Emergence
by Steven Johnson · 329pp · 88,954 words
date it back to the day in the early nineties when Will Wright released a program called SimCity, which would go on to become one of the best-selling video-game franchises of all time. SimCity would also inaugurate a new phase in the developing story of self-organizing: emergent behavior was
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was also something you could build, something you could interact with, and something you could sell. While SimCity came out of the developing web of the bottom-up worldview, it suggested a whole new opening: SimCity was a work of culture, not science. It aimed to entertain, not explain. Ten years after
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Wright’s release of SimCity, the world now abounds with these man-made systems: online stores use them to recognize our cultural tastes; artists use them to create a new
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a quick look at the software best-seller lists will tell you that city simulations are more than just an educational device. Will Wright’s SimCity franchise has now sold millions of copies; it’s likely that the number of virtual towns created using Wright’s tools exceeds the number of
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ant colonies and embryos. Much has been made of the fact that you can’t ever “win” at SimCity, but it’s probably more important to note that you don’t really “play” SimCity either, at least the way we talk about playing conventional games. Users grow their virtual cities, but the
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connected to other cells, and that alter their behavior in response to the behavior of other cells in the network. A given city block in SimCity possesses a number of values—the price of the land, say, or its pollution level. As in a real-world city, these values change in
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drops in value, and the eastern neighbor develops a higher crime rate, then the current block may well grow a little less valuable. (A sophisticated SimCity player might counter the decline by placing a police station within ten blocks of the depressed area.) The algorithms themselves are relatively simple—look at
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system with a fluidity and definition that can only be described as lifelike. The resemblance to our ants and embryos is striking. Each block in SimCity obeys a set of rigid instructions governing its behavior, just as our cells consult the cheat sheet of our genes. But those instructions are dependent
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towns and suburbs in basic ways.” She was writing, of course, about real-world cities, but she could just as easily have been talking about SimCity’s networked algorithms, or the teeming colonies of Arizona harvester ants. Economists and urban sociologists have also been experimenting with models that can simulate the
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’s caveats are important, and as we have already seen, cities involve countless elements that are the exact opposites of those bottom-up systems. (Even SimCity has a mayor!) But the fact that humans think for themselves, and the fact that city organization relies on both hierarchies and heterarchies, does not
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to flock. There is a more radical solution to this problem, though, and it’s most evident in the god-games genre. Classic games like SimCity—or 1999’s best-selling semi-sequel The Sims, which lets game players interact with simulated personalities living in a small neighborhood—have dealt with
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“grow” a certain resource, for the simple reason that there are no preordained levels to follow. You define your own hurdles as you play. In SimCity, you decide whether to build a megalopolis or a farming community; whether to build an environmentally correct new urbanist village or a digital Coketown. Of
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the nursing home, for the thin line between too much order and too little. They have a feel for the edges. PART THREE Screenshot from SimCity 3000 (Courtesy of Maxis) Can a selectional system be simulated? The answer must be split into two parts. If I take a particular animal that
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in some fundamental way. Software will recognize our habits, anticipate our needs, adapt to our changing moods. The first generation of emergent software—programs like SimCity and StarLogo—displayed a captivatingly organic quality; they seemed more like life-forms than the sterile instruction sets and command lines of early code. The
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to the red-light district. Certainly that has been the case with emergent software. Gamers have been experimenting with self-organizing systems at least since SimCity’s release in 1990, but the digital porn world remains, as it were, a top-down affair—despite the hype about putatively “interactive” DVDs. In
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publication, the Net will be teeming with the digital inhabitants of Will Wright’s latest creation, The Sims Online. A fusion of The Sims and SimCity, the game allows players to collectively build cities as part of a massive network collaboration. Unlike either previous game, all the citizens of the world
