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What Do We Simulate When We Simulate a City?
SimCity
is a portal onto a tiny simulated city, which also opens into the teeming
complexities of simulation.
Gingold,
C. (2024). Building SimCity: How to put the world in a machine. The MIT Press.Source:https://direct.mit.edu/books/monograph/5791/Building-SimCityHow-to-Put-the-World-in-a-MachineSimCity
is a game first released in 1989, developed by Maxis and designed by Will
Wright. This unique simulation game combines the strategic complexity of board
games with the visual feedback of arcade games. Rather than using popular video
game themes like adventure, space wars, or high-speed vehicles, SimCity draws
from the relatively less dramatic world of urban planning. It’s a
highly spatial game without a jumping character like Mario or a chomping
character like Pac-Man for players to control. Although SimCity is a complex
puzzle, it doesn’t impose the time pressure of Tetris
or reward endings typical of adventure games. Instead, it invites players to
immerse themselves in a world that blends tax assessment, zoning, and elements
like monsters and natural disasters. SimCity has attracted millions of players
and led to updated versions, including SimCity 2000 (1993), SimCity 3000
(1999), SimCity 4 (2003), SimCity: Societies (2007), SimCity (2013), and SimCity:BuildIt
(2014). It also inspired a more successful spin-off game, The Sims (2000).![]()
SimCity
(1989) for Macintosh
In
SimCity, players must make decisions about critical urban dilemmas: What types
of businesses and residents should the government try to attract? What tax
policies encourage growth? Which transportation and zoning policies will
enhance cultural diversity? And what defines an ideal city?Playing
SimCity draws players in with its responsive feedback mechanisms and seemingly
organic processes—the city grows not only based on player actions but also according
to inherent growth rules. While playing with SimCity, we learn to connect our
actions with the outcomes on the map and to deduce hidden rules by observing
the system’s overt behaviors, ultimately enhancing our
understanding of being part of various complex systems.![]()
SimCity
2000 (1993).
In
2015, Maxis Studio was shut down. What is the legacy of SimCity and network
forum that formed around it? This network brought forth SimCity, Maxis,
numerous simulation game series, and the celebrated game designer Will Wright.
SimCity disseminated concepts of authoritarian governance and urban planning,
along with simplified views on crime, policing, and taxation, sometimes even
with overtly colonial and exploitative perspectives—shortcomings
not uncommon in video games. Nevertheless, SimCity helped people gradually
accept the concept of simulations and computers as opaque "black
boxes," while promoting the idea that complex systems are worth engaging
with, understanding, and that computer simulations can be accessible to everyone.
Much like Tetris, SimCity broadened its audience by expanding our understanding
of computer entertainment, largely by popularizing sandbox games, which have
now become a mainstream genre in digital entertainment.SimCity
is a portal onto a tiny simulated city, which also opens into the teeming
complexities of simulation: the power of imagination and the human drama of
those, like Maxis, who strive to bring dreams to life through software. As a
transformative machine, the computer can simulate anything we imagine. Its
diverse forms reflect a wide range of histories and desires. Urban planners,
policymakers, engineers, scientists, mathematicians, spies, weapons designers,
military strategists, generals, investors, entrepreneurs, artists, gamers, tinkerers,
entertainers, educators, and activists—all have shaped this
transformative machine in their own ways. The transformation is mutual; those
who give computers their many forms often find themselves, like Maxis,
permanently changed.What
Do We Simulate When We Simulate a City? How does SimCity connect the invisible
fabric of social, political, and economic relationships to the material
environment? Or, more broadly, how do people put the world into a machine? This
is the central question Building SimCity: How to put the world in a machine
seeks to answer. Author Chaim Gingold, both a researcher and practitioner,
undertakes this study as both a theorist and a practitioner. Training in
computer science, digital media design, social sciences, and the humanities,
Gingold joined Wright's team shortly after the SimCity was released, working as
an intern on the Spore project, where he closely observed and interviewed
Wright and his team members.First,
simulation as culture. Whether in the lab or living room, simulations are
imaginative cultural practices. Although scientists and engineers have long
employed imagination as part of their simulation work, it was Wright’s
conscious appreciation of the role of imagination that enabled him to remix so
many different simulation practices and turn them to explicitly playful and
expressive ends. SimCity’s hybridity testifies to
