Building SimCity: How to Put the World in a Machine (Game Histories)

System dynamics was a tool for thinking about how you think.

Wright saw simulation as a supple material for expression, world building, and play.

The contingent and representational nature of the modeling act is elided,

“America: Alternative Futures,” a two-hour documentary

The encounter sparked Janeway’s interest in computers as “simulation engines,”104 which he divided into two categories: “prediction” (like econometrics) and “explanation” (like system dynamics).

Games were “designed to reward the kinds of decisions that the game designer thinks are proper,” instilling opaque values and beliefs into players—a critique later leveled at SimCity.69 The model was a “black box,” and even if it was good model, one could not “fathom its complexities by this type of external teasing.”

and their structural and functional realization in the human brain.”

The same action can be play or not-play—it all depends on attitude.

The principal critique of SimCity is that it harbors a “‘hidden curriculum.’”5 In this appraisal, players unconsciously naturalize invisible assumptions, many of which are problematic. Which assumptions are nefarious depends, of course, on one’s own worldview, which is the sharp point of this critique: simulations ought to make their inner workings

Asking big questions and answering them in creative and astute ways strikes us as the best way to reach the goal of not an isolated, general history of games but rather of a body of game histories that will connect game studies to scholarship in a wide array of fields.