Hi! I wrote this book. Ask me anything. I also was a designer on Spore. I'm also trying to feed my 8 month old lunch and he is very excited to asn``wer anything too.
I want to bump a few things that folks linked to below:
[1] Will Wright (designer of SimCity) will be interviewing me about the book on July 19th at 2PM ET. We thought it would be fun to turn the tables and have him interview someone else for a change. On Twitch, free, online, and live. Hosted by ROMchip. RSVP here: https://www.tickettailor.com/events/romchipajournalofgamehis...
[2] Stewart Brand wrote a brief review on X I'm still in disbelief over ("It is one of the best origin stories ever told and the best account I've seen of how innovation actually occurs in computerdom."). Read more here: https://twitter.com/stewartbrand/status/1800941614287946003
Will the interview be available on any other platforms, after the fact? I'd love to watch the interview, but I am not sure I'll be able to catch it live, and Twitch is not my favourite platform for watching livestream recordings.
Hi Ryan!! I got a PhD, did some indie game stuff, made some babies (with some help, mainly from my wife), design consulting. You can see more of my projects here: https://chaim.io, like some tangible/mixed reality computing (done while I was working at a research lab with Bret Victor), and Earth: A Primer, a science book made of simulation toys.
Possibly off topic, but: what did you work on for Spore? Was it around the time of the now (in?)famous E3 demo in ~2006, or closer to the final release? The final game seemed to differ significantly from what many of us were hoping for, and I never really heard much of a story of what happened in between.
The main thing I did was design the Editors (like the Creature Creator), but I initially joined as an intern in 2001 and did some really fun divergent prototypes for Will Wright while the project was in a nascent state, and a bunch of other stuff during development.
There's a whole book to be written about Spore (but I'm done writing books for now), but the simple answer is that the difference between "hoping for" and "final" product encompasses a lot of what makes software and game development (or really any creative project for that matter) interesting. Especially when multiple people are involved. And that is part of what sparked this project, which took over a decade to research and write.
Thank you for the mental picture you trying to tap out a message offending off a very interested child :-)
Man I loved Spore! There's so much potential in those mechanics. A modern remake with mod ability would be amazing! Perhaps that ship is sailed but one can imagine.
Don't you think the granularity of factorio is what brought its success? Don't you think it would be interesting the mix the sims and sim city for more granularity in the game?
That’s a fascinating idea! One of the surprising things I learned while researching this book was that Maxis was actually trying to do that at one point, and in fact more. They had an initiative called SimWorld that would allow all their sim games to link together and even be open to third party development. This very ambitious OS-like architecture meant that The Sims really was seen as zooming into SimCity, and in fact early prototypes of what became The Sims let you do just that. And SimCopter did let you open SC2k save files and fly through them. While SimWorld didn’t take off it seems that without it we wouldn’t have The Sims, which introduced an innovative object-oriented architecture that underwrote its cutting-edge AI, UI, and business model (modular expansion packs).
Thank you. Hmm, a big existential question and I haven't had any coffee yet. There is certainly anxiety in the uncertainty. (Was spending over ten years researching and writing this book––intermixed with other things--a good use of time?) But I think I'd be unhappy with something safe. It's an ongoing surprise to me that my career continues to work, but I do occasionally wonder if this is a wise course. My parallel counterfactual selves are doing really different things, but I think I like the real one more. (Though they probably feel the same way.)
LOL. This must be the reason the Chicago Manual of Style indicates hyphens here. And it must also be the reason an MIT Press copyeditor reviewed the whole manuscript very carefully. (Which then triggered some legalistic arguments from me citing chapter and verse of said stye manual.)
Definitely not a videogame. I wouldn't want the responsibility of allocating that quantity of energy and resources. I think ChatGPT and its brethren are fascinating, amazing, and useful, but your question makes me think probably nobody should have that compute power. Maybe it's hubris to think one could responsibly use it. (Now I feel uncool for failing to have fun with your question.)
Thank you!!! (He really did make that typo and REALLY wanted to be inside my laptop screen and tap the keys just like me and was being super aggressive.)
I linked elsewhere Will talking about the procedural generation. But now we have The Power of Generative AI. Those editors you've built could sure be way different, just doodle your monster and watch it come alive. 'etc.
I would like to make Spore meets Second Life Powered by AI.
Also Space Exploration games really took off in the years since Spore..
This is fertile ground there are so many directions to take it with modern hardware and the recent advancments. Time for another kick at the cat I say. Wanna apply to YC together? :)
I'm not even kidding, I gots ideas. Also randoms reading this if you're picking up what I'm laying down. But to get on the team first you have to buy and read his book.
P.S. - Somebody recently called me about how a Burger King Advertisement doxxed them. In the middle of the commercial it knew their name and IP address and zoomed unto their house with custom comical narration about which burger they like.
One day a Simulation of Everything Game with a little trickery could plausibly stun the player by suddenly showing them a little cartoonish version of themselves playing it in their own room.
I think a lot of videogaming ideas took off after Spore that were very likely influenced by it. Shades of Jodorowsky's Dune? (But I think Spore was actually more successful than many give it credit for, which has been pointed out to me many times. 191m+ creations and counting on Sporepedia.)
Generative AI certainly opens up new possibilities! It's analogous to GPUs (enabled real-time 3D) which opened new possibilities and audiences for videogames. I also think that the fundamental magic of creative tools doesn't actually need fancy tech at all.
Honestly, I'm not much of a building sim player these day! I love videogames but they're so complicated and take so much time, right? Seems like City Skylines is the heir, right? Or maybe it's Minecraft and Tiny Glade? I think that SimCity and Maxis can be seen as helping establish the whole world of open-ended creative sandbox games that have since proven to be dominant. A big takeaway from this book for me, looking at the history of videogames and computing, is that the medium of videogames is really about creativity and making games. (Look at the top-selling games of all time.)
There’s something of a contradiction here, and maybe it’s worth exploring. Or maybe not; I leave the decision to you.
Sim City isn’t a simulation. It’s a game. The reason it was commercially successful is because it was fun.
This is explicitly a different goal from creating a simulator. A simulator can be fun to certain groups of people, but it’s not designed to be fun to large groups of people. Games are.
So here’s the rub. When people draw a correlation between sim city and reality, are they saying that the way to make a simulation of reality is to make a fun game? Because sim city was designed to be a fun game first and foremost, not a simulator.
Can’t it be both? Well, sure. Lots of things are. But when you’re saying that you’re putting the world in a machine, it becomes a different discussion. Is the best way to put the world in a machine to make it fun? That doesn’t seem too plausible, even if the result is fun for some people. So both the title and the descriptions of world building (as in, the world we live in, not a fantasy world) seem off the mark.
I genuinely don’t know if it’s worth pointing this out. But then I read the description, and again, they’re saying very clearly that this book is comparing simulation of reality to a commercially successful game that was designed with a different goal in mind. Is this just coincidence?
Simulations and models, regardless of whether they're designed for fun or for realism, can still teach you plenty of things about the real world; sometimes not from the simulation itself but explicitly by its omissions. The fact that SimCity famously removed all the parking lots tells you something interesting right away. The fact that City Skylines bites the bullet of traffic and renders it in fairly sophisticated detail -- to the degree that the game often devolves into "Traffic Management Simulator" instead of "City Builder Simulator" -- is another such interesting lesson.
But in terms of "how directly transferable are lessons learned directly from the model" is always going to depend on the model's assumptions.
Fun fact -- have you ever heard of the "Monocentric city model?" It comes up in a lot of econ papers, and a lot of urban economics, and therefore a lot of real world policy is based on it.
The "Monocentric city model" is about as simplistic as it gets -- it models the city as a LINE. IE, you have a bunch of agents, and they live some distance from the city, and they have different travel/commuting costs proportional to their distance from the city center; let's run that and see what kinds of consequences fall out of it.
Turns out it's actually a pretty good model and generates outcomes that are pretty analogous to what we see in the real world! Is it perfectly representative of the real world? Of course, not, it models the city as a friggin line. But if we're talking about sheer complexity alone, SimCity is already orders of magnitude more complex than this famous economic model. But that in and of itself doesn't mean that a successful SimCity city would make for a successful real world city, because it's not just about sheer complexity, it's about the appropriateness of the assumptions.
