children, and it is certain that very few children would remain interested in the spreadsheetlike screen. Unfortunately, adults too will find the game and its limited interface boring and unnecessarily difficult to understand. And most of the pure ecological information is not new to anyone who reads a newspaper regularly. It is also easy to lose track of your (original destination while navigating through the highly interrelated topics in the HyperCard stack.

Ultimately, trying to “play” Balance of the Planet is like plowing through a mystery novel whose writer does not give the reader enough meaningful clues. You can identify the ecological villains immediately, but the whys and hows of the complex plot amain mastly unsolved. The many problems of the planet’s ecology are expounded upon but not dynamically illustrated. The bottom line is that Balance of the Planet needed either a truly daunting amount of work in its design and execution or a less ambitious design with a better chance of achieving the goals of playability and edification.

Moran, Tom. (November 1990). Balance of the Planet 1.0. Macworld. (pgs. 227-228).

Download Balance of the Planet for Mac

Architecture

Motorola 68K

Compatibility notes

Emulating this? It could probably run under: Basilisk II