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

Urban Dynamics was roundly slammed by urban planners, social scientists, and experienced urban simulation practitioners,

(Schelling was well aware that the dynamics he described were, in all likelihood, less powerful than segregation’s other causes: organized discrimination, suppressed civil rights, and social inequity.)

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

What software does, then, is obfuscate one world and produce another.

what would happen if children could play at building little artificial minds.

Construction that takes place “in the head” often happens especially felicitously when it is supported by construction of a more public sort “in the world”—a

Software, as a result, reflects nothing so much as people: their histories and dreams, intentions and fears, worldviews and milieus.

these projects were either for training or advocacy, not open-ended debate.

In a business game, participants played the model. In industrial dynamics, participants built the model.

To make SimCity, Wright reconciled the top-down (and nonspatial) representation of system dynamics with other approaches, like cellular automata and game sprites, where behavior emerges, bottom-up, from interacting parts situated in space.