Didn't Cities Skylines come out of a previous project by the same developer, a transport simulator called Cities in Motion? It's no wonder it has a heavy focus on transport management.
The original SimCity franchise did an amazing job of combining both simulation and game, but later iterations (past SimCity 4) ditched any pretense of being a simulation and went full on-game. That shift quickly tanked a previously sterling franchise, which I think shows the significance of the simulation angle.
Cities Skylines eventually filled in that gap and if you look at the dedicated community around those games you'll see a heavy emphasis on simulation and very little focus on making it a more fun game. Interest is somewhat split between modeling aesthetics and modeling transit. I think the greatest interest is in modeling societies and economies, but few games seem to make that work except on small scales. There's an old game called City Life that did an commendable job modelling social classes. The early Tropico games had a very engaging economic system. I can't think of any modern games that have impressed me like those, but I would love suggestions.
> Cities Skylines eventually filled in that gap and if you look at the dedicated community around those games you'll see a heavy emphasis on simulation and very little focus on making it a more fun game.
Nowhere near. If Cities Skylines was a truly accurate simulation:
1. It would be nigh-impossible to bulldoze private property. Every road, once built, would become essentially permanent.
2. Every city would be perpetually cash-strapped, with tax income insufficient to cover the maintenance costs on the infrastructure.
3. If you either raise taxes or reduce spending you would get thrown out of office at the next election.
Thankfully, the creators realised that making it fun was more important than making it accurate.
I would also like to know any economic type simulator recommendations.
My list would probably include: Capitalism and Capitalism 2. I also put a lot of time into Civ1, the original X-Com and Theme Hospital. Not really simulators, but they all had interesting economic models.
I’m not sure I’m following the distinction you’re trying to draw. SimCity is a simulation — just a simplistic one with many simplifications and short cuts.
It’s a toy model.
There’s always simplifications made in any model — SimCity’s happened to be made with “fun” in mind.
I think he is actually trying to say it IS a simulation and NOT emulating the real world.
At least in the hardware world, there are simulators (which are faux short cut versions that work reasonably like the real thing) and emulators (which are software versions that act exactly like the real thing, but usually are very slow)
That’s actually the point. SimCity was made to be fun, not to be a simulation.
To put the dissonance in clearer terms, imagine a book described as "Analyzing interpersonal relationships through the lens of The Sims". Would you take it seriously?
It doesn’t seem like a pedantic distinction to say that the goals of SimCity are different from the goals of simulating reality.
I haven't played a lot of Sim City, but in my mind, factorio is more a simulator than sim city.
Simulating means there is granularity about how each element can be seen and touched by the player.
In sim city there are a lot of shortcuts and simplifications. It looks like you have a city, but the more you play, the more it's just a decor, because the game shows a representation, but doesn't let you see the details.
So you see a car, a house, money, a school, but there is no day planning for citizens, they don't have a lifespan, citizen A or B doesn't have a commute with job C or D, they don't have children that you see grow up, you don't see those citizen bring back groceries or corn going out of the farm.
The problem is simulating granular elements of a city or even a village would require a lot of memory and computing power, even today, so back in 1990 or 2000 it was just not possible to have a granular village or city.
I want to see a mixture of The Sims and Sim City, but you can imagine how difficult it is to design such a game.
I think Cities Skylines 2 has simulation down to that level, where individual residents have houses, jobs, kids, go to school, can die eventually. etc. But it doesn't really seem to add anything to the gameplay and the game didn't get great reviews.
IBM is way into this racket now of Smart Cities and digital twins.
Idea being if you make a Sim City type game but worse, because you are IBM, and then market it to bureaucrats around the world, because you are IBM, they will happily pay you a lot of money, because you are IBM, so that they can point to your simulation as justification for their in/actions. The ass covering is magnificent you just have to feed it a little bit of real data (traffic, power consumption, weather).
Of curse part of what you are simulating is your own understanding and aspirational ideals about how society should function. If you write an essay or a speech people will argue but if you embed values into a game... well, they will still argue but they have to notice it first.
Some will ascribe magical powers of clairvoyance and correctness unto the simulation for reasons that nobody quite understands.
I'm not sure what my point is exactly other than this is potentially a very interesting fulcrum point. Like who is playing whom really in this situation?
A game can consist of a simulation. The fact that you add feature sets to it does not change the fact that.
The various control planes and randomness of the simulation can be tuned, sure, but if you were to capture all those control inputs you can reconstruct the world event timeline in a determistic timeline.
Starcraft 2 Is a simulation. Replays are just games with all commands timestamped and the simulated world throttling forward and backward through time.
My hot take is that all games are simulations to some extent. Many sports are a kind of war game, simulating a specific aspect of real war, obviously abstracting quite a bit. A big part of the fun in catan is in the tension of having to cooperate with rivals to mutually beneficial ends, much like what happens in economics all the time. The point being, that yes, there are varying levels of realism, but in the end I don’t really think there is a simple line denoting “game” or “simulation.”
I'm a bit hesitant about posting this link. I wrote the article mainly for myself (memory capture exercise); it happened a long time ago - and I'm sure my former employers (and hopefully all similar organisations) don't encourage this sort of approach at all.
Isn't that the whole point? SimCity and all its sequels and imitators present a very simplified set of tools and mechanics. Those tools and mechanics are more than the sum of their parts: They entertain, they teach, they advance a political opinion (Jeff Braun has been explicit about this[0]) and yes, they simulate, albeit very simplistically. The intersection of those things and the tradeoffs that are required in all simulations (which all reside on a spectrum of toy to faithful representation) are interesting. IMO it's (ironically) too simplistic to say that SimCity is a mere game and thus unworthy of thinking more deeply about, and I suggest that you're taking that "world in a machine" marketing phrase a bit too literally.
This book is on my reading list! Guess it's worth mentioning I am working on a game to rival SimCity (and Cities Skylines), though aesthetically it looks like a game straight out of the 90s.
If Chris Sawyer made a city builder that dived deep into simulation.. that's what I'm aiming for.
Hey, make me a game where you start out running a business like the old days where you own the company store and own the workers homes, so you manage all that plus the business operations. I don't know, it could be a logging business or coal mine, whatever.
And then at some point the workers revolt against the "company owns everything" system and the game becomes a city simulator.
You just basically start small scale and then zoom out to manage the big scale.
Hell, make it two games as long as I can import the first game map as my starter city.
Did you know that Maxis (creators of SimCity) sold investors on a vision a world where "simulation" was a common use-case for computers, and Maxis was the company at the center of simulation software?
This was the first of many fascinating revelations this book brought me. Reading it, I found myself getting caught up in their grand vision.
The first part of _Building SimCity_ is a deep dive into the game's historical antecedents: from tabletop city simulations and Vannevar Bush's analogue computers, to systems thinking and cellular automata. This part explores many ideas that I have briefly encountered before and wondered "why hasn't anyone taken these wonderful ideas and produced something great with them?" The book answers: "Will Wright did, you just didn't notice." More specifically, _Building SimCity_ argues that SimCity the game is a synthesis and application of many great ideas, which are mostly hidden to the player. This book gives us a look behind the curtain.
The second part of the book spends chapters on the design of SimCity, the history of Maxis, and the experience of playing SimCity. The implementation chapter has no code listings — as a programmer, reading it feels like reading an exceptionally clear design document, explaining the real-time (UI) clock and the simulation clock, the 16-bit representation of map tile state, the main simulation loop, and the map scan algorithm for information propogation across tiles. This chapter is accompanied by exceptionally well-designed diagrams, which I find quite valuable on their own.
To set expectations: this is an academic work. It contains war stories and technical details, but it also goes to great lengths to situate SimCity in its historical context, connecting it to previous ideas, and providing full citations. But though the prose has an academic bent, I find it very engaging and readable.
The only negative thing I can say about this book is that the printed edition has a chemical smell, which I assume is due to the full-color printing and will presumeably fade with time.
[Disclaimer: I haven't finished this book yet, I've read the first few chapters about the history of simulation and also skipped ahead to the chapter about SimCity's implementation details. I'm posting this here because it's what I've written out in emails to friends about the book; I'll update my review when I finish reading it.]
They really were at the center of simulation. They had so many offerings that many people have never even heard of, like Sim Earth. I ran into it at a point in my life when I was playing with a lot of ideas about sustainability and waste, and it ended up being very influential in how I think about the world. It was almost a throw away game, there just wasn't much to do, but setting up initial conditions and watching them play out was fascinating to me. It taught me a lot about critical mass, and resource utilization rates.
