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It can be fun to try and spot the rhetorical sleight-of-hand trick that articles like this use to come to their eye-catching conclusions: > The art project Mag

It can be fun to try and spot the rhetorical sleight-of-hand trick that articles like this use to come to their eye-catching conclusions: > The art project Magnasanti revealed the contours of the black box when it attempted to “beat” the game that famously doesn’t have a win state [...] Artist Vincent Ocasla accomplished this feat through rigorous trial and error, eventually creating a crime-free city that maintained a stable population of 6 million sims, but only by creating a dystopian nightmare. [...] > Magnasanti reveals the contours of the black box, showing how citizen health and happiness were ultimately unimportant. What the game considers a successful city doesn’t look at all like one we would actually want to live in. SimCity presents an open-ended simulation with a wide range of things players can decide to optimize for. An artist once built a city optimizing for population density and low crime to the exclusion of all other factors, and this resulted in a dystopian nightmare where all the simulated citizens were unhealthy and miserable. But by describing what the artist did as "trying to 'beat' the game", the article pins the blame for the artist's choices on the game itself. Even though SimCity clearly does not think Magnasanti is a good city -- it's constantly flashing up warning messages and graphs showing that all the citizens are miserable and unhealthy! One could just as easily have argued that SimCity's black box is hiding a progressive ideology, one that warns us of the dangers of industrialization and over-policing! (Much like how the board game Monopoly is about the dangers of capitalism.) In essence, an artist set out to 'beat' SimCity, the artist decided what 'beating' SimCity meant, and the article tricked us into thinking that said something about SimCity.

