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There's a socialist critique of SimCity here. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/10/les-simerables https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/10/les-simerables The article a

by pradn 9y ago

There's a socialist critique of SimCity here. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/10/les-simerables https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/10/les-simerables The article argues that SimCity encodes a set of neoliberal assumptions into its game play that make imagining other forms of city-building impossible.

viburnum 9y ago
You know how messed up SimCity is when you're trying to make a place like Copenhagen or Barcelona but it's always pushing you to make San Jose.
- ascagnel_ 9y ago
  I think that's a great example of implicit bias -- SimCity/Maxis has traditionally been located in northern California, and as such its modeled after cities in that region.
  - clairity 9y ago
    a lot of the buildings are in southern california. i walk by the equitable building all the time. =)
- oftenwrong 9y ago
  Relevant http://humantransit.org/2013/05/how-sim-city-greenwashes-parking.html http://humantransit.org/2013/05/how-sim-city-greenwashes-par... https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/02/urban-planning-computer-games/470895/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/02/urban-p...
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
lainga 9y ago
I actually think I know why this is, for Simcity 4, at least. The original SC4 traffic model, Simulator Z, spent more effort trying to find alternate transit modes (i.e., mass transit) if private road congestion was high. However, it was also very compute-intensive and wouldn't run decently on the lowest-end Intel PCs at the time. Maxis was concerned about backward compatibility, and so the game was shipped with a simplified traffic model that spent less time considering alternate transit. If you install the Network Addon Mod (NAM) it includes, among other things, a new traffic model that's closer to the original design.
deft 9y ago
Pretty much every simulation game encodes neoliberal assumptions, which I'm sure is unintentional but it makes playing them very restrictive. But it's why "simulations" lead to articles like "Capitalism shown to be most efficient system through Minecraft simulation".
- majewsky 9y ago
  Reminds me of that rivalry that I've going on on a Space Astronomy server with a friend. Space Astronomy is a Minecraft modpack with a focus on tech and space exploration, and there's a lot of stuff in there to automate resource extraction, processing and storage. And for some sort of reason, we slipped into a competition over who can mine the most resources. I think my ME system currently contains (among other things) some 6 million pieces of coal and nearly 2 million iron ingots. Even rare metals like gold count in the 100,000s of ingots. Then there's 10,000s of each kind of common mob drop (e.g. spider eyes, bones), even thousands of creeper heads. The globally accepted freely convertible currency is Octuple Compressed Cobblestone, a single block of which contains 9^8 = 43046721 blocks of cobblestone. It takes my cobblestone generator about 1 real-life month to generate another one of these. I could easily expand it, but I choose not to to not cause deflation. :) The point is, we're waaaaay past the point where any of this scale is actually necessary, and the other players on the server are pointing this out to us when visiting our vast facilities and the giant holes that our quarries rip into the landscape. For all practical purposes, you're fine with 10000 iron ingots, you don't need millions of the things. We're actually sitting around now and wondering what to do with all this wealth. My friend suggested building a temple in a jungle out of pure gold, but that doesn't even begin to decimate our gold reserves. Maybe we need to build something out of octuple compressed cobblestone. :D
- philwelch 9y ago
  "Neoliberal assumptions" seems to be a pejorative term for "the best contemporary understanding of economics and social science". I'm reminded of the Bush Administration aide who made derisive comments about the "reality-based community".
DonHopkins 9y ago
Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games: https://medium.com/@donhopkins/designing-user-interfaces-to-simulation-games-bd7a9d81e62d https://medium.com/@donhopkins/designing-user-interfaces-to-... >Other people wanted to use SimCity for the less noble goal of teaching people what to think, instead of just teaching them to think. >Everyone notices the obvious built-in political bias, whatever that is. But everyone sees it from a different perspective, so nobody agrees what its real political agenda actually is. I don’t think it’s all that important, since SimCity’s political agenda pales in comparison to the political agenda in the eye of the beholder. >Some muckety-muck architecture magazine was interviewing Will Wright about SimCity, and they asked him a question something like “which ontological urban paridigm most influenced your design of the simulator, the Exo-Hamiltonian Pattern Language Movement, or the Intra-Urban Deconstructionist Sub-Culture Hypothesis?” He replied, “I just kind of optimized for game play.” Constructionist Educational Open Source SimCity: https://medium.com/@donhopkins/har-2009-lightning-talk-transcript-constructionist-educational-open-source-simcity-by-don-3a9e010bf305 https://medium.com/@donhopkins/har-2009-lightning-talk-trans... >I’ve programmed a plug-in church with a plug-in agent: the Church of Pacmania, and the PacBot. The church spawn PacBots on the road next to it, which eat the traffic on the roads (lowering the pollution and raising their score, of course). So naturally the Church of Pacmania generate a lot of traffic, to attract and feed the PacBots. I’m going to have a “Tax the Churches” option, too. If I lower the taxes, then more people will come in, and the churches will recruit them, and they’ll all drive to church. So then there will be a lot more traffic for the PacBots to eat. https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/blob/b0c5a3f495ebabbc51d5e45dac948d8e40fc53ee/MicropolisCore/src/pyMicropolis/micropolisEngine/micropolisrobot.py#L292 https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/blob/b0c5a3f495ebabb... https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/blob/b0c5a3f495ebabbc51d5e45dac948d8e40fc53ee/MicropolisCore/src/pyMicropolis/micropolisEngine/micropoliszone.py#L310 https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/blob/b0c5a3f495ebabb...