another aspect of simulation as culture: its collectivity. This book shows how
simulation, like any other cultural endeavor, is a collective activity in which
practices arise, evolve, and are passed around. By tracing SimCity’s genealogy, Building SimCity follows the development of multiple
simulation traditions, showing how sociocultural influences, including
economic, intellectual, and technical factors, shape simulation practice.Second,
simulation as cognition. This book proposes a framework for thinking about how
simulations (and other dynamic representations) transform how we think, feel,
and act. Building SimCity argues that all simulations—whether
realized through role-play, electromechanical analogs, digital computers, or
other materialities—enact dynamic analogies with
certain representational affordances.This
theory is used to interpret SimCity and its forebears and is developed with the
aid of diverse examples, especially the epochal analogs of Vannevar Bush. This
framing challenges the conventional analog-digital dichotomy; Building SimCity
argues that digital computers are in fact a species of analog device. An
overarching aim of this book is to help digital media designers zoom out and
see their work as kin to practices that extend back into the history of
computing and beyond, across a dizzying variety of materials and cultural
forms.Third,
software. Building SimCity uses software to follow the manifold ways in which
people shape computing toward human ends. How should software be analyzed? The
question is pertinent to legislators (squinting at corporate “algorithms”), designers and engineers (who maintain and build software),
scholars (who might study games or the history of computing), and more.
Software impinges on practically every aspect of human (and nonhuman) life. To
rephrase a prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalist, software has eaten the
world. The structure and interpretation of software are, as a result, of
ever-widening importance. Software is where cultures intermesh with computing
machines. Software directs the computer’s protean
ability to simulate, or enact, any other symbolic machine. Software, as a
result, reflects nothing so much as people: their histories and dreams,
intentions and fears, worldviews and milieus.Building
SimCity analyzes software as media, material, and sociocultural phenomena. As media,
software is analyzed as harboring cognitive, ludic, and experiential
dimensions. As for software’s material elements, code, algorithms,
machines, schema, and math are all fair game, and diagrams help make them
legible, even to nontechnical readers. As far as critique is concerned, this
book is more concerned with SimCity’s overarching
simulation approach, how agency, subjectivity, and ideology are enacted.Organization of this bookPart
I, “Simulation’s Grasp,”introduces material that underpins the entire book.Chapter 1, “Building Imaginary Cities,” makes the
opening move in situating SimCity among contrasting simulation approaches.
Children enact cardboard and make-believe cities in a simulation method
developed by educator Doreen Gehry Nelson. She, like Forrester, was prompted to
simulate cities by the urban crises of the 1960s. But her background, in
teaching, the arts, and civics, led to a radically different approach, illustrating
how context shapes simulation practice. The chapter traces the origin of Nelson’s simulation technique and its links to military and business
simulation gaming, and more. Comparing Nelson’s
simulation technique to SimCity begins to yield a comparative framework for
analyzing SimCity (and other simulation approaches) in terms of subjectivity,
agency, and legibility.Chapter
2, “Simulation as Analogy,” presents a framework
for analyzing simulations. Vannevar Bush’s early career
(1920s–1930s) was spent developing analogs—dynamic instruments for grappling with the perplexities of power
grids, atoms, and airplanes. Aided by Bush’s
theorizing, this chapter offers a theory of simulation grounded in analogical
reasoning. Simulations establish dynamic analogies between a mechanism and a
phenomenon and can be understood as representations offering newfound
affordances. This chapter retheorizes the analog-digital dichotomy and argues
that programmable digital computers are a kind of analog device.Part
II, “Paving the Road to SimCity,” traces
historical developments that shaped SimCity’s design
and reception. Chapter 3, “System Dynamics: A Society
of Bits,” explores the roots of SimCity’s linchpin economic model. It began with servomechanism control
systems, which Jay Forrester was familiar with from his wartime engineering
work. Such feedback loops became, in his computer simulations, models for just
about everything. Favoring intuition over data, his approach was well suited to
expansive and imaginative uses: supply chains, cities, the world—even a spiritual experience. This chapter seeks a proper historical
account of system dynamics situated in control systems, digital computing, and
postwar “systems management.”Chapter
4, “Cellular Automata: Synthesizing the Universe,” attempts a coherent account of this fragmented history and shows
