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Magnasanti – The largest and most terrible city of SimCity
- JoeDaDude 4y agoJust to be clear, the music in the video is not Philip Glass' Koyaanisqatsi at all. FWIW, Koyaanisqatsi was a 1982 film [1], effectively a 90 minute music video before videos were a thing. The film has lots of unsavory city clips in contrast with nature clips [2] to make the point of Life Out of Balance, the subtitle of the film. The music and film clips are frequently used to illustrate decay. or the unhealthy nature of city life in general, most notably in a Grand Theft Auto commercial [3]. [1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koyaanisqatsi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koyaanisqatsi [2]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDW-1JIa2gI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDW-1JIa2gI [3]. https://www.thefader.com/2007/03/30/video-grand-theft-philip-glass https://www.thefader.com/2007/03/30/video-grand-theft-philip...
- pawsforthought 4y agoSamsara [1][2], from 2011, is a more recent take on the same theme, directed by Koyaanisqatsi’s cinematographer, Ron Fricke. Shot on 70mm film over the course of 5 years in 25 countries, it’s every bit as awe inspiring and chilling as the earlier film. [1]: https://youtu.be/iQzpExpsezI https://youtu.be/iQzpExpsezI [2]: https://youtu.be/HCkEILshUyU https://youtu.be/HCkEILshUyU
- fallingfrog 4y agoI mean "deprive people of services, police them brutally, stuff them into a small area, and work them like mules until they die" was pretty much the reigning strategy in the industrial era, and frankly we're returning to that now in slightly altered form under neoliberalism, so it's not that far fetched.
- seltzered_ 4y agoI think about the Magnasanti sim city a lot when thinking about how simcity's game mechanics were designed - see an earlier comment with more references : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19313380 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19313380
- a_shovel 4y agoFor some reason, people have a disproportionate trust in city-building game designers' view of civic planning. Magnasanti is meaningful because it exposes some of the biases and simplifications that pervade the genre. The reason certain strategies work in city-building games isn't because they're realistic simulations of how cities function and those strategies would work in real life, it's because it's a game made by human designers who decided that that's a strategy that should work, or made certain assumptions (that may or may not be true) while designing the game's systems that allow the strategy to work. See also Polygon's "The ideology hiding in SimCity’s black box": https://www.polygon.com/videos/2021/4/1/22352583/simcity-hidden-politics-ideology-urban-dynamics https://www.polygon.com/videos/2021/4/1/22352583/simcity-hid... Some select quotes: > How SimCity’s hidden ideology affects the people who play it is difficult to untangle. An article from 1992 quotes a player saying “I became a total Republican playing this game,” and even modern versions of the game contain oddly conservative viewpoints, including a preference for regressive taxation. > On more than one occasion, politicians have been “tested” in the game to see how well they can manage a pretend city.
- praestigiare 4y agoThis is pervasive in games with simulated markets and economies as well - both the built-in somewhat regressive assumptions as well the tendency to treat them as examples of understanding the real world.
- bobthepanda 4y agoGames market themselves as simulations, but in the end of the day a game needs to be fun, and overly accurate or complex simulations easily get in the way of that.
- _pvxk 4y agoSee also https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/16/book-review-seeing-like-a-state/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/16/book-review-seeing-lik... if you're into evenly-spaced rectangular grids.
- zecken 4y agoAnother great video about this by HBO's John Wilson: https://vimeo.com/238073511 https://vimeo.com/238073511
- jandrese 4y agoI don't understand how the city doesn't just burn down. If I created that in SimCity I can only imagine the raging firestorm that it would be in less than a year.
- dylan604 4y agojust turn off disasters
- jandrese 4y agoAre you even playing SimCity anymore if you don't have disasters? Might as well turn on unlimited money while you are at it. Saying you can break the game, but first you have to turn off the balancing mechanics doesn't seem as impressive.
- dylan604 4y agoIt's not breaking the game if it is a check box in the settings for the game. sometimes, you just want to do things and not be interrupted. othertimes, you want arrmageddon. that's why they offered so many prebuilt scenarios.