deleted 6y ago
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thaumasiotes 6y ago
SimCity very much does express an ideology, though generally not because the designer wanted to. But try to zone something for mixed use. SimCity itself tells you that certain things will happen under certain conditions, and it is generally wrong about those predictions. It's not intended to be an accurate simulation; it's intended to be amusing and to conform to people's intuitions about what they want to happen when they plan their city in a certain way. But people play it and feel they're learning something about how cities actually work.
- hypertele-Xii 6y ago
  > SimCity very much does express an ideology [...] try to zone something for mixed use [...] It's not intended to be an accurate simulation It absolutely is trying to be an accurate simulation, for its time. That was 28 years ago. Do you remember how slow computers used to be? You can't zone for mixed use because of technical limitations. The simulation takes place on a grid; each grid cell is limited in memory by computer technology; therefore the performance requirements of the simulation dictate that only one thing can exist in one place.
sudosysgen 6y ago
The game making it impossible to have a stable large city with low crime without dystopian modes of control absolutely communicates the ideology of the creators of the game, conscious or not. It's really not a sleight of hand. The idea that it's natural for it being impossible to have a city with low crime and a high population without making everyone miserable is absolutely ideology, and it's just your own ideology that perceives this as somehow a neutral fact. Its not progressive to say that without over-policing high crime is inevitable, or that industrialization means we have no choice but to be miserable either. Those are solidly reactionary beliefs.
- Nowado 6y ago
  It does, but so do you somehow assuming that 'stable large city' is something to be aimed for. There's ideology behind what it takes to achieve such goal, just like there's ideology in assuming that is a goal to achieve. There is a lot of intentional and unintentional emergent states in games, but trying to push narration of something being a win state as if that was a minor jump is not doing that critical reading any favours.
  - sudosysgen 6y ago
    Yes, certainly stable large cities with low crime and happy people being something to aim for has ideology behind it. But so does the game, and the ideology in the game is way more pervasive and interesting. As far as myself, I did take care not to assume that large stable crime free happy cities are inherently desirable in my above comment. Simply the fact that they are impossible still communicates ideology, whether you think they are desirable or not.
    - Nowado 6y ago
      Perfectly fair within comment, nonetheless my point holds thread-wise.
      - buran77 6y ago
        When you try to "define" a black box, to find its edges, what you're aiming for is irrelevant. You'll give it input and analyze the output to find out what states it can be in and what are the "rules", and use that to characterize the black box. In this case whether a stable large city is to aim for or not in real life or in the game is a bit irrelevant, what's important is that the game's black box allows large, crime free cities if and only if they are a dystopian nightmare. This is how the state was defined and it's backed into the game by design. It's worth noting that someone made it like this and behind that ideology there's a message being passed on through the game. By testing to find the win conditions in a certain scenario you basically discover what the designer of the system considered to be necessary to win. The coder who wrote the code responsible for this (or their manager) either put their own ideology in code, or put what they believed to be the most accepted by the target audience. Almost any such creation embodies either the ideology of the creator, or that of the consumer. Sometimes it's boring and sometimes it's interesting to let the genie out of the black box.
antasvara 6y ago
I'd assume that having no win state in the game is precisely because the creator didn't want to make a statement about the ideal city. Instead, each person who plays the game can decide if and when they've created the ideal city for themselves. Calling a crime-free city with a stable population "ideal" is just as valid as calling a crime-filled city with happy citizens "ideal." I love that you called it a sleight of hand because that's exactly what it is; just by assuming someone could beat the game, the authors have misunderstood Sim City.
notahacker 6y ago
The ends are open but the means are limited by the design. Want to elevate your Sims out of poverty? Well you can't really, but you can tax the poor out of their inconvenient, property-value reducing existence by setting regressive tax rates and your city will function just fine. Want to build a European style city centre which is pedestrianised, mixed-use and has controls on building style? Nope, you can't, the game wants to fill a commercial zone with towers and parking lots. Sure, not all the design assumptions align quite so neatly with American and right wing sterotypes: suburbs are really inefficient to provide services for and Sims aren't at all bothered about religion in many versions. But they are designed limitations rather than the product of players' imagination.
- hypertele-Xii 6y ago
  > Want to build a European style city centre which is pedestrianised, mixed-use and has controls on building style? Nope, you can't Because it's a 28-year-old game with the computational limitations of the time. It does not simulate people walking. It does not simulate multiple types of buildings existing in the same plot. It does not simulate building styles (I think?). And it has nothing to do with ideology. No-one could make such a simulation in 1993.
  - morelisp 6y ago
    > It does not simulate people walking... And it has nothing to do with ideology Buddy,
  - notahacker 6y ago
    I dont think the requirement for road access or the US-style zoning or the only way to stop low wealth apartment towers popping up next door to shiny condos being to raise taxes on the poor or the impossibility of centrally planning a housing development without using a cheat/mod was down to computational limitations, especially not by SimCity 4 in 2003. It was a game based on a US vision of what a city is and how (un)involved its planners are, and ideology certainly shaped city planning in the US, if not Will Wright.
thu2111 6y ago
Well, that one is pretty egregious but there are other blatantly misleading statements. I don't know what polygon is meant to be, but the author seems to be far more ideologically biased than SimCity ever was. One example: "Scientific simulations, like those used to model climate change, don’t keep their formulas hidden in a black box because replicability is a big part of the scientific method." But the black box nature of climate models was the core issue in one of the biggest disputes between sceptics and researchers of all time. It went to court and the researcher preferred to lose the suit than reveal his model (Michael Mann). The COVID model from Imperial College that justified lockdowns had to be extracted from the university via FOIA requests which were stonewalled for months. The scientist who wrote it openly claimed in interviews nobody except him understood the model equations, which were all entirely undocumented. Probably the author doesn't know these things, but it shows a rather naive misunderstanding of the true nature of science. Black box models that encode ideological beliefs are common throughout serious research. The comment about how SimCity doesn't simulate race or gender is also rather ideological. The belief that race and gender are central to everything is both quite new, very much a view of the left and totally USA centric, but SimCity was designed to sell to international markets too. "Cities are built on history, politics, and racial bias" is the sort of comment that gives away the article for what it is: a complaint that a a popular video game wasn't woke. We learn more about Polygon's ideology than that of Will Wright.
- hypertele-Xii 6y ago
  Polygon also seems to forget that SimCity 2000 is a 28-year-old game. I think I had a 200 MHz computer to play it on with mere dozens of megabytes of memory. To store and simulate such fine details was simply not possible at the time.
  - kalleboo 6y ago
    It originally came out in 1993, so you're looking at more like 16-25 MHz that it was targeted at
  - jofaz 6y ago
    I played it on an Apple Performa 460. That's a 33Mhz 68030 with 4MB of RAM
delusional 6y ago
I think you've found an interesting point here. I don't agree that this is some "slight of hand" by the author to try and convince your, but I do think you're correct that you can't draw your conclusion solely based on the one art project. I see it more as a failing of the author than a trick. SimCity does have an ideology, and it does have something to say with how it has weighed it's measurements of citizen satisfaction, but the author seems to fail at capturing that ideology and instead just talks about how minmaxing is bad. The rest of the article is interesting. There's plenty of people out there that don't even think about how the rules of the game frames the discussions you can have about it. It's just kind of a bad example.
- smitty1e 6y ago
  SimCity is a piece of code. It may be more fair to say that the author himself had an ideology. Ho hum. Who lacks ideology? Well, the dead, for starters. My observation is of the "who smelt it, dealt it" variety: those offering the heaviest charges of bias and ideology are communicating the depth of their own.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