how it helped set the stage for SimCity and Maxis. It wasn’t until the 1980s that a cellular automata community of practice
cohered and gathered scientific respectability, propelled by the emerging
fields of artificial life and dynamical systems theory, and the proliferation
of inexpensive graphical microcomputers. A close look at this history helps
explain SimCity’s design and aesthetics, Maxis’s partnership with the Santa Fe Institute, and why Maxis titles like
SimCity were enthusiastically received in mainstream culture as avatars of
computer simulation, artificial life, and complexity science.Chapter
5, “A Children’s Construction Set,” explores the historical origins of SimCity’s
user interface. The graphical user interface (GUI) did more than bestow
accessibility on SimCity; it supported the kind of self-directed, creative, and
playful experience Wright was after.Part
III, “SimCity’s Architects,” closely analyzes SimCity and Maxis. Chapter 6, “Designing SimCity,” traces SimCity’s development. While Wright authored SimCity’s core simulation and overall experience, it was Maxis that refined
its interface and brought it to market. Chapter 7, “Maxis
at the Crossroads,” chronicles the history of the
SimCity network and Maxis’s struggle to reconcile the
opposing forces that gave rise to it. Chapter
8, “How SimCity Works,” elucidates SimCity’s simulation design. Working from source code, this chapter examines
how SimCity’s representations—from
internal structures to the exterior user interface—combine
to produce a compelling illusion of a living city. These software mechanisms
are traced back to the diverse simulation traditions Wright intermixed. Chapter
9, “Playing SimCity,” takes up
SimCity’s ludic affordances. Using play theory, this
chapter analyzes SimCity’s ability to draw people in
and hold their attention. What, in other words, makes it fun? This play-centric
analysis also illuminates how paradox and ambiguity enabled a wide variety of
actors to adapt SimCity to their own purposes—thus
underwriting the growth of the SimCity network.The
Conclusion, “The World in a Machine,” summarizes the book’s key ideas. Building SimCity then reviews its approach toward the challenge
of studying software. Finally, I argue that SimCity’s
ambiguous appeal, and Maxis’s collapse—not to mention its initial success—stem from
Wright’s genius for surfacing the ambiguous and
contradictory potentialities of computing, simulation, and play.In
a word, SimCity offers a specific and vivid domain, a city construction set,
that can be analogized to various cities: Berlin, San Francisco, or wherever
you imagine.Players
are a designer’s most important resource. Designers do not shape electronic
computers as much as they sway and stoke player imagination. Unlike scientists
and engineers whose simulations addressed practical problems, Wright saw
simulation as a supple material for expression, world building, and play. Like
these other simulation makers, Wright employed aggressive abstraction to turn
such representations toward new expressive possibilities. But Wright’s heightened sensitivity to the role of imagination enabled him to
take the sober tools of nonfiction and turn them toward exuberant, fictive world
building. This orientation, moreover, helped Wright reconcile diverse, and
often conflicting, simulation traditions. The resulting synthesis undergirds
SimCity’s wide-ranging appeal and holding power.
SimCity coyly evokes, and flexibly meets, diverse purposes: play, education,
architecture, urban planning, education, science, and others. Earnestness and
irreverence go hand in hand; playfulness discreetly serves the purposes of the
serious minded, while studiously researched realism bestows complexity and
gravitas on play.
1.“I
especially love analogies, my most faithful masters, acquainted with all the
secrets of nature . . . they clearly present to our eyes the whole essence of
the question.”- Johannes Kepler, 1604, quoted in Creative Thought: An
Investigation of Conceptual Structures and Processes![]()
2.“Games…are
a distinctive art form. They offer us access to a unique artistic horizon and a
distinctive set of social goods. They are special as an art because they engage
with human practicality—with our ability to decide and to do. And they are special as a
practical activity precisely because they are an art. In ordinary life, we have
to struggle to deal with whatever the world throws at us, with whatever means
we happen to have lying around. In ordinary life, the form of our struggle is
usually forced on us by an indifferent and arbitrary world. In games, on the
other hand, the form of our practical engagement is intentionally and
creatively configured by the game’s designers. In
ordinary life, we have to desperately fit ourselves to the practical demands of
the world. In games, we can engineer the world of the game, and the agency we
will occupy, to fit us and our desires. Struggles in games can be carefully
shaped in order to be interesting, fun, or even beautiful for the struggler.”- C.
Thi Nguyen, Games: Agency As Art, 2020
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