- metadat 4y ago> High unemployment, horrific air pollution, almost no education, medical and fire services are absent, and residents do not live to retirement age. The police state made it possible to maximize the size of the city, while retaining full control over the citizens - but it minimized the quality of life and effectively destroyed free will. > Magnasanti is a “cage” in which six million “economic slaves” are enclosed. Amazing. -ly awful.
- qikInNdOutReply 4y agoAmazong. -ly awful.
- pragmatick 4y agoThere's even a moma entry about it: https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2013/designandviolence/sim-city-magnasanti-vincent-ocasla/ https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2013/designand...
- Akronymus 4y agoI wonder just how many problems would be solved with mixed zoning in that city.
- bigDinosaur 4y agoThat would not be optimally efficient. Back to planning school for you. The happiness of the citizens was not a concern.
- Akronymus 4y agoIts not about happiness but cutting down on unnecessary travel.
- eru 4y agoDo you want to add mixed zoning as a mechanic in Sim City?
- Akronymus 4y agoKinda, yeah. Thats actually the reason why I originally started reverse engineering the game.
- eru 4y agoIn real life, planners are well advised to employ a laissez faire approach in many cases. But it wouldn't be too much of a game, if Sim City would let you just stick to the minimum and let citizens handle the rest.
- Akronymus 4y agoFor me, simcity is, and probably always will be, a simulation. And you tend to lose out on efficiency (Not covering as many people with a school, for example), so I don't see it as going to be too unbalanced
- DonHopkins 4y ago
- tra3 4y agoWhy are the sim city screenshots in Russian? Kinda odd.
- spyremeown 4y agoBecause 156 million people in the world speak Russian. Why would that be odd?
- beanjuice 4y agoThe original author of the post is theoretically an architect student from the Philliphines, according to some articles. I agree, however, who knows... just screenshots.
- DonHopkins 4y agoIt's odd because the original version was written in English. Then somebody (Alconost) translated to Russian, without giving credit to the original source, but putting in a bunch of advertisements for their own site, then somebody poorly translated it back to English. How many people in the world speak Russian is irrelevant and has nothing to do with the fact that it's odd that whoever translated it to Russian didn't bother crediting the original, and just credited themselves a lot. Then because of that omission, somebody wasted their time making such a terrible redundant translation back to English, with bizarre phrases like "Transferred to Alconost" and "The article is translated in Alconost", which make one question the skills of the translator so bent on claiming credit for themselves without giving proper credit to others. https://archive.ph/GokfI https://archive.ph/GokfI The original author of the city was indeed an architecture student from the Philippines, Vincent Oscala. At least Alconost left Vincent's name in when he misappropriated somebody else's article to advertise his low quality translation and advertising services. The odd and terrible Russian translation also omits important links, including this interview with Vincent: Viceland Games: The Totalitarian Buddhist Who Beat SimCity https://archive.ph/eA7CX https://archive.ph/eA7CX Mammoth: http://m.ammoth.us/blog/2010/10/magnasanti/ http://m.ammoth.us/blog/2010/10/magnasanti/
- egormakarov 4y agoto better convey the gloomy dystopian nature of this city to the western reader
- ipiz0618 4y agoThat's Hong Kong
- thematrixturtle 4y agoThis appears to be a low-quality partial copy of a more detailed blog post from 2010, now gone but still living on via archive.is: https://archive.ph/GokfI https://archive.ph/GokfI Don't miss the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTJQTc-TqpU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTJQTc-TqpU Discussed previously on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16933265 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16933265 (620 comments)
- AceJohnny2 4y agoWorth highlighting that part of the soundtrack of the video is from the 1982 movie "Koyaanisqatsi - Life Out of Balance" (as referenced in the blog post), soundtrack by Philip Glass, and which is an experimental movie about, I guess, humanity's urban life at odds with the natural world.
- weare138 4y agoThank you, I knew I've seen this before but couldn't remember where.
- eckza 4y agoProbably here.
