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

Simulations entail a transformation. Changes in scale and materiality enable phenomena that would otherwise not fit in a laboratory, workbench, or school—cities,

Play is buffered from ordinary life. Consequences are suspended or limited.

and SimLife (1992).

cognitive science, that attempted to open up this black box and study the “representational and computational capacities of the human mind

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

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.”

Translating one domain into another, finding the analogy that snugly fits both, and highlighting the appropriate concepts is a profoundly creative process.

Cognitive scientists use representation to describe our internal mental (and perceptual) structures.

“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.