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

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

Novices and experts alike can observe and learn from one another, and apprenticeship can flourish.

Piaget had noted that children progressed through developmental stages he called kinesthetic, visual, and symbolic—modalities

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

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

Simulation design blasted open the black box, forcing people to articulate and concretize their own tacit mental models and, in doing so, confront and reconceptualize their understandings.

children are actually active builders of knowledge—little scientists who are constantly creating and testing their own theories of the world.

helps you understand what happened but does not tell you how you should feel about it.

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