[HN Gopher] Building SimCity: How to put the world in a machine
___________________________________________________________________
Building SimCity: How to put the world in a machine
Author : jarmitage
Score : 183 points
Date : 2024-06-16 16:55 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (mitpress.mit.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (mitpress.mit.edu)
| benbreen wrote:
| Reading this now and really enjoying it. Here's a brief review
| from Stewart Brand:
| https://twitter.com/stewartbrand/status/1800941614287946003
| neonate wrote:
| https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1800941614287946003.html
| juice_bus wrote:
| The ebook is $4.99 more expensive than the physical copy - wild.
| crtasm wrote:
| 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.
| mtillman wrote:
| big pdf: https://alexwlchan.net/files/2024/universe.pdf
| solalf wrote:
| And the paperback is $50. What happened here?
| Shadowmist wrote:
| 100 color photo pages
| noahlt wrote:
| [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.]
| ziggy_star wrote:
| 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.
| lioeters wrote:
| 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
| ziggy_star wrote:
| I like the cut of his jib.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| 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!:)
| chaimgingold wrote:
| 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
| chaimgingold wrote:
| 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.
| chaimgingold wrote:
| PC Gamer just ran a piece on some of the Nintendo history
| in there. Includes a fun old pic of Will Wright, Shigeru
| Miyamoto, and Jeff Braun.
|
| https://www.pcgamer.com/games/sim/in-1989-a-nintendo-
| bigwig-...
| milesvp wrote:
| 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.
| mathgeek wrote:
| 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.
| bavell wrote:
| SimAnt and SimEarth were also staples of my childhood
| gaming, barely knew how to play SimEarth but it was a
| blast! A lot of game design takeaways from SimAnt for me
| too.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| 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
| 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
| card_zero wrote:
| > 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.
| card_zero wrote:
| 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.
| curiousgal wrote:
| What's the point of posting a book listing? A review or an
| analysis would have been more interesting.
| atan2 wrote:
| 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.
| atan2 wrote:
| I tried to look it up but I am still not sure if this book
| discusses SimCity's _programming_ or not.
| chaimgingold wrote:
| Yes. There's a whole chapter on this with tons of diagrams, not
| code.
| thenthenthen wrote:
| This should have been a game
| szvsw wrote:
| 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...
| chaimgingold wrote:
| 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.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| 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 it 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.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edXRNtuAGTg
|
| I was also thrilled you wrote about John von Neumann's 29
| state self replicating cellular automata machine! Super
| interesting and important stuff.
|
| I wrote more about that stuff in the discussion of SimCity
| for WebAssembly:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40698110
|
| Chaim, I'm looking forward to Will Wright interviewing you
| about Building SimCity, Fri Jul 19, 2024 2:00 PM - 3:30 PM
| EDT. It will definitely be weird!
|
| https://x.com/cgingold/status/1798790177814663294
|
| >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:
|
| here: https://app.tickettailor.com/events/romchipajournalofga
| mehis...
| chaimgingold wrote:
| Thanks, Don! Please scan that!
|
| She recently found a shrink wrapped copy of a teacher guide
| she coauthored with Michael Bremer and opened it (!)
| because we disagreed about what was in there, LOL. It's
| destined now for her UCLA archive. Apparently she also
| wrote guides for many other Maxis titles but not all saw
| the light of day. Or maybe they did but need to be
| recovered.
| szvsw wrote:
| 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!
| chaimgingold wrote:
| Your film has some beautiful stuff in it!
| 42lux wrote:
| Whenever Maxis comes up I always imagine some government
| simulations running on refined models but still using the SimCity
| 2000 interface.
| otteromkram wrote:
| Is this an advertisement?
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| 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?
| yellow_postit wrote:
| 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.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| 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.
| Retric wrote:
| 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.
| chgs wrote:
| I'm not convinced anyone described monopoly as fun
| rightbyte wrote:
| It's mostly that the rules are propagated by hearsay from
| 10 yo:s.
|
| If you don't add all the house rules all kids use to
| prolong the game, it is quite playable.
|
| For some reason alot of kids love it. I think handling
| money is the main lure.
| voidfunc wrote:
| It can be a straight up ruthless experience if you play
| it by the rules as written rather than adding shitty
| house rules. I love playing with other adults that know
| how to play.
| MenhirMike wrote:
| What's fascinating is that some of those house rules
| seemed to have come up independently in places all around
| the world. For example, the stupid free parking jackpot.
