I want to buy my own country.

Culled from today’s strange but true headlines on another leading brands site, the tiny war port of Sealand in the North Sea is for sale. Not that Britain recognizes it anymore. Hell, they built it around WWII, abandoned it and then a retired general Paddy “Roy” Bates crowned himself Prince and there you go. Yes, I’m ignoring the obvious humor with his name..too easy. Wait..let me spell that with an English accent..humour.

Maybe I should have prefaced the desire to own my own country. Let’s drift back in time to a simpler GUI when computer games actually ran in a DOS environment and Dell was still a decent computer company…1993.

I’m working for an auto leasing division of a major bank, and my boss of all people, shows me this game and has me load it on my system on 5 1/4″ floppies no less. A little something called Sid Meier’s Civilization. I was hooked. First of all, I didn’t have to deposit any quarters into my CPU, and technically I was getting paid to play in my spare time.

I love computer games. I bought my first “computer” in 1974, before Atari was bouncing a ball back and forth between two white paddles. I had the Magnavox Odyssey. It was a console that connected to your television, and you inserted different cartridges depending on your task, or game. For those who know me personally, yes I believe it is still with the stuff in the blue van. Life took me plenty of places quickly, so it wasn’t again until the late seventies, early eighties that I was able to touch a computer again.

Many a weekend night in the tri-state area, when the band of the week was on break at a local Ground Round, my girlfriends and I would play whatever video games they had in the foyer. My favorites were Moon Patrol and Joust. Man, I loved to make that Ostrich fly and jab my opponent. Thankfully, now if you want you can still find the MAME emulators online and play again. But when I wasn’t working, or playing as a Freshette, I was copying computer code from PC Magazine on an old Tandy. The funny thing about that though, was it never worked. You could type code and compile all the live long day, and you still had to wait for the next month’s issue to come out for all the programming corrections. Yeah, except for ACCESS, I refuse to program anymore. But let’s fast forward from 1983 to 1993.

The objective of Civilization is as follows: Develop a great empire from the ground up or in other words: “…to build a legacy that would stand the test of time”. The game begins in 4000 BC, and the players attempt to expand and develop their empires through the ages until modern and near-future times.

In other words, you load the game, the screen is black except for one tiny square of green grass you are standing on. You moved your Commander with your arrow keys. You have limited intelligence, and to win you have to reach Alpha Centauri. Along the way, you have to forge alliances with at least four other computer generated civilizations, battle with them, and gain knowledge through well placed questions. I was addicted, to say the least. I spent months playing this game whenever I could.

Just when you thought you were gaining ground, and everyone was happy, some illness would strike, or a war would break out. I would find myself pondering how to raise taxes to fund the military without forcing my people into poverty, but protecting them at the same time. To be honest, I remember thinking back then, that this game should be mandatory for every person in the US to play, as everyone is an armchair quarterback when it comes to running this country. Another blog, another day, I’ll describe how I’m a Liberpublicrat.

I never did get to finish the game, as the banks were merging and my location was being moved to Philadelphia. The VP wanted me to go, but I had already turned my resignation in. He accepted it with a sneer and that I was a “Mall Chick, and wouldn’t leave the suburbs.” Whatever dude, I wasn’t into Public Transportation and long commutes and yep, I loveeee shopping.

Now this brings me back to present day (editor note: this is still 2007) and the 5,920 square feet for sale. Remarkable enough it has its own national anthem and coinage. It also had a hell of a defense system with radar and armaments. According to the real estate agent (I would love to see the sign) it has eight rooms in each of the two towers, offices, a power generator and a chapel, all with a marvelous sea view. The lure of it all is Autonomy. I’m sure I can get whatever else I need dirt cheap on EBay, they have everything.

But for me, I would be playing the ultimate game of Civilization. I would like to make up my own language just for shits and giggles, something between the African clicking language and the whistling Himalayans’. The idea for the country now is Offshore Banking and a Casino (is there a difference?) but I would go along with that, I do need a local economy to fit into this world.

On a side note I’ve always wanted to eliminate money, and in lieu of that, no one gets paid to play sports, or be a politician. So, if I bought this little country, I could enforce that. But I would love to have a venture, where if you were so inclined, that for a year, you would come and live there, and simulate the game and get a real taste of what Life is all about.

It’s so easy to criticize our government, policies, education, when we are far removed from the pressures of dealing with Third World Countries. By the way, quick quiz..who were the Second World Countries? Ok, hold your Google search, it was the term used for Communist countries but abandoned with the collapse of the Soviet’s regime. In 1952 the term Third World countries came about for anyone not fitting in First World or Second World, though we don’t use the term First World today.

But if I owned Sealand I’d be a Fourth World Country. I think I would have to change the name too, because it sounds like you would only go there to whale watch or save a baby seal. To be honest, I’m not real sure what I would name it, because you have to have a really good name to project the right image. I mean, look at us. United States of America. You know, just hearing our name evokes images of what we have endured to earn that moniker.

The only other country that is just as descriptive to me is The Peoples Republic of China. It may sound good on paper, except for the oppression, high suicide rate and their propensity to kill newborns and steal technology. Then again, everything sounds good in theory, its applying the practical where you get screwed.

Hmmm, so saying that, maybe I’ll save $974,999,947.06 and just buy the game again. Knowing me, I’d probably be bored once I was done decorating the place. So I’ll just say with high hopes, “Tick click clack tic clack toc toc tic.”