As a side note, Oxygen Not Included feels like a master's class in sustainability, especially if you don't over abuse some of the game's broken mechanics.
It’s funny to look back as someone who was seven when SimEarth came out. It was anything but a throwaway game for me, as I played it for months on a mostly daily basis. Same with SimAnt and whatever other similar games I could get my hands on.
Hi! The focus is SimCity, but once the book gets into Maxis I get into SimEarth, SimAnt, SimLife, and The Sims. They aren't treated in as much detail, but they are here because they are crucial for understanding the overall arc of Maxis, SimCity's consequences, and Will Wright's career.
You can't understand Maxis without understanding the relationship they had with the world beyond videogames. Consider SimEarth. Stewart Brand (should need no intro; Kevin Kelly introduced them—he and Wright bonded over their love of social insects) introduced Wright to James Lovelock (co-inventor of Gaia hypothesis), who happily collaborated, and Maxis donated money to Lovelock's nonprofit. And Brand's GBN consultancy was interested in using SimEarth for their work. There's more context to all this I get into, but that's the super short version.
I'm still stunned by how much Brand thinks I got all this right (and how much he loves the book): "Of course I checked the few moments where I intersected with the events in the story. They are tone-perfect, detail-perfect, and context-perfect. More so than I've ever seen before." See his review on X:
> - how much does it go into people and personalities of the team and stakeholders, besides the technical design of the game?
A lot; it all goes together.
> - it sounds like first part of the book is historical and talks about various games, second focuses strictly on simcity?
Yes. And not just games, but computer history and simulation practices (like system dynamics, cellular automata, artificial life) that influenced SimCity and shaped its reception.
Building SimCity only talks about pre-EA SimCity. So there's SimCity, SimCity 2000, and SimCity for SNES, but not much else—aside from how SimCity 3000 was a train wreck that helped destroy Maxis.
Apparently the author of "Building SimCity" worked on Spore with Will Wright.
> Spore is a computer simulation game directed by Will Wright (SimCity, The Sims). I designed its suite of powerful yet fun to use 3d tools that players used to make alien creatures, buildings, and vehicles.
> I designed Spore's critically acclaimed creative tool suite, e.g. the Spore Creature Creator, which has been used to make over 189 million creations.
> In 2002, I was handpicked by Will Wright for Spore's nucleic R&D team. Responsibilities also included design and prototyping across the entire project, directing interns, and interfacing with journalists.
Sounds interesting, if perhaps less fun than Masters of Doom.
I look forward to reading it for free some day. And I probably like that ink smell, although I agree that it's important that a book should smell good.
Here is Will Wright's talk "Interfacing to Microworlds" from April 26 1996, which he presented to Terry Winnograd's user interface class at Stanford. I sat in on the talk, asked questions, took notes, and wrote up a summary, had Will review it, then went to work with him on Dollhouse which became The Sims. After we shipped in 2000 I updated my summary of the talk with some thoughts and retrospectives about working with Will on The Sims.
Stanford recently published the video, so again I updated my write-up with more information from the talk, transcript excerpts, screen snapshots, links and citations.
All I had to go on for the 27 years between the talk until the video surfaced and I could finally watch it again were my notes and memory, so I'd forgotten how just prescient and purposeful he was, and I didn't remember that he was already planning on leaning into the storytelling and user created content and self and family representation aspects, and making the people speak with "Charlie Brown Adults" mwop mwop mwop speech, among many other things.
Will Wright - Maxis - Interfacing to Microworlds - 1996-4-26
>Video of Will Wright's talk about "Interfacing to Microworlds" presented to Terry Winograd's user interface class at Stanford University, April 26, 1996.
>He demonstrates and gives postmortems for SimEarth, SimAnt, and SimCity 2000, then previews an extremely early pre-release prototype version of Dollhouse (which eventually became The Sims), describing how the AI models personalities and behavior, and is distributed throughout extensible plug-in programmable objects in the environment, and he thoughtfully answers many interesting questions from the audience.
>This is the lecture described in "Will Wright on Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games (1996)": A summary of Will Wright’s talk to Terry Winograd’s User Interface Class at Stanford, written in 1996 by Don Hopkins, before they worked together on The Sims at Maxis.
Use and reproduction:
The materials are open for research use and may be used freely for non-commercial purposes with an attribution. For commercial permission requests, please contact the Stanford University Archives (universityarchives@stanford.edu).
A summary of Will Wright’s talk to Terry Winograd’s User Interface Class at Stanford, written in 1996 by Don Hopkins, before they worked together on The Sims at Maxis. Now including a video and snapshots of the original talk!
Will Wright and Brian Eno discussing generative systems at a Long Now Foundation talk:
SimCity takes a lot of short cuts to fool you. It's what Will Wright calls the "Simulator Effect":
Will Wright defined the “Simulator Effect” as how players imagine the simulation is vastly more detailed, deep, rich, and complex than it actually is: a magical misunderstanding that you shouldn’t talk them out of. He designs games to run on two computers at once: the electronic one on the player’s desk, running his shallow tame simulation, and the biological one in the player’s head, running their deep wild imagination.
"Reverse Over-Engineering" is a desirable outcome of the Simulator Effect: what game players (and game developers trying to clone the game) do when they use their imagination to extrapolate how a game works, and totally overestimate how much work and modeling the simulator is actually doing, because they filled in the gaps with their imagination and preconceptions and assumptions, instead of realizing how many simplifications and shortcuts and illusions it actually used.
The trick of optimizing games is to off-load as much as the simulation from the computer into the user's brain, which is MUCH more powerful and creative. Implication is more efficient (and richer) than simulation.
Some muckety-muck architecture magazine was interviewing Will Wright about SimCity, and they asked him a question something like “which ontological urban paradigm 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.”
During development, when we first added Astrological signs to the characters, there was a discussion about whether we should invent our own original "Sim Zodiac" signs, or use the traditional ones, which have a lot of baggage and history (which some of the designers thought might be a problem).
Will Wright argued that we actually wanted to leverage the baggage and history of the traditional Astrological signs of the Zodiac, so we should just use those and not invent our own.
The way it works is that Will came up with twelve archetypal vectors of personality traits corresponding to each of the twelve Astrological signs, so when you set their personality traits, it looks up the sign with the nearest euclidian distance to the character's personality, and displays that as their sign. But there was absolutely no actual effect on their behavior.
That decision paid off almost instantly and measurably in testing, after we implemented the user interface for showing the Astrological sign in the character creation screen, without writing any code to make their sign affect their behavior: The testers immediately started reporting bugs that their character's sign had too much of an effect on their personality, and claimed that the non-existent effect of astrological signs on behavior needed to be tuned down. But that effect was totally coming from their imagination!
They should call them Astrillogical Signs!
The create-a-sim user interface hid the corresponding astrological sign for the initial all-zero personality you first see before you've spent any points, because that would be insulting to 1/12th of the players (implying [your sign] has zero personality)!
From: "Gavin Clayton" <gavinc@eidosnet.co.uk>
Newsgroups: alt.family-names.sims,alt.games.the-sims
Sent: Tuesday, April 11, 2000 2:59 PM
Subject: No other game has done this...
> Hi... no need to reply to this cos it's just a whimsical thought :-)
>
> When I first got the game I tried to make my own family, trying to get
> their personalities accurate too. When making myself, my dad and my
> sister, I attributed points to all the personality categories, and I
> found I had points left over. But when I made my mum I ran out of
> available points and was wishing for more -- I wanted to give her more
> points than are available. It made me realise for the first time in
> years how much I love my mum :-)
>
> Now what other game has ever done *that*? :-)
>
> Gavin Clayton
> Implication is more efficient (and richer) than simulation.
I guess that why lacking a water supply in SimCity 2000 didn't inhibit the city's growth at all, and the negative effect on your mayoral approval rating could be removed by building a single pump anywhere, with no pipes.
People interesting in this might be interested in Silicon Second Nature by Stefan Helmreich, a pretty brilliant MIT anthropologist/historian of science. It’s all about the Santa Fe Institute and the science of emergence, from both a technical and social level. One of the best books I’ve ever read I think!