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bundles called fascicles. When they reach other neighborhoods and sheets they stimulate target cells.” Edelman, 1992, 64. Because each cell: Twenty years before Wright released SimCity, Thomas Schelling sketched out its basic principles in a decidedly low-tech game-theory experiment: “Get a roll of pennies, a roll of dimes, a
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, Mary Wollstonecraft, 125 shopping malls, 90, 92 sidewalk culture, 51, 91–97, 99, 146, 147, 148, 230–31 silk weavers, 101, 102, 104–7, 124 SimCity, 66, 87–89, 98, 186, 205, 208, 229 Sims, The, 186–89, 209–10, 229 simulations, computer: of aggregation, 16–17, 23, 59–63, 163
The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class?and What We Can Do About It
by Richard Florida · 9 May 2016 · 356pp · 91,157 words
Square, the computer gaming giant Electronic Arts unveiled Cities of Tomorrow, the latest addition to its hugely successful SimCity franchise. Rather than racking up points the usual way, by killing bad guys, players of SimCity games take charge of cities. In the role of mayor, they have the power to change things
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): 1–15. CHAPTER 2: WINNER-TAKE-ALL URBANISM 1. Geoff Manaugh and Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan, “Sneak Peek of SimCity: Cities of Tomorrow,” Gizmodo, October 11, 2013, http://gizmodo.com/sneak-peek-of-simcity-cities-of-the-future-1443653857. 2. As far as I can tell, the phrase superstar cities was introduced in
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of, 104–108, 107 (table) wages of, 31–32 Shanghai, 44 (table), 45 Sharkey, Patrick, 117 Silicon Valley, 42, 45, 47, 175 Silva, Rohan, 36 SimCity, 13 Singapore, 16 (table), 17, 42 skyboxification, 103 Smith, Adam, 26 Smith, Patti, 35 social safety net, 204, 209–210 Social Security Act, 204 SoHo
Joel on Software
by Joel Spolsky · 1 Aug 2004 · 370pp · 105,085 words
testing every old program they could find with Win-dows 95. Jon Ross, who wrote the original version of SimCity for Windows 3.x, told me that he accidentally left a bug in SimCity where he read memory that he had just freed. Yep. It worked fine on Win-dows 3.x
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, because the memory never went anywhere. Here's the amazing part: On beta versions of Windows 95, SimCity wasn't working in testing. Microsoft tracked down the bug and added specific code to Windows 95 that looks for
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SimCity. If it finds SimCity running, it runs the memory allocator in a special mode that doesn't free memory right away. That's the kind of obsession with backward
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to them. The only thing you can return is Windows XP.) I first heard about this from one of the developers of the hit game SimCity, who told me that there was a critical bug in his application: it used memory right after freeing it, a major no-no that happened
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right away. The testers on the Windows team were going through various popular applications, testing them to make sure they worked OK, but SimCity kept crashing. They reported this to the Windows developers, who disassembled SimCity, stepped through it in a debugger, found the bug, and added special code that checked if
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SimCity was running, and if it did, ran the memory allocator in a special mode in which you could still use memory after freeing it. __________ 5.
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–2nd by Naked Chef Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations (Austin)–2nd mechanism, separating policy from Media Lab memory for bloatware memory management automatic–2nd SimCity mentoring difficulties–2nd meta tags Metcalfe's Law methodology limitations Michelman, Eric Michelson, Amos microeconomics Micropro blunders Microserfs (Coupland) Microsoft. See also Windows bill presentment
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in functional specifications showing off, screen shots for showstoppers shrinkwrap–2nd side notes in functional specifications sign-up feature in Juno Silence is Golden value SimCity program, 2nd–2nd Simonyi, Charles–2nd simplicity in functional specifications–2nd illusion of–2nd in software schedules size of bloatware–2nd skills, program manager smart
All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Video Games Conquered Pop Culture
by Harold Goldberg · 5 Apr 2011 · 329pp · 106,831 words
’s size. But it was still there. While there was evil and violence everywhere, like Doom gone urban and hyperreal, it was The Sims and SimCity as well. It was life in a blender spawned by game genres in a blender. But as the game continued to pile on the sales
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, no videogame equivalent of a gold watch. In actuality, the higher-ups at EA had known for nearly a year that the brilliant designer of SimCity and The Sims was going to leave, but they had kept it a secret from stockholders, industry analysts, and, especially, the press. Outside of the
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John Cheever, and even the transcendent hope of Ralph Waldo Emerson. In that sense the moniker “God Games” was a misnomer. Wright’s creations, especially SimCity and The Sims, were more about the human condition, about evolution and about the meaning of play, than they were about simply taking the role