by pradn 9y ago

viburnum 9y ago

You know how messed up SimCity is when you're trying to make a place like Copenhagen or Barcelona but it's always pushing you to make San Jose.

ascagnel_ 9y ago
I think that's a great example of implicit bias -- SimCity/Maxis has traditionally been located in northern California, and as such its modeled after cities in that region.
- clairity 9y ago
  a lot of the buildings are in southern california. i walk by the equitable building all the time. =)
oftenwrong 9y ago
Relevant http://humantransit.org/2013/05/how-sim-city-greenwashes-parking.html http://humantransit.org/2013/05/how-sim-city-greenwashes-par... https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/02/urban-planning-computer-games/470895/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/02/urban-p...

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

lainga 9y ago

I actually think I know why this is, for Simcity 4, at least. The original SC4 traffic model, Simulator Z, spent more effort trying to find alternate transit modes (i.e., mass transit) if private road congestion was high. However, it was also very compute-intensive and wouldn't run decently on the lowest-end Intel PCs at the time. Maxis was concerned about backward compatibility, and so the game was shipped with a simplified traffic model that spent less time considering alternate transit. If you install the Network Addon Mod (NAM) it includes, among other things, a new traffic model that's closer to the original design.

deft 9y ago

Pretty much every simulation game encodes neoliberal assumptions, which I'm sure is unintentional but it makes playing them very restrictive. But it's why "simulations" lead to articles like "Capitalism shown to be most efficient system through Minecraft simulation".

majewsky 9y ago
Reminds me of that rivalry that I've going on on a Space Astronomy server with a friend. Space Astronomy is a Minecraft modpack with a focus on tech and space exploration, and there's a lot of stuff in there to automate resource extraction, processing and storage. And for some sort of reason, we slipped into a competition over who can mine the most resources. I think my ME system currently contains (among other things) some 6 million pieces of coal and nearly 2 million iron ingots. Even rare metals like gold count in the 100,000s of ingots. Then there's 10,000s of each kind of common mob drop (e.g. spider eyes, bones), even thousands of creeper heads. The globally accepted freely convertible currency is Octuple Compressed Cobblestone, a single block of which contains 9^8 = 43046721 blocks of cobblestone. It takes my cobblestone generator about 1 real-life month to generate another one of these. I could easily expand it, but I choose not to to not cause deflation. :) The point is, we're waaaaay past the point where any of this scale is actually necessary, and the other players on the server are pointing this out to us when visiting our vast facilities and the giant holes that our quarries rip into the landscape. For all practical purposes, you're fine with 10000 iron ingots, you don't need millions of the things. We're actually sitting around now and wondering what to do with all this wealth. My friend suggested building a temple in a jungle out of pure gold, but that doesn't even begin to decimate our gold reserves. Maybe we need to build something out of octuple compressed cobblestone. :D
philwelch 9y ago
"Neoliberal assumptions" seems to be a pejorative term for "the best contemporary understanding of economics and social science". I'm reminded of the Bush Administration aide who made derisive comments about the "reality-based community".

DonHopkins 9y ago

Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games: https://medium.com/@donhopkins/designing-user-interfaces-to-simulation-games-bd7a9d81e62d https://medium.com/@donhopkins/designing-user-interfaces-to-... >Other people wanted to use SimCity for the less noble goal of teaching people what to think, instead of just teaching them to think. >Everyone notices the obvious built-in political bias, whatever that is. But everyone sees it from a different perspective, so nobody agrees what its real political agenda actually is. I don’t think it’s all that important, since SimCity’s political agenda pales in comparison to the political agenda in the eye of the beholder. >Some muckety-muck architecture magazine was interviewing Will Wright about SimCity, and they asked him a question something like “which ontological urban paridigm most influenced your design of the simulator, the Exo-Hamiltonian Pattern Language Movement, or the Intra-Urban Deconstructionist Sub-Culture Hypothesis?” He replied, “I just kind of optimized for game play.” Constructionist Educational Open Source SimCity: https://medium.com/@donhopkins/har-2009-lightning-talk-transcript-constructionist-educational-open-source-simcity-by-don-3a9e010bf305 https://medium.com/@donhopkins/har-2009-lightning-talk-trans... >I’ve programmed a plug-in church with a plug-in agent: the Church of Pacmania, and the PacBot. The church spawn PacBots on the road next to it, which eat the traffic on the roads (lowering the pollution and raising their score, of course). So naturally the Church of Pacmania generate a lot of traffic, to attract and feed the PacBots. I’m going to have a “Tax the Churches” option, too. If I lower the taxes, then more people will come in, and the churches will recruit them, and they’ll all drive to church. So then there will be a lot more traffic for the PacBots to eat. https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/blob/b0c5a3f495ebabbc51d5e45dac948d8e40fc53ee/MicropolisCore/src/pyMicropolis/micropolisEngine/micropolisrobot.py#L292 https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/blob/b0c5a3f495ebabb... https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/blob/b0c5a3f495ebabbc51d5e45dac948d8e40fc53ee/MicropolisCore/src/pyMicropolis/micropolisEngine/micropoliszone.py#L310 https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/blob/b0c5a3f495ebabb...