- quietbritishjim 4y agoArchive.org link (that archive.ph one doesn't work for me): https://web.archive.org/web/20170323054316/https://rumorsontheinternets.org/2010/10/14/magnasanti-the-largest-and-most-terrifying-simcity/ https://web.archive.org/web/20170323054316/https://rumorsont...
- fritztastic 4y agoVaguely reminds me of Kowloon city
- kqr 4y agoIntroduction (audio): https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/episode-66-kowloon-walled-city/ https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/episode-66-kowloon-wa...
- DonHopkins 4y agoMaxis actually distributed a model of Kowloon as one of the original cities included with SimCity Classic (before it was called "Classic"). I recall that it was from the Japanese Fujitsu FM Towns version of SimCity, which included several extra Japanese cities that weren't shipped with other versions, but that I dug up from my archives and included with Micropolis, the open source version of SimCity Classic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FM_Towns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FM_Towns https://www.mobygames.com/game/fmtowns/simcity https://www.mobygames.com/game/fmtowns/simcity https://www.retroplace.com/en/games/46874--simcity https://www.retroplace.com/en/games/46874--simcity Directory of original Maxis SimCity save files, including Kamakura, Kobe, Kowloon, Kyoto, Senri, and Yokohama from the FM Towns version: https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/tree/master/MicropolisCore/cities https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/tree/master/Micropol... Kowloon save file: https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/blob/master/MicropolisCore/cities/kowloon.cty https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/blob/master/Micropol... Tokyo was also one of the original SimCity scenarios, shipped with every version of the game. That was the one that caused Toho (Godzilla's owner) to sue Maxis because the scenario originally referenced Godzilla, and the box featured a picture of Godzilla. Maxis had to change it to a generic orange monster and call it a "large reptillian creature" instead, and change the Godzilla on the box to a tornado. Original versions of the box with Godzilla are valuable collectors items! >TOKYO, JAPAN 1957: A large reptilian creature has been spotted heading for Tokyo bay. It seems to be attracted to the heavy levels of industrial pollution there. Try to control the fires, then rebuild the industrial center. You have 5 years. https://imgur.com/z5gy9GW https://imgur.com/z5gy9GW https://twitter.com/dancingcrab/status/928792064736874496 https://twitter.com/dancingcrab/status/928792064736874496 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godzilla_in_popular_culture#Video_games https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godzilla_in_popular_culture#Vi... >The "Monster" disaster in the computer game SimCity depicted an unnamed green monster that resembled Godzilla. A scenario in the game: Tokyo, Japan 1954 parodies the original movie. The depiction of the monster in-game and on the boxart led to legal issues with Toho, with Maxis changing the Monster's design in-game and swapping it on the packaging for the "Tornado" disaster instead.
- smcl 4y agoThis kind of smart, walkable, mixed-use urbanism is illegal to build in many American cities
- orthoxerox 4y agoI'll admit I was greatly entertained by this roast, but SimCity is unable to represent smart, walkable, mixed-use urbanism with its Euclidean RCI zoning approach.
- smcl 4y agoJust to let everyone else in on it, using the text “This kind of smart, walkable…” together with some uninviting locale is a bit of a meme. It was a cheap joke and I do not regret it :D
- 2Gkashmiri 4y agocheck these coordinates on google/apple/bing maps. 28.56795257061634, 77.28627687655779 this is in india and looks vaguely familiar to the image on the blogpost
- birriel 4y agoThere's a lot of influence from Le Corbusier, particularly Plan Voisin. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_Voisin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_Voisin
- 0xedd 4y agoI see myself in the picture and I'm offended.
- vachina 4y ago
- wly_cdgr 4y agoI've never been able to enjoy these kinds of games because whenever I play them I just feel like I'm trying to figure out what ideologically dubious and half-informed beliefs and assumptions about urban management the developers baked into the game logic
- BeetleB 4y agoThat would be true for so many other games. Sports games, first person shooters, etc.
- wly_cdgr 4y agoNo doubt...it's a big part of what makes games so fascinating and perennially relevant and fun to talk/think about
- Cyberdog 4y agoAs an anarchist hippie, I still enjoy the Civ series, including decimating neighboring countries and claiming their territory as my own… after they declare war on me first, anyway. And the FPS genre has been brought up in another subthread - though to be sure I greatly prefer sci-fi or fantasy-themed ones like Halo or Quake to the more "realistic" Collar Doody games.