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lend an ear. Everything looked brighter then. Just as Henk Rogers envisioned the unlimited potential in Alexey Pajitnov’s Tetris, Braun saw the potential in SimCity (the game’s new name). He and Wright went on to retrieve the rights from Broderbund and to raise $50,000 to start their new
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publisher took their toll; every company he and Braun met with agreed with Broderbund. Yet, in 1989, it was actually Broderbund that agreed to copublish SimCity with Maxis. Broderbund had just launched an experimental affiliate program that allowed Wright and Braun to keep 80 percent of the profits, instead of just
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15 percent of the royalties, and was eager for guinea pigs. Every game would be given on consignment to Broderbund, which would distribute SimCity. Maxis would do the rest of the work, including boxing the game and manufacturing the disks. Initially, Wright and Maxis sold the game themselves at
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easily handled all technical support. But then, the media came to the rescue in the form of Newsweek. Writer Bill Barol said glowingly that experiencing SimCity was “thrilling,” that it gave you “the exhilarating ability to change your environment.” When Newsweek’s photographer found Maxis to be housed in Braun’s
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was reviewed by a major newsweekly (the first two were reviews of the interactive text adventures Zork and A Mind Forever Wandering in 1985). The SimCity review was a sign that games were slowly going mainstream and legit. Suddenly, Wright was the “it” designer, and
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SimCity became the Game of the Year. It had earned approximately $3 million by the time Christmas rolled around. As the PC version sold 500,000
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, but SimRefinery for Chevron eventually brought in $75,000 to the coffers.) The hits just kept on coming for Wright. Thoughtful hits. Yes, there were SimCity sequels, which were Maxis’s bread and butter. But there was also SimAnt: The Electronic Ant Colony, based on the studies of the Pulitzer Prize
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about games. While the company netted a healthy $6 million that year, there was no way it could continue on that course, because the next SimCity was years away from hitting shelves. In 1996, bean counters forced Wright and his crew to release a quartet of generally unfinished, unpolished, sometimes untested
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for blood.” But EA recognized Wright’s brilliance and hired some of the country’s brightest designers to help him out. In 1999, they released SimCity 3000, starring the shoot-from-the-hip former mayor of New York City Ed Koch. By that time, Trip Hawkins was no longer involved in
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a bigmouthed star with a series of bestselling books and was featured semiregularly on NBC’s Saturday Night Live. He was the perfect celebrity for SimCity 3000. In part, it was SimAnt that gave Wright the idea for his next series of games. But Wright was also inspired by mathemagician Martin
Overcomplicated: Technology at the Limits of Comprehension
by Samuel Arbesman · 18 Jul 2016 · 222pp · 53,317 words
must really know what it was doing. But he didn’t. He got curious, and after some research he discovered—as any good fan of SimCity 2000 would know—that this was actually an inside joke, a nonsensical phrase inserted into the game that only sounds like it means something. Ever
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be a powerful path to insight, and is a skill that needs cultivation. For example, the computer game SimCity, a model of sorts, gives its users insights into how a city works. Before SimCity, I doubt many outside the realm of urban planning and civil engineering had a clear mental model of
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27–May 2, 2013 (New York: ACM Digital Library, 2013): 1863–72. the computer game SimCity: For more on SimCity and how it can shed some light on how a complicated system works, read Doug Bierend, “SimCity That I Used to Know: On the Game’s 25th Birthday, a Devotee Talks with Creator
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Will Wright,” re:form, October 17, 2014, https://medium.com/re-form/simcity-that-i-used-to-know-d5d8c49e3e1d. Near the end of Average Is Over: Cowen, Average Is Over, 227–28. Cowen is speculating specifically about the
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path, 74–75 parsing of, 73–74 sewage systems, complexity of, 101 Shakespeare, William, 55 Shatner, William, 160 Shepard, Alan, 200 sickle-cell anemia, 128 SimCity, 159, 166 simulations, see scientific models software: accretion in, 37–38, 41–42, 44 in automobiles, 10–11, 13, 45, 65, 100, 174 branch points
Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Popular Culture Is Making Us Smarter
by Steven Johnson · 5 Apr 2006 · 250pp · 9,029 words