Stefan Helmreich's book is indeed brilliant! I used it extensively when writing Building SimCity. Stefan was quite helpful in researching my book, sharing and checking some old SFI documentation so I could determine things like who visited SFI when for what event (and with whom).
The attendee list for some of the early Artificial Life conferences was quite cool. Peter Molyneux shows up as well as one of Maxis's venture capitalists.
I was delighted how you covered Doreen Nelson's life work, Design Based Learning, like you did in your thesis. I have a copy of the "School Edition" Lab Pack of SimCity Classic that she and Michael Bremer wrote, which I'll dig up and scan, so I can put it on archive.org and include ìt with the open source Micropolis project.
LGR - SimCity Educational Version Unboxing & Overview: An overview of the "School Edition" Lab Pack of SimCity Classic by Maxis. Unboxing, first impressions of the package and testing of the radically rad software ensues.
Hey thanks for the response. I’m looking forward to picking up the book now. Silicon Second Nature left a big enough impression on me that I did a performance art piece inspired by it in undergrad (back when I thought I might be an artist, LOL)… unfortunately I don’t have access any longer to video documentation but there are some pics and description on my (currently offline) website:
In my childhood, me and my brother had access to computers (and simcity) only once a month. Because we still wanted to play, we actually made paper version of it, drawing maps ourselves and doing all the financial calculations on a separate sheet. I wanted to write my own simcity.
Later on, I spent considerable amount of time designing the code, again on paper as I still didn't have access to computers.
I think that had the most significant impact on my skills, and, eventually, my career.
Thanks for that
Do you think people can learn something from simulation games that’s inherently hard to learn from mere language or mathematics?
Is it possible to create good simulation games of substantial global events and the subsequent possible outcomes. Some examples would be a pandemic like Covid and how it shaped societies differently based on preconditions and policies OR a discovery of nuclear fission that sparked building nuclear weapon (I.e the manhattan project) and fueled the cold war OR the realization and threat of man made global warming and the global reaction and policy making and many possible outcomes.
And if not why are they not feasible for games. Is there something that makes these types of events and their outcome hard to simulate?
I think yes, and so did Vannevar Bush (OK, not the game part). The first two chapters of Building SimCity are dedicated to non-computer simulations for this reason. Vannevar Bush and his analog instruments, like the differential analyzer, are the subject of chapter 2. Bush (and others) argued that good tangible models were excellent complements to, and sometimes superior to, abstract symbolic representations. For this reason he and his colleagues grieved the transition to digital computing.
For example, he writes in Pieces of the Action (p. 262) of "an example of how easy it is to teach fundamental calculus," about a mechanic with a high school education who learned calculus by working on the differential analyzer. "It was very interesting to discuss this subject with him because he had learned the calculus in mechanical terms ‐ a strange approach, and yet he understood it. That is, he did not understand it in any formal sense, but he understood the fundamentals; he had it under his skin."
I think this is fascinating stuff, and chapter 2 goes deep into the subject. Chapter 1 is about Doreen Gehry Nelson and city simulations made by school kids--it's all about games, simulation, tangibility, and learning.
Procedural Rhetoric: Ian Bogost, Janet Murray (Chaim's advisor and Building SimCity endorser)
For better or worse, games can deliver pre-programmed propaganda and procedural rhetoric for advancing ideologies and changing minds. Some designers push clichéd narratives, stereotypical characters, and institutionalized prejudices that normalize and encourage homophobia, sexism, racism, bigotry, and violence. Others like Will Wright conscientiously use it for good.
Ian Bogost defined the “Procedural Rhetoric” game design philosophy as an unholy blend of Will Wright and Aristotle, that explains how people learn through rules and processes, analyzes the art of persuasion, and focuses on conveying ideology by crafting laws and rules within games.
“I developed my own design philosophy that I called procedural rhetoric, an unholy blend of Will Wright and Aristotle.” -Ian Bogost, Video Games Are Better Without Characters
As a conspiracy theorist, my intuition suggests to me that there are people within the government that would frown upon the general public getting too interested in (and skilled in) the complexities and nuances of human coordination. That sort of thing is The Experts job.
I'd be very interested to hear of other books and articles like this, too.
Edwin Hutchins's Cognition in the Wild is one of my favorite books. It's very technical and ethnographic, but less historical. It doesn't deal with code, but that's because it's about the nitty gritty of navigation on a Navy ship (pre digital computing), and (here's the historical aspect) it compares this to some traditional Polyponesian navigational practices.
The closest thing off the top of my head are titles in MIT Press's Platform Studies series, like Racing the Beam, about the Atari 2600, which is historical and technical. https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262539760/racing-the-beam/
If you make a Venn diagram with history, ethnography, technical details, and code as different circles, the central intersection may not be huge, but I think there may be a lot more if you remove some of the constraints. But I want to see more work at this intersection, and I hope more people do it.
I don't see anything wrong with posting about a book, a course, etc., especially if it's a newly released product. It's good to know what's being done.
Hi! I wrote this book. Ask me anything. I also was a designer on Spore. I'm also trying to feed my 8 month old lunch and he is very excited to asn``wer anything too.
I want to bump a few things that folks linked to below:
[1] Will Wright (designer of SimCity) will be interviewing me about the book on July 19th at 2PM ET. We thought it would be fun to turn the tables and have him interview someone else for a change. On Twitch, free, online, and live. Hosted by ROMchip. RSVP here: https://www.tickettailor.com/events/romchipajournalofgamehis...
[2] Stewart Brand wrote a brief review on X I'm still in disbelief over ("It is one of the best origin stories ever told and the best account I've seen of how innovation actually occurs in computerdom."). Read more here: https://twitter.com/stewartbrand/status/1800941614287946003
Have you ever read 'Sim Cities and Sim Crises'?
https://molleindustria.org/GamesForCities/
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Will the interview be available on any other platforms, after the fact? I'd love to watch the interview, but I am not sure I'll be able to catch it live, and Twitch is not my favourite platform for watching livestream recordings.
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Congrats about Stewart Brand, that’s a ringing endorsement. Can’t wait to read the book.
Stewart Brand's twitter review was reason I went out and bought the book right away. So far it's an excellent read!
Hi Chaim! I really enjoyed working with you on Spore. What have you been up to in the intervening years besides writing this book?
Hi Ryan!! I got a PhD, did some indie game stuff, made some babies (with some help, mainly from my wife), design consulting. You can see more of my projects here: https://chaim.io, like some tangible/mixed reality computing (done while I was working at a research lab with Bret Victor), and Earth: A Primer, a science book made of simulation toys.
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Ryan!! Now you’re getting tagged. Long time. I saw Ted and Rebecca a couple weeks ago. If you’re that Ryan I.
Cool!
Possibly off topic, but: what did you work on for Spore? Was it around the time of the now (in?)famous E3 demo in ~2006, or closer to the final release? The final game seemed to differ significantly from what many of us were hoping for, and I never really heard much of a story of what happened in between.
The main thing I did was design the Editors (like the Creature Creator), but I initially joined as an intern in 2001 and did some really fun divergent prototypes for Will Wright while the project was in a nascent state, and a bunch of other stuff during development.
There's a whole book to be written about Spore (but I'm done writing books for now), but the simple answer is that the difference between "hoping for" and "final" product encompasses a lot of what makes software and game development (or really any creative project for that matter) interesting. Especially when multiple people are involved. And that is part of what sparked this project, which took over a decade to research and write.
(Also, many years ago I wrote a chapter for another MIT Press book about some early Spore history. It's reproduced on this deprecated blog: http://www.levitylab.com/blog/2011/02/brief-history-of-spore...)
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Thank you for the mental picture you trying to tap out a message offending off a very interested child :-)
Man I loved Spore! There's so much potential in those mechanics. A modern remake with mod ability would be amazing! Perhaps that ship is sailed but one can imagine.
You're welcome, and thank you!
I agree! There's a lot of talented people out there. Hopefully someone will make something like that one day.
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Don't you think the granularity of factorio is what brought its success? Don't you think it would be interesting the mix the sims and sim city for more granularity in the game?
That’s a fascinating idea! One of the surprising things I learned while researching this book was that Maxis was actually trying to do that at one point, and in fact more. They had an initiative called SimWorld that would allow all their sim games to link together and even be open to third party development. This very ambitious OS-like architecture meant that The Sims really was seen as zooming into SimCity, and in fact early prototypes of what became The Sims let you do just that. And SimCopter did let you open SC2k save files and fly through them. While SimWorld didn’t take off it seems that without it we wouldn’t have The Sims, which introduced an innovative object-oriented architecture that underwrote its cutting-edge AI, UI, and business model (modular expansion packs).