thaumasiotes 6y ago

SimCity very much does express an ideology, though generally not because the designer wanted to. But try to zone something for mixed use. SimCity itself tells you that certain things will happen under certain conditions, and it is generally wrong about those predictions. It's not intended to be an accurate simulation; it's intended to be amusing and to conform to people's intuitions about what they want to happen when they plan their city in a certain way. But people play it and feel they're learning something about how cities actually work.

hypertele-Xii 6y ago
> SimCity very much does express an ideology [...] try to zone something for mixed use [...] It's not intended to be an accurate simulation It absolutely is trying to be an accurate simulation, for its time. That was 28 years ago. Do you remember how slow computers used to be? You can't zone for mixed use because of technical limitations. The simulation takes place on a grid; each grid cell is limited in memory by computer technology; therefore the performance requirements of the simulation dictate that only one thing can exist in one place.

sudosysgen 6y ago

The game making it impossible to have a stable large city with low crime without dystopian modes of control absolutely communicates the ideology of the creators of the game, conscious or not. It's really not a sleight of hand. The idea that it's natural for it being impossible to have a city with low crime and a high population without making everyone miserable is absolutely ideology, and it's just your own ideology that perceives this as somehow a neutral fact. Its not progressive to say that without over-policing high crime is inevitable, or that industrialization means we have no choice but to be miserable either. Those are solidly reactionary beliefs.

Nowado 6y ago
It does, but so do you somehow assuming that 'stable large city' is something to be aimed for. There's ideology behind what it takes to achieve such goal, just like there's ideology in assuming that is a goal to achieve. There is a lot of intentional and unintentional emergent states in games, but trying to push narration of something being a win state as if that was a minor jump is not doing that critical reading any favours.
- sudosysgen 6y ago
  Yes, certainly stable large cities with low crime and happy people being something to aim for has ideology behind it. But so does the game, and the ideology in the game is way more pervasive and interesting. As far as myself, I did take care not to assume that large stable crime free happy cities are inherently desirable in my above comment. Simply the fact that they are impossible still communicates ideology, whether you think they are desirable or not.
  - Nowado 6y ago
    Perfectly fair within comment, nonetheless my point holds thread-wise.
    - buran77 6y ago
      When you try to "define" a black box, to find its edges, what you're aiming for is irrelevant. You'll give it input and analyze the output to find out what states it can be in and what are the "rules", and use that to characterize the black box. In this case whether a stable large city is to aim for or not in real life or in the game is a bit irrelevant, what's important is that the game's black box allows large, crime free cities if and only if they are a dystopian nightmare. This is how the state was defined and it's backed into the game by design. It's worth noting that someone made it like this and behind that ideology there's a message being passed on through the game. By testing to find the win conditions in a certain scenario you basically discover what the designer of the system considered to be necessary to win. The coder who wrote the code responsible for this (or their manager) either put their own ideology in code, or put what they believed to be the most accepted by the target audience. Almost any such creation embodies either the ideology of the creator, or that of the consumer. Sometimes it's boring and sometimes it's interesting to let the genie out of the black box.

antasvara 6y ago

I'd assume that having no win state in the game is precisely because the creator didn't want to make a statement about the ideal city. Instead, each person who plays the game can decide if and when they've created the ideal city for themselves. Calling a crime-free city with a stable population "ideal" is just as valid as calling a crime-filled city with happy citizens "ideal." I love that you called it a sleight of hand because that's exactly what it is; just by assuming someone could beat the game, the authors have misunderstood Sim City.