myself on a family vacation with my seven-year-old nephew, and on one rainy day I decided to introduce him to the wonders of SimCity 2000, the legendary city simulator that allows you to play Robert Moses to a growing virtual metropolis. For most of our session, I was controlling
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. My nephew would be asleep in five seconds if you popped him down in an urban studies class room, but somehow an hour of playing SimCity taught him that h igh tax rates in industrial areas can stifle development. That's a powerful learning experience, for reasons we 'll ex plore
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you 've reached certain predefined levels , either of population, money, or popularity. You can build pretty much any kind of environment you want play ing SimCity, but you can't build a baseball stadium until you have fifty thousand residents. Similarly, Grand Theft Auto allows players to drive aimlessly through a
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in from the right when you fi rst land on the planet. When my nephew suggested lowering the industrial tax rate during my demo of SimCity, he was probing the game's physics. I had explained the offici al rules to him: players are allowed to alter the tax rates for
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best-seller lists. The two genres that historically have dominated the charts are both forms of complex simulation: either sport sims, or GOD games like SimCity or Age of Empires. The most pop ular game of all time is the domestic saga The Sims. (The closest thing you' l l see
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-world diamond . ) As for the social and historical simulations, j ust think back to my nephew learning about the effects of industrial taxes while playing SimCity. The violent games may generate the most outrage, but the games that people reliably line up to buy are the ones that require the most
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diets are concerned for all of us young, old, or somewhere in the middle-the commonsense rule still applies : moderation in everything. However laud able SimCity is, if you've spent the last week locked in your study playing it, you should pick up a book for a change. (And prefe
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are not water molecules; they come into the world thanks to the passions and talents of individual humans. Hill Street Blues needed its Steven Bochco, SimCity its Wil l Wright. These biogra phical explanations are not without value, but they are only part of the story. (And of course they are
Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It
by M. Nolan Gray · 20 Jun 2022 · 252pp · 66,183 words
of that journey? Part I CHAPTER 1 Where Zoning Comes From For many Americans, their singular experience with city planning is a little game called SimCity. First released in 1989 and developed by legendary game designer Will Wright, the game invites players to plan their own cities. More of a sandbox
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than a conventional game with points or levels, each new “round” of SimCity presents players with a virgin field, the power to map out streets and zoning, and the freedom to do whatever they like from there. Poor
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these zoning decisions unfold without the pesky intervention of local politics; there are no ornery community boards or NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) litigants in SimCity. The player-as-zoning-tyrant acts alone, beneficently applying their technical expertise to advance the general welfare of their growing city. As you might expect
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, SimCity leaves a lot to be desired from a realism perspective: zoning isn’t really about separating incompatible uses or coordinating densities, and local interest groups
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nothing else from this chapter, remember this: the comprehensive use segregation and density controls envisioned by zoning are a relatively recent invention. Far from the SimCity fantasy of merely regulating noxious uses or rationalizing growth, zoning’s purpose from the start has been to prop up incumbent property values, slow the
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gone bad. Its purpose is not to address traditional externalities or coordinate growth with infrastructure, as suggested by zoning defenders and envisioned in the sanitized SimCity version of city planning. On the contrary, zoning is a mechanism of exclusion designed to inflate property values, slow the pace of new development, segregate
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sewer systems, 15, 84, 134, 174, 191 shadow permitting process, 61 Shoag, Daniel, 77 Shoup, Donald, 114 Siegan, Bernard, 152, 155 Silicon Valley, 67, 72 SimCity, 11–12, 14, 30 Simplified 3D density gradient of metropolitan San Antonio, 70 single-family zoning, 24, 28, 57, 97, 111–113 single-room occupancies
You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All
by Adrian Hon · 14 Sep 2022 · 371pp · 107,141 words
course, material gain. This means there’s no bright line for what counts as gamification—it’s more of a family resemblance, encompassing everything from SimCity and Peloton to frequent-flyer programmes and Chinese social credit systems. It also means that one can find examples of gamification going back decades and