Some fun primary sources:
[1] Will Wright interview for SimCity 2000 CDROM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcgV4YolDkg
[2] Game Developer magazine piece on SimWorld and early The Sims: https://ubm-twvideo01.s3.amazonaws.com/o1/vault/GD_Mag_Archi... (An old Game Developer magazine piece)
[3] Will Wright shows a very early The Sims demo at Terry Winograd’s Stanford seminar: https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/yj113jt5999
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You do so much cool stuff in life. Much Kudos to you. And you have taken an unusual career path in your life for a smart person.
Are you content with the uncertainty, and not having a conventional, safe job?
Thank you. Hmm, a big existential question and I haven't had any coffee yet. There is certainly anxiety in the uncertainty. (Was spending over ten years researching and writing this book––intermixed with other things--a good use of time?) But I think I'd be unhappy with something safe. It's an ongoing surprise to me that my career continues to work, but I do occasionally wonder if this is a wise course. My parallel counterfactual selves are doing really different things, but I think I like the real one more. (Though they probably feel the same way.)
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Your lunch is 8 months old?
LOL. This must be the reason the Chicago Manual of Style indicates hyphens here. And it must also be the reason an MIT Press copyeditor reviewed the whole manuscript very carefully. (Which then triggered some legalistic arguments from me citing chapter and verse of said stye manual.)
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> feed my 8 month old lunch and he is very excited to asn``wer anything too.
Looks like you're having a hard time keeping him away from the keyboard, too, I can relate :)
If you had access to the compute power that open ai has, what would you make?
Definitely not a videogame. I wouldn't want the responsibility of allocating that quantity of energy and resources. I think ChatGPT and its brethren are fascinating, amazing, and useful, but your question makes me think probably nobody should have that compute power. Maybe it's hubris to think one could responsibly use it. (Now I feel uncool for failing to have fun with your question.)
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What’s better, the puréed peas or carrots? That’s either to the infant eating it, or the parent who ultimately deals with it later on.
Is the ebook (on Penguin Random House) DRM-free? Are you planning an audiobook version?
I haven’t read the book, but in TFA it’s described as a “lavishly visual book” so I’m not sure it would translate well to audio.
Good luck with the baby and congrats for the book. <3
Thank you!!! (He really did make that typo and REALLY wanted to be inside my laptop screen and tap the keys just like me and was being super aggressive.)
I linked elsewhere Will talking about the procedural generation. But now we have The Power of Generative AI. Those editors you've built could sure be way different, just doodle your monster and watch it come alive. 'etc.
I would like to make Spore meets Second Life Powered by AI. Also Space Exploration games really took off in the years since Spore..
This is fertile ground there are so many directions to take it with modern hardware and the recent advancments. Time for another kick at the cat I say. Wanna apply to YC together? :)
I'm not even kidding, I gots ideas. Also randoms reading this if you're picking up what I'm laying down. But to get on the team first you have to buy and read his book.
P.S. - Somebody recently called me about how a Burger King Advertisement doxxed them. In the middle of the commercial it knew their name and IP address and zoomed unto their house with custom comical narration about which burger they like.
One day a Simulation of Everything Game with a little trickery could plausibly stun the player by suddenly showing them a little cartoonish version of themselves playing it in their own room.
I'm just sayin'.
LOL. Thanks!
I think a lot of videogaming ideas took off after Spore that were very likely influenced by it. Shades of Jodorowsky's Dune? (But I think Spore was actually more successful than many give it credit for, which has been pointed out to me many times. 191m+ creations and counting on Sporepedia.)
Generative AI certainly opens up new possibilities! It's analogous to GPUs (enabled real-time 3D) which opened new possibilities and audiences for videogames. I also think that the fundamental magic of creative tools doesn't actually need fancy tech at all.
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Honestly, I'm not much of a building sim player these day! I love videogames but they're so complicated and take so much time, right? Seems like City Skylines is the heir, right? Or maybe it's Minecraft and Tiny Glade? I think that SimCity and Maxis can be seen as helping establish the whole world of open-ended creative sandbox games that have since proven to be dominant. A big takeaway from this book for me, looking at the history of videogames and computing, is that the medium of videogames is really about creativity and making games. (Look at the top-selling games of all time.)
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There’s something of a contradiction here, and maybe it’s worth exploring. Or maybe not; I leave the decision to you.
Sim City isn’t a simulation. It’s a game. The reason it was commercially successful is because it was fun.
This is explicitly a different goal from creating a simulator. A simulator can be fun to certain groups of people, but it’s not designed to be fun to large groups of people. Games are.
So here’s the rub. When people draw a correlation between sim city and reality, are they saying that the way to make a simulation of reality is to make a fun game? Because sim city was designed to be a fun game first and foremost, not a simulator.
Can’t it be both? Well, sure. Lots of things are. But when you’re saying that you’re putting the world in a machine, it becomes a different discussion. Is the best way to put the world in a machine to make it fun? That doesn’t seem too plausible, even if the result is fun for some people. So both the title and the descriptions of world building (as in, the world we live in, not a fantasy world) seem off the mark.
I genuinely don’t know if it’s worth pointing this out. But then I read the description, and again, they’re saying very clearly that this book is comparing simulation of reality to a commercially successful game that was designed with a different goal in mind. Is this just coincidence?
Simulations and models, regardless of whether they're designed for fun or for realism, can still teach you plenty of things about the real world; sometimes not from the simulation itself but explicitly by its omissions. The fact that SimCity famously removed all the parking lots tells you something interesting right away. The fact that City Skylines bites the bullet of traffic and renders it in fairly sophisticated detail -- to the degree that the game often devolves into "Traffic Management Simulator" instead of "City Builder Simulator" -- is another such interesting lesson.
But in terms of "how directly transferable are lessons learned directly from the model" is always going to depend on the model's assumptions.
Fun fact -- have you ever heard of the "Monocentric city model?" It comes up in a lot of econ papers, and a lot of urban economics, and therefore a lot of real world policy is based on it.
The "Monocentric city model" is about as simplistic as it gets -- it models the city as a LINE. IE, you have a bunch of agents, and they live some distance from the city, and they have different travel/commuting costs proportional to their distance from the city center; let's run that and see what kinds of consequences fall out of it.
Turns out it's actually a pretty good model and generates outcomes that are pretty analogous to what we see in the real world! Is it perfectly representative of the real world? Of course, not, it models the city as a friggin line. But if we're talking about sheer complexity alone, SimCity is already orders of magnitude more complex than this famous economic model. But that in and of itself doesn't mean that a successful SimCity city would make for a successful real world city, because it's not just about sheer complexity, it's about the appropriateness of the assumptions.
Based on your capitalization of “LINE”, you might also know this, but “THE LINE” is a real world example of a (proposed) linear city project in Saudi Arabia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Line,_Saudi_Arabia
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This is fascinating! (All simulation requires abstraction.)
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Didn't Cities Skylines come out of a previous project by the same developer, a transport simulator called Cities in Motion? It's no wonder it has a heavy focus on transport management.
The original SimCity franchise did an amazing job of combining both simulation and game, but later iterations (past SimCity 4) ditched any pretense of being a simulation and went full on-game. That shift quickly tanked a previously sterling franchise, which I think shows the significance of the simulation angle.
Cities Skylines eventually filled in that gap and if you look at the dedicated community around those games you'll see a heavy emphasis on simulation and very little focus on making it a more fun game. Interest is somewhat split between modeling aesthetics and modeling transit. I think the greatest interest is in modeling societies and economies, but few games seem to make that work except on small scales. There's an old game called City Life that did an commendable job modelling social classes. The early Tropico games had a very engaging economic system. I can't think of any modern games that have impressed me like those, but I would love suggestions.
> Cities Skylines eventually filled in that gap and if you look at the dedicated community around those games you'll see a heavy emphasis on simulation and very little focus on making it a more fun game.
Nowhere near. If Cities Skylines was a truly accurate simulation:
1. It would be nigh-impossible to bulldoze private property. Every road, once built, would become essentially permanent.
2. Every city would be perpetually cash-strapped, with tax income insufficient to cover the maintenance costs on the infrastructure.
