The SimCity network also illustrates how simulation makers—in this case, Wright—function as interdisciplinarians. By bridging conceptual domains, the analogies underwriting simulations bridge intellectual frameworks. Doing so allows separate communities to come together and exchange ideas even if, as Peter Galison observes, their worldviews are inc

who wanted unpredictable complexity to emerge from precisely crafted rules.

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

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

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.”

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

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

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.

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