- wly_cdgr 4y agoAnd if I realize those opinions don't align with my own, I am now faced with the choice between failing at the game or succeeding by doing things that I think should fail. No thanks. I'll take my strategy abstract, please
- sn0wtrooper 4y agoThinking like this would drive you off many many games.
- wly_cdgr 4y agoVery true, and it does. But there are fortunately still plenty to enjoy (as well as plenty of pleasures outside of games!). I mean, just chess and Geometry Wars are enough for a lifetime. Also, it's easier for me to stomach/look past the ideological biases in stuff like FPS and action adventure games, because they tend to largely be right out in the open on the surface narrative / world-building layers. For example, if you don't like the Guardian feminism of Horizon Zero Dawn or the jingoism of CoD, you can just kinda ignore those aspects and enjoy the mechanics, art, exploration, etc - or at least I can. Vs. the bias black box of simulation games
- red_trumpet 4y ago> I suspect that this made it possible to use a place that would otherwise have been occupied by roads under a real estate - as a result, the population density has increased. And precisely such a strategy is seriously considered by many cities, including Sydney. Down with cars - long live public transport. And this seems like a sound idea. It mostly shows how much space can be freed if we were to abolish cars. The dreadfulness of this city does not come from the absence of cars, as the author acknowledges himself: > High unemployment, horrific air pollution, almost no education, medical and fire services are absent, and residents do not live to retirement age. The police state made it possible to maximize the size of the city, while retaining full control over the citizens - but it minimized the quality of life and effectively destroyed free will. > Born in Magnasanti, he spends his life working and living in a small but very efficient stretch of space, and dies at the age of about 50 years. All of this has nothing to do with the absence of cars. To the contrary, combustion cars enhance air pollution and noise in a city, restricting livability.
- calvinmorrison 4y agoThere's an issue in SimCity 3000 where your healthcare is overfunded, it becomes like a retirement community in florida. The % of your workforce drops compared to your population and so your city stops growing. simcity is just a fun optimization game
- jjoonathan 4y agoThe dreadfulness of the city comes from economic conditions, but if you are a citizen, economic conditions come from: * How hard you can make business compete for your business (∝ range^2 * density) * How hard you can make real estate compete for your business (∝ range^2 * density) * How hard you can make business compete for your labor (∝ range^2 * density) Having options is good, density gives you options, but range gives you options squared. The absence of cars improves density, but it also decreases range by 10x and range^2 by 100x. It is far from obvious to me that density improvements outweigh this on balance. Density has undeniable efficiency benefits, but if they accrue to capital (primarily, entirely, or more-than-entirely) and you are a laborer in Magnasanti, the outcome is not good for you.
- Andrew_nenakhov 4y agoI wonder why a student from Philippines is using a Russian version of the game (as evidenced by labels on screenshots with various charts)?
- gostsamo 4y agoMost likely he is using a cracked version downloaded from a russian forum. Russian piracy subculture is rather strong and powered by deep disrespect toward copyright and copyright law.
- Andrew_nenakhov 4y agoIt is generally far easier to get a cracked version of an original game. As for 'piracy subculture', I guess that now with Steam refusing to accept payments from Russian users (who couldn't pay by Mastercard/visa anyway) it'll receive a powerful boost.
- sudosysgen 4y agoWhen Iran went into a similar position there were rumours that the state undertook its own piracy efforts. Incidentally there are a lot of software you'll only find cracks for in Iranian website if you use an Iranian IP.
- Andrew_nenakhov 4y agoProbably when a country falls out of an international community with more or less consistent approach to enforcement of IP laws, it creates a certain Wild West-like environment.
- sudosysgen 4y agoNot quite, it's really that poorer countries don't want to enforce IP laws, they only do so under pressure from richer countries. There are international communities such as as the African Union that really don't give a shit about IP, it's really the US and Europe that press for it in Africa.