3. If you either raise taxes or reduce spending you would get thrown out of office at the next election.
Thankfully, the creators realised that making it fun was more important than making it accurate.
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I would also like to know any economic type simulator recommendations.
My list would probably include: Capitalism and Capitalism 2. I also put a lot of time into Civ1, the original X-Com and Theme Hospital. Not really simulators, but they all had interesting economic models.
Famously they had to make cars pocketable so that parking wouldn't make car dependent cities as ugly as they are
I’m not sure I’m following the distinction you’re trying to draw. SimCity is a simulation — just a simplistic one with many simplifications and short cuts.
It’s a toy model.
There’s always simplifications made in any model — SimCity’s happened to be made with “fun” in mind.
The point is SimCity is no more a simulation than Monopoly is.
The rules of both are explicitly set up to be fun not a simplification of some model.
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I think he is actually trying to say it IS a simulation and NOT emulating the real world.
At least in the hardware world, there are simulators (which are faux short cut versions that work reasonably like the real thing) and emulators (which are software versions that act exactly like the real thing, but usually are very slow)
That’s actually the point. SimCity was made to be fun, not to be a simulation.
To put the dissonance in clearer terms, imagine a book described as "Analyzing interpersonal relationships through the lens of The Sims". Would you take it seriously?
It doesn’t seem like a pedantic distinction to say that the goals of SimCity are different from the goals of simulating reality.
I haven't played a lot of Sim City, but in my mind, factorio is more a simulator than sim city.
Simulating means there is granularity about how each element can be seen and touched by the player.
In sim city there are a lot of shortcuts and simplifications. It looks like you have a city, but the more you play, the more it's just a decor, because the game shows a representation, but doesn't let you see the details.
So you see a car, a house, money, a school, but there is no day planning for citizens, they don't have a lifespan, citizen A or B doesn't have a commute with job C or D, they don't have children that you see grow up, you don't see those citizen bring back groceries or corn going out of the farm.
The problem is simulating granular elements of a city or even a village would require a lot of memory and computing power, even today, so back in 1990 or 2000 it was just not possible to have a granular village or city.
I want to see a mixture of The Sims and Sim City, but you can imagine how difficult it is to design such a game.
I think Cities Skylines 2 has simulation down to that level, where individual residents have houses, jobs, kids, go to school, can die eventually. etc. But it doesn't really seem to add anything to the gameplay and the game didn't get great reviews.
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IBM is way into this racket now of Smart Cities and digital twins.
Idea being if you make a Sim City type game but worse, because you are IBM, and then market it to bureaucrats around the world, because you are IBM, they will happily pay you a lot of money, because you are IBM, so that they can point to your simulation as justification for their in/actions. The ass covering is magnificent you just have to feed it a little bit of real data (traffic, power consumption, weather).
Of curse part of what you are simulating is your own understanding and aspirational ideals about how society should function. If you write an essay or a speech people will argue but if you embed values into a game... well, they will still argue but they have to notice it first.
Some will ascribe magical powers of clairvoyance and correctness unto the simulation for reasons that nobody quite understands.
I'm not sure what my point is exactly other than this is potentially a very interesting fulcrum point. Like who is playing whom really in this situation?
Dwarf Fortress is perhaps a stronger exploration of your thesis, because it is unapologetically simulation-first.
A game can consist of a simulation. The fact that you add feature sets to it does not change the fact that.
The various control planes and randomness of the simulation can be tuned, sure, but if you were to capture all those control inputs you can reconstruct the world event timeline in a determistic timeline.
Starcraft 2 Is a simulation. Replays are just games with all commands timestamped and the simulated world throttling forward and backward through time.
Science
It's a game that simulates planning and building a city for enjoyment.
It is a simulation, just a simulation game as opposed to simulation software.
You may have a reasonable point, but that doesn't mean that SimCity cannot feature in a book about computer simulation history.
My hot take is that all games are simulations to some extent. Many sports are a kind of war game, simulating a specific aspect of real war, obviously abstracting quite a bit. A big part of the fun in catan is in the tension of having to cooperate with rivals to mutually beneficial ends, much like what happens in economics all the time. The point being, that yes, there are varying levels of realism, but in the end I don’t really think there is a simple line denoting “game” or “simulation.”
I'm a bit hesitant about posting this link. I wrote the article mainly for myself (memory capture exercise); it happened a long time ago - and I'm sure my former employers (and hopefully all similar organisations) don't encourage this sort of approach at all.
https://rikroots.substack.com/p/why-rik-left-the-neighbourho...
Isn't that the whole point? SimCity and all its sequels and imitators present a very simplified set of tools and mechanics. Those tools and mechanics are more than the sum of their parts: They entertain, they teach, they advance a political opinion (Jeff Braun has been explicit about this[0]) and yes, they simulate, albeit very simplistically. The intersection of those things and the tradeoffs that are required in all simulations (which all reside on a spectrum of toy to faithful representation) are interesting. IMO it's (ironically) too simplistic to say that SimCity is a mere game and thus unworthy of thinking more deeply about, and I suggest that you're taking that "world in a machine" marketing phrase a bit too literally.
[0] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1992-10-02-vw-391-st...
This book is on my reading list! Guess it's worth mentioning I am working on a game to rival SimCity (and Cities Skylines), though aesthetically it looks like a game straight out of the 90s.
If Chris Sawyer made a city builder that dived deep into simulation.. that's what I'm aiming for.
Still in early development: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2287430/Metropolis_1998/
Hey, make me a game where you start out running a business like the old days where you own the company store and own the workers homes, so you manage all that plus the business operations. I don't know, it could be a logging business or coal mine, whatever.
And then at some point the workers revolt against the "company owns everything" system and the game becomes a city simulator.
You just basically start small scale and then zoom out to manage the big scale.
Hell, make it two games as long as I can import the first game map as my starter city.
Thanks.
I've been following your development for a while. Love the new take you have for the genre.
Is there a plan to have a creative mode?
On the roadmap I saw "Intelligent traffic lights". Can you elaborate further on this? Are going as far to let people set the timers of the lights?
I've got it on my wishlist. Looking forward to see what you come up with.
Creative mode: yeah of course!
I havent updated/worked on my road map in a loonng time. But Im gonna attempt the traffic light react to number of cars in each road it manages.
Other than the retro art style what are the main ideas you have going in that you want to implement in the game?
Big picture things (some are already implemented):
- You can design your own buildings
- You can see inside of them
- Demand is based on specific businesses, not general zones
- Deeper simulation of citizens
- All the classic city builder features
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Woah this is awesome, added it to my wishlist.
Thank you!
Looks great, release it on GOG and I'll buy it!
And you are doing all this on under 100MB of disk space?
I plan on adding it on GOG, prob for 1.0 only but we'll see!
The game is currently around 25 MB!
hey! i met you in boston at the indie dev meetup during PAX!! your game is super awesome ! and im crazy looking forward to it
Hey, I don't recall meeting anyone by the name of ninja muffin :D
I had to search around to find your face ha. I remember chatting with you. Nice to bump into each other here :)
Thanks for the kind words!
Game looks great and is on my wishlist!
Thanks for the WL!
wishlisted, please keep going !
Thank you!
[Copy-pasting my review from Amazon]
Did you know that Maxis (creators of SimCity) sold investors on a vision a world where "simulation" was a common use-case for computers, and Maxis was the company at the center of simulation software?
This was the first of many fascinating revelations this book brought me. Reading it, I found myself getting caught up in their grand vision.
The first part of _Building SimCity_ is a deep dive into the game's historical antecedents: from tabletop city simulations and Vannevar Bush's analogue computers, to systems thinking and cellular automata. This part explores many ideas that I have briefly encountered before and wondered "why hasn't anyone taken these wonderful ideas and produced something great with them?" The book answers: "Will Wright did, you just didn't notice." More specifically, _Building SimCity_ argues that SimCity the game is a synthesis and application of many great ideas, which are mostly hidden to the player. This book gives us a look behind the curtain.
The second part of the book spends chapters on the design of SimCity, the history of Maxis, and the experience of playing SimCity. The implementation chapter has no code listings — as a programmer, reading it feels like reading an exceptionally clear design document, explaining the real-time (UI) clock and the simulation clock, the 16-bit representation of map tile state, the main simulation loop, and the map scan algorithm for information propogation across tiles. This chapter is accompanied by exceptionally well-designed diagrams, which I find quite valuable on their own.
