Elias Crim is the founding editor of Online Access Magazine and is a publishing executive in Chicago. He is a regular commentator for IntellectualCapital.com. His e-mail address is eliascrim@intellectualcapital.com.

My thirteen-year-old niece Anna, who knows her way around a PC keyboard, had a birthday recently. I asked her what she got. "An ant colony," she informed me happily.

The virtual earth

Oh, great, I thought, remembering those tacky clear plastic terrariums I used to have as a kid until I broke one on the kitchen floor.

SimAnt Screenshot

"No, not live ants. It's a computer game where you pretend you are an ant in the back yard. You have to help defend the colony against the spiders and lawn chemicals and stuff."

Turns out a company in Walnut Creek, California called Maxis has been very successful in the last few years producing simulations of various things, including aquariums, human cities and even the earth itself.

You make 'em; you break 'em

These software games are interesting partly because of their double nature. On the one hand, they are a light-weight method of learning a certain amount of biology or city planning notions. SimCity 2000, for example, gives you the hypothetical power to create your own city, within the same kind of guidelines that, say, Mayor Giuliani wrestles with every day.

On the other hand, once you've created your utopian landscape, you can buy another game called Streets of SimCity, where you drive a simulated "muscle car, dangerously fast sports car or lethal bread truck" through a landscape of head-on collisions and commuter shootouts.

Similarly, while SimLife allows you to "create exotic plants and animals, then turn them loose in a custom-designed ecosystem," a related game makes you into "a genetic engineer whose creations have been turned to evil use." You're then supposed to design, mutate and breed "powerful fighting creatures and strategically deploy them to save the world."

These simulations -- in both their high-minded and low-minded versions -- are the leading consumer edge of yet another wave of cyber-megalomania, this time in the form of something called A-Life (for artificial life). While Maxis does not, so far as I know, make any explicit connections between its products and the A-Life movement, one blurb for their SimLife product hints, "Breaking the barriers between games and simulations, playing and learning-even between machines and life..."

If a virtual tree falls in a forest ...

As people these days are capable of convincing themselves of almost anything, A-Lifers are convinced that their computers are creating more than mere simulations of vital activity. These "independent" thinkers -- they appear to have liberated themselves from scientific method, for example -- maintain that they have created software "organisms" that deserve classification as living beings, a growing catalog of extremely pitiful artifacts referred to as "critters."

A better description of a digital organism is simply a self-replicating program not unlike a computer "virus," except that the biological metaphor is now stretched to the breaking point. (This error began when DNA was first described in terms of genetic "code," setting in motion what may prove to be a fateful and misplaced scientific metaphor, that of human intelligence as essentially like software and life as a collection of "algorithms.")

Thus, my niece's game includes as a working principle the idea that while a single ant is not intelligent, an ant colony taken together displays intelligence. That is, from a collection of small software pieces you can construct a much more sophisticated system. Ultimately, in fact, you can create a (non-carbon-based) form of life itself.

So long as you utterly redefine the word life, however. Not too many serious entomologists, I suspect, would acknowledge the SimAnt instruction manual's description of the game ("a highly redundant, fault-tolerant system") as particularly insightful about insect life.

After all, "fault-tolerant," I discovered refers to one of the game's rules, as Anna explained it to me: "In SimAnt, when you die, you are instantly brought back to life."

This option is also available with computer "pets," another combination of digital silliness and cultural disorientation peculiar, it seems, to our times. One Web Site for such virtual animals is running a survey with the question, "Should virtual pets die?" The same site offers cyber-pets for "adoption" if you send in a check for $19.95.

Even my niece can see through that one.