Building SimCity: How to put the world in a machine

I want to bump a few things that folks linked to below:

[1] Will Wright (designer of SimCity) will be interviewing me about the book on July 19th at 2PM ET. We thought it would be fun to turn the tables and have him interview someone else for a change. On Twitch, free, online, and live. Hosted by ROMchip. RSVP here: https://www.tickettailor.com/events/romchipajournalofgamehis...

[2] Stewart Brand wrote a brief review on X I'm still in disbelief over ("It is one of the best origin stories ever told and the best account I've seen of how innovation actually occurs in computerdom."). Read more here: https://twitter.com/stewartbrand/status/1800941614287946003

If you had access to the compute power that open ai has, what would you make?

I linked elsewhere Will talking about the procedural generation. But now we have The Power of Generative AI. Those editors you've built could sure be way different, just doodle your monster and watch it come alive. 'etc.

I would like to make Spore meets Second Life Powered by AI. Also Space Exploration games really took off in the years since Spore..

This is fertile ground there are so many directions to take it with modern hardware and the recent advancments. Time for another kick at the cat I say. Wanna apply to YC together? :)

I'm not even kidding, I gots ideas. Also randoms reading this if you're picking up what I'm laying down. But to get on the team first you have to buy and read his book.

P.S. - Somebody recently called me about how a Burger King Advertisement doxxed them. In the middle of the commercial it knew their name and IP address and zoomed unto their house with custom comical narration about which burger they like.

One day a Simulation of Everything Game with a little trickery could plausibly stun the player by suddenly showing them a little cartoonish version of themselves playing it in their own room.

I'm just sayin'.

Cool!

Possibly off topic, but: what did you work on for Spore? Was it around the time of the now (in?)famous E3 demo in ~2006, or closer to the final release? The final game seemed to differ significantly from what many of us were hoping for, and I never really heard much of a story of what happened in between.

Hi Chaim! I really enjoyed working with you on Spore. What have you been up to in the intervening years besides writing this book?

Don't you think the granularity of factorio is what brought its success? Don't you think it would be interesting the mix the sims and sim city for more granularity in the game?

Your lunch is 8 months old?

Good luck with the baby and congrats for the book. <3

After SimCity 4 what’s the next great building sim you’d recommend?

Is the ebook (on Penguin Random House) DRM-free? Are you planning an audiobook version?

You do so much cool stuff in life. Much Kudos to you. And you have taken an unusual career path in your life for a smart person.

Are you content with the uncertainty, and not having a conventional, safe job?

Thank you for the mental picture you trying to tap out a message offending off a very interested child :-)

Man I loved Spore! There's so much potential in those mechanics. A modern remake with mod ability would be amazing! Perhaps that ship is sailed but one can imagine.

feed my 8 month old lunch and he is very excited to asn``wer anything too.

Looks like you're having a hard time keeping him away from the keyboard, too, I can relate :)

I’m not sure I’m following the distinction you’re trying to draw. SimCity is a simulation — just a simplistic one with many simplifications and short cuts.

It’s a toy model.

There’s always simplifications made in any model — SimCity’s happened to be made with “fun” in mind.

Simulations and models, regardless of whether they're designed for fun or for realism, can still teach you plenty of things about the real world; sometimes not from the simulation itself but explicitly by its omissions. The fact that SimCity famously removed all the parking lots tells you something interesting right away. The fact that City Skylines bites the bullet of traffic and renders it in fairly sophisticated detail -- to the degree that the game often devolves into "Traffic Management Simulator" instead of "City Builder Simulator" -- is another such interesting lesson.

But in terms of "how directly transferable are lessons learned directly from the model" is always going to depend on the model's assumptions.

Fun fact -- have you ever heard of the "Monocentric city model?" It comes up in a lot of econ papers, and a lot of urban economics, and therefore a lot of real world policy is based on it.

The "Monocentric city model" is about as simplistic as it gets -- it models the city as a LINE. IE, you have a bunch of agents, and they live some distance from the city, and they have different travel/commuting costs proportional to their distance from the city center; let's run that and see what kinds of consequences fall out of it.

Turns out it's actually a pretty good model and generates outcomes that are pretty analogous to what we see in the real world! Is it perfectly representative of the real world? Of course, not, it models the city as a friggin line. But if we're talking about sheer complexity alone, SimCity is already orders of magnitude more complex than this famous economic model. But that in and of itself doesn't mean that a successful SimCity city would make for a successful real world city, because it's not just about sheer complexity, it's about the appropriateness of the assumptions.

The original SimCity franchise did an amazing job of combining both simulation and game, but later iterations (past SimCity 4) ditched any pretense of being a simulation and went full on-game. That shift quickly tanked a previously sterling franchise, which I think shows the significance of the simulation angle.

Cities Skylines eventually filled in that gap and if you look at the dedicated community around those games you'll see a heavy emphasis on simulation and very little focus on making it a more fun game. Interest is somewhat split between modeling aesthetics and modeling transit. I think the greatest interest is in modeling societies and economies, but few games seem to make that work except on small scales. There's an old game called City Life that did an commendable job modelling social classes. The early Tropico games had a very engaging economic system. I can't think of any modern games that have impressed me like those, but I would love suggestions.

I haven't played a lot of Sim City, but in my mind, factorio is more a simulator than sim city.

Simulating means there is granularity about how each element can be seen and touched by the player.

In sim city there are a lot of shortcuts and simplifications. It looks like you have a city, but the more you play, the more it's just a decor, because the game shows a representation, but doesn't let you see the details.