To set expectations: this is an academic work. It contains war stories and technical details, but it also goes to great lengths to situate SimCity in its historical context, connecting it to previous ideas, and providing full citations. But though the prose has an academic bent, I find it very engaging and readable.
The only negative thing I can say about this book is that the printed edition has a chemical smell, which I assume is due to the full-color printing and will presumeably fade with time.
[Disclaimer: I haven't finished this book yet, I've read the first few chapters about the history of simulation and also skipped ahead to the chapter about SimCity's implementation details. I'm posting this here because it's what I've written out in emails to friends about the book; I'll update my review when I finish reading it.]
They really were at the center of simulation. They had so many offerings that many people have never even heard of, like Sim Earth. I ran into it at a point in my life when I was playing with a lot of ideas about sustainability and waste, and it ended up being very influential in how I think about the world. It was almost a throw away game, there just wasn't much to do, but setting up initial conditions and watching them play out was fascinating to me. It taught me a lot about critical mass, and resource utilization rates.
As a side note, Oxygen Not Included feels like a master's class in sustainability, especially if you don't over abuse some of the game's broken mechanics.
It’s funny to look back as someone who was seven when SimEarth came out. It was anything but a throwaway game for me, as I played it for months on a mostly daily basis. Same with SimAnt and whatever other similar games I could get my hands on.
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Thanks! If you don't mind some more detail
- how much does it go into people and personalities of the team and stakeholders, besides the technical design of the game?
- it sounds like first part of the book is historical and talks about various games, second focuses strictly on simcity?
- does it only cover first simcity? What about latter generations and competitors, or maxis follow ups like simearth etc?
Thx muchly!:)
Hi! The focus is SimCity, but once the book gets into Maxis I get into SimEarth, SimAnt, SimLife, and The Sims. They aren't treated in as much detail, but they are here because they are crucial for understanding the overall arc of Maxis, SimCity's consequences, and Will Wright's career.
You can't understand Maxis without understanding the relationship they had with the world beyond videogames. Consider SimEarth. Stewart Brand (should need no intro; Kevin Kelly introduced them—he and Wright bonded over their love of social insects) introduced Wright to James Lovelock (co-inventor of Gaia hypothesis), who happily collaborated, and Maxis donated money to Lovelock's nonprofit. And Brand's GBN consultancy was interested in using SimEarth for their work. There's more context to all this I get into, but that's the super short version.
I'm still stunned by how much Brand thinks I got all this right (and how much he loves the book): "Of course I checked the few moments where I intersected with the events in the story. They are tone-perfect, detail-perfect, and context-perfect. More so than I've ever seen before." See his review on X:
https://x.com/stewartbrand/status/1800941614287946003
I forgot to answer your first two questions:
> - how much does it go into people and personalities of the team and stakeholders, besides the technical design of the game?
A lot; it all goes together.
> - it sounds like first part of the book is historical and talks about various games, second focuses strictly on simcity?
Yes. And not just games, but computer history and simulation practices (like system dynamics, cellular automata, artificial life) that influenced SimCity and shaped its reception.
Building SimCity only talks about pre-EA SimCity. So there's SimCity, SimCity 2000, and SimCity for SNES, but not much else—aside from how SimCity 3000 was a train wreck that helped destroy Maxis.
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He then went on to do Spore. Here is a pre-release talk from 2005: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofA6YWVTURU
The final game got nerfed by EA but this talk is great fun and a continuation of sorts.
Apparently the author of "Building SimCity" worked on Spore with Will Wright.
> Spore is a computer simulation game directed by Will Wright (SimCity, The Sims). I designed its suite of powerful yet fun to use 3d tools that players used to make alien creatures, buildings, and vehicles.
> I designed Spore's critically acclaimed creative tool suite, e.g. the Spore Creature Creator, which has been used to make over 189 million creations.
> In 2002, I was handpicked by Will Wright for Spore's nucleic R&D team. Responsibilities also included design and prototyping across the entire project, directing interns, and interfacing with journalists.
From: http://chaim.io
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Sounds interesting, if perhaps less fun than Masters of Doom. I look forward to reading it for free some day. And I probably like that ink smell, although I agree that it's important that a book should smell good.
Here is Will Wright's talk "Interfacing to Microworlds" from April 26 1996, which he presented to Terry Winnograd's user interface class at Stanford. I sat in on the talk, asked questions, took notes, and wrote up a summary, had Will review it, then went to work with him on Dollhouse which became The Sims. After we shipped in 2000 I updated my summary of the talk with some thoughts and retrospectives about working with Will on The Sims.
Stanford recently published the video, so again I updated my write-up with more information from the talk, transcript excerpts, screen snapshots, links and citations.
All I had to go on for the 27 years between the talk until the video surfaced and I could finally watch it again were my notes and memory, so I'd forgotten how just prescient and purposeful he was, and I didn't remember that he was already planning on leaning into the storytelling and user created content and self and family representation aspects, and making the people speak with "Charlie Brown Adults" mwop mwop mwop speech, among many other things.
Will Wright - Maxis - Interfacing to Microworlds - 1996-4-26
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsxoZXaYJSk
>Video of Will Wright's talk about "Interfacing to Microworlds" presented to Terry Winograd's user interface class at Stanford University, April 26, 1996.
>He demonstrates and gives postmortems for SimEarth, SimAnt, and SimCity 2000, then previews an extremely early pre-release prototype version of Dollhouse (which eventually became The Sims), describing how the AI models personalities and behavior, and is distributed throughout extensible plug-in programmable objects in the environment, and he thoughtfully answers many interesting questions from the audience.
>This is the lecture described in "Will Wright on Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games (1996)": A summary of Will Wright’s talk to Terry Winograd’s User Interface Class at Stanford, written in 1996 by Don Hopkins, before they worked together on The Sims at Maxis.
Use and reproduction: The materials are open for research use and may be used freely for non-commercial purposes with an attribution. For commercial permission requests, please contact the Stanford University Archives (universityarchives@stanford.edu).
https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/yj113jt5999
Will Wright on Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games (1996) (2023 Video Update)
https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-user-interfaces-to-s...
A summary of Will Wright’s talk to Terry Winograd’s User Interface Class at Stanford, written in 1996 by Don Hopkins, before they worked together on The Sims at Maxis. Now including a video and snapshots of the original talk!
Will Wright and Brian Eno discussing generative systems at a Long Now Foundation talk:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UqzVSvqXJYg
SimCity takes a lot of short cuts to fool you. It's what Will Wright calls the "Simulator Effect":
Will Wright defined the “Simulator Effect” as how players imagine the simulation is vastly more detailed, deep, rich, and complex than it actually is: a magical misunderstanding that you shouldn’t talk them out of. He designs games to run on two computers at once: the electronic one on the player’s desk, running his shallow tame simulation, and the biological one in the player’s head, running their deep wild imagination.
"Reverse Over-Engineering" is a desirable outcome of the Simulator Effect: what game players (and game developers trying to clone the game) do when they use their imagination to extrapolate how a game works, and totally overestimate how much work and modeling the simulator is actually doing, because they filled in the gaps with their imagination and preconceptions and assumptions, instead of realizing how many simplifications and shortcuts and illusions it actually used.
The trick of optimizing games is to off-load as much as the simulation from the computer into the user's brain, which is MUCH more powerful and creative. Implication is more efficient (and richer) than simulation.
Some muckety-muck architecture magazine was interviewing Will Wright about SimCity, and they asked him a question something like “which ontological urban paradigm 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.”
During development, when we first added Astrological signs to the characters, there was a discussion about whether we should invent our own original "Sim Zodiac" signs, or use the traditional ones, which have a lot of baggage and history (which some of the designers thought might be a problem). Will Wright argued that we actually wanted to leverage the baggage and history of the traditional Astrological signs of the Zodiac, so we should just use those and not invent our own.
The way it works is that Will came up with twelve archetypal vectors of personality traits corresponding to each of the twelve Astrological signs, so when you set their personality traits, it looks up the sign with the nearest euclidian distance to the character's personality, and displays that as their sign. But there was absolutely no actual effect on their behavior.
