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.

We might end up with new concrete objects to think with, but the real prize, in the end, is how we rethink the world.

Ken Karakotsios,

A “representation doesn’t need to represent anything: it is simply the medium (internal and/or external) on which the task performer performs the task.”

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

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

(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.)

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