| (I assume that Hasbro added it to the manual as a house
| rule at some point?)
|
| And yeah, getting money and property is fun! But the game
| is supposed to be a 30-45 minute experience.
| ianburrell wrote:
| The reason is probably because Monopoly as written is
| short and brutal. Which isn't fun for families. So people
| add rules to make more fair. Which has result of making
| it last longer and turn into slog.
|
| The solution is for families other games which are better
| suited especially for younger kids. But Monopoly has
| established itself as universal family board game.
| smrq wrote:
| The funny thing about this is that Monopoly was designed to
| be a simulation of capitalism rather than a fun game. So
| it's arguably less of a simulation.
| outside1234 wrote:
| 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)
| phaedrus wrote:
| Dwarf Fortress is perhaps a stronger exploration of your
| thesis, because it is unapologetically simulation-first.
| BorgHunter wrote:
| 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...
| iknowstuff wrote:
| Famously they had to make cars pocketable so that parking
| wouldn't make car dependent cities as ugly as they are
| larsiusprime wrote:
| 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.
| ziggy_star wrote:
| 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?
| jokoon wrote:
| 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.
| solardev wrote:
| 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.
| larsiusprime wrote:
| There's a common rule of thumb in sim game design: "never
| simulate anything more than one layer of abstraction below
| what the player can actually observe"
| RobRivera wrote:
| 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
| EGG_CREAM wrote:
| 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."
| SillyUsername wrote:
| Price seems a bit steep. Needs to lower taxes for me to buy it.
| YesBox wrote:
| 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/
| mysterydip wrote:
| Game looks great and is on my wishlist!
| jakemauer wrote:
| Woah this is awesome, added it to my wishlist.
| chaimgingold wrote:
| 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.
| tunnuz wrote:
| Good luck with the baby and congrats for the book. <3
| chaimgingold wrote:
| 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.)
| ryani wrote:
| Hi Chaim! I really enjoyed working with you on Spore. What have
| you been up to in the intervening years besides writing this
| book?
| chaimgingold wrote:
| 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.
| xanderlewis wrote:
| 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.
| chaimgingold wrote:
| 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...)
| xanderlewis wrote:
| Thanks. I should add that I _did_ enjoy the final game very
| much; it was just quite different to what was demoed.
|
| I'll probably be buying your book!
| chaimgingold wrote:
| Thank you!
|
| Not to be defensive, but I want to say more about this
| because I think it's a fascinating subject with Spore in
| particular and games, software, and technology generally.
| My take is that Will Wright had a very exciting vision
| but visions are just that: not real. They are inherently
| nebulous and everyone on the team (and many many people
| beyond it) had their own idea on what Spore would be or
| turn into. We converged on something and negotiated with
| one another and many constraints, social and technical,
| and arrived at something. It didn't help that part of the
| game's marketing appeal was a bit Rorschach-y in the
| first place and capitalized on the exciting but vague
| promise of Will Wright (Sim-) + Universe (-Everything).
| hellodang_ wrote:
| After SimCity 4 what's the next great building sim you'd
| recommend?
| chaimgingold wrote:
| 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.)
| ziggy_star wrote:
| 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'.
| chaimgingold wrote:
| 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.
| ziggy_star wrote:
| Jodorowsky's Dune is perfectly apt actually.
|
| I think you were the right people with the right vision but
| very early and we all simply fell into the darkest timeline
| because what should have been hasn't happened.
|
| If you think about it this sort of your responsibility to
| save the universe by embarking on this quest with me and
| righting a cosmic wrong. Otherwise another Covid might
| happen.
|
| Also VCs have moneybags for you we got all the buzzwords
| neatly lined up. Come Mr. Gingold, you cannot resist this
| potent of a reality distortion field from an internet
| stranger. Or dare I say... internet friend? ;)
| chaimgingold wrote:
| I definitely feel like I've made a new internet friend.
| :D
| ziggy_star wrote:
| Besties with testiees.
|
| I'll drop you a line sometimes later this year. Enjoy the
| baby good buddy!
| jokoon wrote:
| 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?
| chaimgingold wrote:
| 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
| chaimgingold wrote:
| 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
| Keyframe wrote:
| First world problem, I know, but when did we stop getting an
| ebook along side a purchase of a paper copy?
| trilinearnz wrote:
| Is this about the original Sim City, Sim City 2000, or does it
| cover all of them in a general way?
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