In excluding race from the model (populations are distinguished only by economic status), Forrester makes the starry-eyed assumption that American life is color-blind

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

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

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.”

toys, which he sees as “free-form,” “open-ended,” and available to experimentation and recombination, unlike games, which “tend to be isolated universes where there’s a rule set, and once you leave that universe the rule set is meaningless.”

this chapter examines SimCity’s holding power using four play frames: playmate, toy, construction set, and game.

or use off-the-shelf programs like CA Lab (1989, for PC) or CASim (1989, for Mac).

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

“the cultural pervasiveness of simulation” is a call to “develop a new social criticism” whose aim would be to help people understand, challenge, and rewrite simulation rules.