That decision paid off almost instantly and measurably in testing, after we implemented the user interface for showing the Astrological sign in the character creation screen, without writing any code to make their sign affect their behavior: The testers immediately started reporting bugs that their character's sign had too much of an effect on their personality, and claimed that the non-existent effect of astrological signs on behavior needed to be tuned down. But that effect was totally coming from their imagination! They should call them Astrillogical Signs!
The create-a-sim user interface hid the corresponding astrological sign for the initial all-zero personality you first see before you've spent any points, because that would be insulting to 1/12th of the players (implying [your sign] has zero personality)!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffzt12tEGpY
> Implication is more efficient (and richer) than simulation.
I guess that why lacking a water supply in SimCity 2000 didn't inhibit the city's growth at all, and the negative effect on your mayoral approval rating could be removed by building a single pump anywhere, with no pipes.
People interesting in this might be interested in Silicon Second Nature by Stefan Helmreich, a pretty brilliant MIT anthropologist/historian of science. It’s all about the Santa Fe Institute and the science of emergence, from both a technical and social level. One of the best books I’ve ever read I think!
https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520208001/silicon-second-na...
Stefan Helmreich's book is indeed brilliant! I used it extensively when writing Building SimCity. Stefan was quite helpful in researching my book, sharing and checking some old SFI documentation so I could determine things like who visited SFI when for what event (and with whom).
The attendee list for some of the early Artificial Life conferences was quite cool. Peter Molyneux shows up as well as one of Maxis's venture capitalists.
I was delighted how you covered Doreen Nelson's life work, Design Based Learning, like you did in your thesis. I have a copy of the "School Edition" Lab Pack of SimCity Classic that she and Michael Bremer wrote, which I'll dig up and scan, so I can put it on archive.org and include ìt with the open source Micropolis project.
LGR - SimCity Educational Version Unboxing & Overview: An overview of the "School Edition" Lab Pack of SimCity Classic by Maxis. Unboxing, first impressions of the package and testing of the radically rad software ensues.
>I thought it would be fun to turn the tables and give Will Wright a chance to interview someone else: me (!), about Building SimCity.
>@ROMchip_Journal: Mark your calendars! Next month, ROMchip is hosting @cgingold and Will Wright for a discussion of Gingold's new book BUILDING SIMCITY
>Event will broadcast live on Twitch Friday, July 19 @ 2PM EST. Grab your free tickets for the oneline interview:
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Hey thanks for the response. I’m looking forward to picking up the book now. Silicon Second Nature left a big enough impression on me that I did a performance art piece inspired by it in undergrad (back when I thought I might be an artist, LOL)… unfortunately I don’t have access any longer to video documentation but there are some pics and description on my (currently offline) website:
https://web.archive.org/web/20210802234726/https://samwolk.i...
There’s also a short 16mm experimental film I made around the same time:
https://vimeo.com/198901474
Just sharing since it’s pretty rare for me to meet someone who might actually be interested in these, ha!
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In my childhood, me and my brother had access to computers (and simcity) only once a month. Because we still wanted to play, we actually made paper version of it, drawing maps ourselves and doing all the financial calculations on a separate sheet. I wanted to write my own simcity. Later on, I spent considerable amount of time designing the code, again on paper as I still didn't have access to computers. I think that had the most significant impact on my skills, and, eventually, my career. Thanks for that
Reading this now and really enjoying it. Here's a brief review from Stewart Brand: https://twitter.com/stewartbrand/status/1800941614287946003
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1800941614287946003.html
Do you think people can learn something from simulation games that’s inherently hard to learn from mere language or mathematics?
Is it possible to create good simulation games of substantial global events and the subsequent possible outcomes. Some examples would be a pandemic like Covid and how it shaped societies differently based on preconditions and policies OR a discovery of nuclear fission that sparked building nuclear weapon (I.e the manhattan project) and fueled the cold war OR the realization and threat of man made global warming and the global reaction and policy making and many possible outcomes.
And if not why are they not feasible for games. Is there something that makes these types of events and their outcome hard to simulate?
I think yes, and so did Vannevar Bush (OK, not the game part). The first two chapters of Building SimCity are dedicated to non-computer simulations for this reason. Vannevar Bush and his analog instruments, like the differential analyzer, are the subject of chapter 2. Bush (and others) argued that good tangible models were excellent complements to, and sometimes superior to, abstract symbolic representations. For this reason he and his colleagues grieved the transition to digital computing.
For example, he writes in Pieces of the Action (p. 262) of "an example of how easy it is to teach fundamental calculus," about a mechanic with a high school education who learned calculus by working on the differential analyzer. "It was very interesting to discuss this subject with him because he had learned the calculus in mechanical terms ‐ a strange approach, and yet he understood it. That is, he did not understand it in any formal sense, but he understood the fundamentals; he had it under his skin."
I think this is fascinating stuff, and chapter 2 goes deep into the subject. Chapter 1 is about Doreen Gehry Nelson and city simulations made by school kids--it's all about games, simulation, tangibility, and learning.
Procedural Rhetoric: Ian Bogost, Janet Murray (Chaim's advisor and Building SimCity endorser)
For better or worse, games can deliver pre-programmed propaganda and procedural rhetoric for advancing ideologies and changing minds. Some designers push clichéd narratives, stereotypical characters, and institutionalized prejudices that normalize and encourage homophobia, sexism, racism, bigotry, and violence. Others like Will Wright conscientiously use it for good.
Ian Bogost defined the “Procedural Rhetoric” game design philosophy as an unholy blend of Will Wright and Aristotle, that explains how people learn through rules and processes, analyzes the art of persuasion, and focuses on conveying ideology by crafting laws and rules within games.
“I developed my own design philosophy that I called procedural rhetoric, an unholy blend of Will Wright and Aristotle.” -Ian Bogost, Video Games Are Better Without Characters
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40660693
As a conspiracy theorist, my intuition suggests to me that there are people within the government that would frown upon the general public getting too interested in (and skilled in) the complexities and nuances of human coordination. That sort of thing is The Experts job.
Whenever Maxis comes up I always imagine some government simulations running on refined models but still using the SimCity 2000 interface.
Price seems a bit steep. Needs to lower taxes for me to buy it.
Can anyone recommend any other books like this where it is both a history/ethnography and covers the actual technical details/code?
I'd be very interested to hear of other books and articles like this, too.
Edwin Hutchins's Cognition in the Wild is one of my favorite books. It's very technical and ethnographic, but less historical. It doesn't deal with code, but that's because it's about the nitty gritty of navigation on a Navy ship (pre digital computing), and (here's the historical aspect) it compares this to some traditional Polyponesian navigational practices.
The closest thing off the top of my head are titles in MIT Press's Platform Studies series, like Racing the Beam, about the Atari 2600, which is historical and technical. https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262539760/racing-the-beam/
Maybe Casey O'Donnell's Developer's Dilemma? https://direct.mit.edu/books/monograph/4469/Developer-s-Dile...
If you make a Venn diagram with history, ethnography, technical details, and code as different circles, the central intersection may not be huge, but I think there may be a lot more if you remove some of the constraints. But I want to see more work at this intersection, and I hope more people do it.
I tried to look it up but I am still not sure if this book discusses SimCity's programming or not.
Yes. There's a whole chapter on this with tons of diagrams, not code.
Thank you for the quick reply.
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First world problem, I know, but when did we stop getting an ebook along side a purchase of a paper copy?
It shows the ebook by itself as more expensive than the paperback, which is a first for me.
Is this about the original Sim City, Sim City 2000, or does it cover all of them in a general way?
Focus is the original SimCity, but many Maxis Sim- games up to EA acquisition are touched upon, especially the long saga of what became The Sims.
What's the point of posting a book listing? A review or an analysis would have been more interesting.
I don't see anything wrong with posting about a book, a course, etc., especially if it's a newly released product. It's good to know what's being done.
just want to say thanks for spore - my son's favourite for a long time.
Thanks for sharing this!
This should have been a game
Is this an advertisement?
The ebook is $4.99 more expensive than the physical copy - wild.
And the paperback is $50. What happened here?
100 color photo pages
and "6 x 9 in", I thought only PDFs were fixed sizes :)
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262537759/minitel/ is $39.99 ebook, $40 paperback, but $35 hardcover. bizarre pricing.
big pdf: https://alexwlchan.net/files/2024/universe.pdf
The Kindle version is $36