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and publishing of board games much cheaper than before. Locke might have admired educational board games, but he’d have loved educational video games like SimCity and Minecraft that can teach urban planning and architecture and programming. Only by learning the history of how games have been used for purposes beyond
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the game learning rather than messing about—not that there’s anything wrong with fun! It’s also tempting to believe games like Civilization and SimCity can teach us useful lessons about world history and city planning, that they both aim to reflect the real world and are successful in doing
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elegant way of giving players meaningful strategic choices, but it promotes a flawed understanding of scientific discovery and cultural development. The conceptual framework that governs SimCity is based on a “capitalistic land value ecology” which may fit one corner of America in the late twentieth century but hardly describes cities in
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anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, which was celebrated by the launch of Tencent’s Homeland Dream. While outwardly resembling SimCity in its goal to grow a thriving city, Homeland Dream is a much simpler “idle clicker” game with little skill or strategy required.30 Instead
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use it that aren’t centralised or tend toward authoritarian or coercive purposes. The gamification of civic engagement (also known as “e-participation”) includes sophisticated SimCity-style simulations to help citizens and policymakers understand and make planning decisions, but it mostly means injecting fun into democratic and governmental processes like participatory
Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia
by Anthony M. Townsend · 29 Sep 2013 · 464pp · 127,283 words
real world starts tracking the Mirror World instead?”92 Computer simulations seduce precisely because they replace the complexity of the real world. The video game SimCity is addictive because of the simplicity of its underlying model—players quickly figure out how to win by exploiting its predictable dynamics (in fact, the
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design of early versions was directly borrowed from Urban Dynamics. Following trends in research, SimCity 2013’s GlassBox simulation engine now uses a sophisticated agent-based model).93 But even the best mathematical models of real-world phenomena are always
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Large-Scale Models,” 167. 91Harrison, interview, May 9, 2011. 92Gelernter, Mirror Worlds, 217, Gelernter’s italics. 93“SimCity and Advanced GeoAnalytics,” SpatialMarkets blog, March 16, 2012, http://www.spatialmarkets.com/2012/3/16/simcity-and-advanced-geoanalytics.html. 94Lee, “Requiem for Large-Scale Models,” 169. 95Banavar, lecture, April 10, 2012. 96Gelernter, Mirror
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. 56Cosma Rohilla Shalizi, “Scaling and Hierarchy in Urban Economies,” ARXIV, e-print arXiv:1102.4101, February 2011, http://arxiv.org/abs/1102.4101. 57Steve Lohr, “SimCity, for Real: Measuring an Untidy Metropolis,” New York Times, February 23, 2013, BU3. 58Geoffrey West, lecture, Urban Systems Symposium, New York University, New York City
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software of, 268 test for smart grid technology by, 37 Silicon Valley, 44 Homebrew Computer Club in, 153 People’s Computer Company in, 153, 155 SimCity, 89 simulation, 75 as agent-based, 87 for cities, 78–79, 85–90 Sinclair, Upton, 318 Singapore, 224, 279 ad for smart traffic systems in
Marx at the Arcade: Consoles, Controllers, and Class Struggle
by Jamie Woodcock · 17 Jun 2019 · 236pp · 62,158 words
I had to try and learn the moves with friends while we battled it out in front of the TV. I built sprawling metropolises in SimCity, astonished that I could then fly a helicopter through them in SimCopter. Baldur’s Gate was the closest I ever got to Dungeons & Dragons: I
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signaled how popular games had become. Meanwhile, simulation games, like The Sims, were becoming vastly popular, building on the success of Utopia, Populous, Civilization, and SimCity.80 Valve, the publisher of the seminal Half-Life, launched the online distribution platform Steam in 2003. This move built on the success of the
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reaction to a Sims game without pools was so intense that developers knew they had to rectify the situation as soon as possible.”6 The SimCity series exists on a larger scale. The subject is the city rather than the household, drawing the focus onto a larger and more anonymous mass
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of citizens. SimCity taps into a similar sandbox/dollhouse experience. It also often demonstrates how much more effectively the player could handle traffic problems than local government in
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, 29 Shannon, Claude, 18–19, 29 Shaw, Carol, 151–52 A Short History of the Gaze, 142 Short, Tanya, 85–86 Silicon Valley, 23, 99 SimCity, 2, 31, 128–29 SimCopter, 2 Sims, The, 31, 127–28 Smilegate/Tencent, 38 Solitaire, 28 Sonic, 2, 27 Sonic the Hedgehog, 28, 97 Sony
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