notahacker 6y ago

The ends are open but the means are limited by the design. Want to elevate your Sims out of poverty? Well you can't really, but you can tax the poor out of their inconvenient, property-value reducing existence by setting regressive tax rates and your city will function just fine. Want to build a European style city centre which is pedestrianised, mixed-use and has controls on building style? Nope, you can't, the game wants to fill a commercial zone with towers and parking lots. Sure, not all the design assumptions align quite so neatly with American and right wing sterotypes: suburbs are really inefficient to provide services for and Sims aren't at all bothered about religion in many versions. But they are designed limitations rather than the product of players' imagination.

hypertele-Xii 6y ago
> Want to build a European style city centre which is pedestrianised, mixed-use and has controls on building style? Nope, you can't Because it's a 28-year-old game with the computational limitations of the time. It does not simulate people walking. It does not simulate multiple types of buildings existing in the same plot. It does not simulate building styles (I think?). And it has nothing to do with ideology. No-one could make such a simulation in 1993.
- morelisp 6y ago
  > It does not simulate people walking... And it has nothing to do with ideology Buddy,
- notahacker 6y ago
  I dont think the requirement for road access or the US-style zoning or the only way to stop low wealth apartment towers popping up next door to shiny condos being to raise taxes on the poor or the impossibility of centrally planning a housing development without using a cheat/mod was down to computational limitations, especially not by SimCity 4 in 2003. It was a game based on a US vision of what a city is and how (un)involved its planners are, and ideology certainly shaped city planning in the US, if not Will Wright.

thu2111 6y ago

Well, that one is pretty egregious but there are other blatantly misleading statements. I don't know what polygon is meant to be, but the author seems to be far more ideologically biased than SimCity ever was. One example: "Scientific simulations, like those used to model climate change, don’t keep their formulas hidden in a black box because replicability is a big part of the scientific method." But the black box nature of climate models was the core issue in one of the biggest disputes between sceptics and researchers of all time. It went to court and the researcher preferred to lose the suit than reveal his model (Michael Mann). The COVID model from Imperial College that justified lockdowns had to be extracted from the university via FOIA requests which were stonewalled for months. The scientist who wrote it openly claimed in interviews nobody except him understood the model equations, which were all entirely undocumented. Probably the author doesn't know these things, but it shows a rather naive misunderstanding of the true nature of science. Black box models that encode ideological beliefs are common throughout serious research. The comment about how SimCity doesn't simulate race or gender is also rather ideological. The belief that race and gender are central to everything is both quite new, very much a view of the left and totally USA centric, but SimCity was designed to sell to international markets too. "Cities are built on history, politics, and racial bias" is the sort of comment that gives away the article for what it is: a complaint that a a popular video game wasn't woke. We learn more about Polygon's ideology than that of Will Wright.

hypertele-Xii 6y ago
Polygon also seems to forget that SimCity 2000 is a 28-year-old game. I think I had a 200 MHz computer to play it on with mere dozens of megabytes of memory. To store and simulate such fine details was simply not possible at the time.
- kalleboo 6y ago
  It originally came out in 1993, so you're looking at more like 16-25 MHz that it was targeted at
- jofaz 6y ago
  I played it on an Apple Performa 460. That's a 33Mhz 68030 with 4MB of RAM

delusional 6y ago

I think you've found an interesting point here. I don't agree that this is some "slight of hand" by the author to try and convince your, but I do think you're correct that you can't draw your conclusion solely based on the one art project. I see it more as a failing of the author than a trick. SimCity does have an ideology, and it does have something to say with how it has weighed it's measurements of citizen satisfaction, but the author seems to fail at capturing that ideology and instead just talks about how minmaxing is bad. The rest of the article is interesting. There's plenty of people out there that don't even think about how the rules of the game frames the discussions you can have about it. It's just kind of a bad example.

smitty1e 6y ago
SimCity is a piece of code. It may be more fair to say that the author himself had an ideology. Ho hum. Who lacks ideology? Well, the dead, for starters. My observation is of the "who smelt it, dealt it" variety: those offering the heaviest charges of bias and ideology are communicating the depth of their own.