WHEN our children were a lot younger, I recall a period of incessant demand for a computer game which I thought was called "Sin City".

"All our friends have got it, Dad. It's wicked. Go on, you can afford it."

All the usual stuff to persuade Dad to give in. But I resisted. I don't regard myself as a prude, but I did think they were too young for anything called "Sin City", and I couldn't for the life of me work out how, if it were true, that their friends' parents -- who all seemed pretty respectable to me -- could have thought that anything called "Sin City" was suitable for their eight to ten year olds.

I then discovered that these parents had not in fact started to dally on the fringes of who knows what, but that I had got entirely the wrong end of the stick.

The game was not called "Sin City" at all, but "Sim City", short for "simulated city" and that it was a remarkably intelligent and entirely wholesome game in which participants built their own city.

The educative part of the game was -- and is -- that the players learnt that nothing was free, and in building their city they had to take account of the resources used, not only the cash spent, but water, power, sewage and pollution. And I even joined in the game myself -- until the cries of "God, Dad, you're slow" or "that's against the rules".

I haven't played "Sim City" for years but last Thursday I saw a full size live model of it -- on an official visit to Kazakhstan.

"Kazakh where?" Well, Kazakhstan is a new country, only independent since 1999. It's in central Asia, between the Caspian Sea and China, and it's huge. It's the size of all of Western Europe put together -- twelve times the land area of the UK, and with a population of around 20 million. It was under the Russian Tsars, and then the old Soviet Union until the latter collapse in the late 1980s.

When it was part of the USSR its capital was right in the southeast corner, in Almaty. The wrong place, thought the President (then and now) Nazarbaev. So he decided in 1997 simply to move the capital roughly to the centre of this vast land, to a junction town called Aqmola -- which for good measure he renamed Astana.

So there I was on Thursday. It was so cold. You know how it can feel at Ewood Park on a bitterly cold and grim Saturday afternoon, the mist is coming up from the River Darwen, we're losing and you're shivering? That's warm, by Astana standards. It was well below minus 20 degrees C there last week, and it can be below minus 40 degrees C (much much colder than your freezer).

But there, rising up on this windswept plain, is a new city. They showed me the model (which look just like a 3D version of Sim City), took me up a tower to view progress. Much of it is a very large building site at present, like the British New Town of the 50s. But a lot of it is finished, and over time it will mature into quite a graceful capital.

I went to Kazakhstan not to experience their weather, nor to admire their architecture, but because the central Asian republics, of which Kazakhstan is the largest in size and population, are increasingly important to us in the west. They have great natural resources - oil, gas, minerals - to which we need access, as our own North Sea supplies run down. Their economy is growing, and could be an important market for British goods and services. Whilst there, I talked about prospects for the British aerospace industry -- of direct relevance to North East Lancashire.

More than this, though, Kazakhstan is strategically important. It's relatively stable and becoming more democratic, in a region with more troubles than most, including Afghanistan to the south.

The days when there were "far away lands of which we know little" (a late 1930s reference to Czechoslovakia) have gone. It's not only computer games and architecture which have gone global, but terrorism and wider threats to our security. So strengthening partners like Kazakhstan matters to us as much as it does to them.