So you see a car, a house, money, a school, but there is no day planning for citizens, they don't have a lifespan, citizen A or B doesn't have a commute with job C or D, they don't have children that you see grow up, you don't see those citizen bring back groceries or corn going out of the farm.

The problem is simulating granular elements of a city or even a village would require a lot of memory and computing power, even today, so back in 1990 or 2000 it was just not possible to have a granular village or city.

I want to see a mixture of The Sims and Sim City, but you can imagine how difficult it is to design such a game.

IBM is way into this racket now of Smart Cities and digital twins.

Idea being if you make a Sim City type game but worse, because you are IBM, and then market it to bureaucrats around the world, because you are IBM, they will happily pay you a lot of money, because you are IBM, so that they can point to your simulation as justification for their in/actions. The ass covering is magnificent you just have to feed it a little bit of real data (traffic, power consumption, weather).

Of curse part of what you are simulating is your own understanding and aspirational ideals about how society should function. If you write an essay or a speech people will argue but if you embed values into a game... well, they will still argue but they have to notice it first.

Some will ascribe magical powers of clairvoyance and correctness unto the simulation for reasons that nobody quite understands.

I'm not sure what my point is exactly other than this is potentially a very interesting fulcrum point. Like who is playing whom really in this situation?

I'm a bit hesitant about posting this link. I wrote the article mainly for myself (memory capture exercise); it happened a long time ago - and I'm sure my former employers (and hopefully all similar organisations) don't encourage this sort of approach at all.

https://rikroots.substack.com/p/why-rik-left-the-neighbourho...

Dwarf Fortress is perhaps a stronger exploration of your thesis, because it is unapologetically simulation-first.

Famously they had to make cars pocketable so that parking wouldn't make car dependent cities as ugly as they are

A game can consist of a simulation. The fact that you add feature sets to it does not change the fact that.

The various control planes and randomness of the simulation can be tuned, sure, but if you were to capture all those control inputs you can reconstruct the world event timeline in a determistic timeline.

Starcraft 2 Is a simulation. Replays are just games with all commands timestamped and the simulated world throttling forward and backward through time.

Science

It's a game that simulates planning and building a city for enjoyment.

It is a simulation, just a simulation game as opposed to simulation software.

You may have a reasonable point, but that doesn't mean that SimCity cannot feature in a book about computer simulation history.

My hot take is that all games are simulations to some extent. Many sports are a kind of war game, simulating a specific aspect of real war, obviously abstracting quite a bit. A big part of the fun in catan is in the tension of having to cooperate with rivals to mutually beneficial ends, much like what happens in economics all the time. The point being, that yes, there are varying levels of realism, but in the end I don’t really think there is a simple line denoting “game” or “simulation.”

Isn't that the whole point? SimCity and all its sequels and imitators present a very simplified set of tools and mechanics. Those tools and mechanics are more than the sum of their parts: They entertain, they teach, they advance a political opinion (Jeff Braun has been explicit about this[0]) and yes, they simulate, albeit very simplistically. The intersection of those things and the tradeoffs that are required in all simulations (which all reside on a spectrum of toy to faithful representation) are interesting. IMO it's (ironically) too simplistic to say that SimCity is a mere game and thus unworthy of thinking more deeply about, and I suggest that you're taking that "world in a machine" marketing phrase a bit too literally.

[0] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1992-10-02-vw-391-st...

Thanks! If you don't mind some more detail

- how much does it go into people and personalities of the team and stakeholders, besides the technical design of the game?

- it sounds like first part of the book is historical and talks about various games, second focuses strictly on simcity?

- does it only cover first simcity? What about latter generations and competitors, or maxis follow ups like simearth etc?

Thx muchly!:)

They really were at the center of simulation. They had so many offerings that many people have never even heard of, like Sim Earth. I ran into it at a point in my life when I was playing with a lot of ideas about sustainability and waste, and it ended up being very influential in how I think about the world. It was almost a throw away game, there just wasn't much to do, but setting up initial conditions and watching them play out was fascinating to me. It taught me a lot about critical mass, and resource utilization rates.

As a side note, Oxygen Not Included feels like a master's class in sustainability, especially if you don't over abuse some of the game's broken mechanics.

He then went on to do Spore. Here is a pre-release talk from 2005: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofA6YWVTURU

The final game got nerfed by EA but this talk is great fun and a continuation of sorts.

Here is Will Wright's talk "Interfacing to Microworlds" from April 26 1996, which he presented to Terry Winnograd's user interface class at Stanford. I sat in on the talk, asked questions, took notes, and wrote up a summary, had Will review it, then went to work with him on Dollhouse which became The Sims. After we shipped in 2000 I updated my summary of the talk with some thoughts and retrospectives about working with Will on The Sims.

Stanford recently published the video, so again I updated my write-up with more information from the talk, transcript excerpts, screen snapshots, links and citations.

All I had to go on for the 27 years between the talk until the video surfaced and I could finally watch it again were my notes and memory, so I'd forgotten how just prescient and purposeful he was, and I didn't remember that he was already planning on leaning into the storytelling and user created content and self and family representation aspects, and making the people speak with "Charlie Brown Adults" mwop mwop mwop speech, among many other things.

Will Wright - Maxis - Interfacing to Microworlds - 1996-4-26

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsxoZXaYJSk

Video of Will Wright's talk about "Interfacing to Microworlds" presented to Terry Winograd's user interface class at Stanford University, April 26, 1996.

He demonstrates and gives postmortems for SimEarth, SimAnt, and SimCity 2000, then previews an extremely early pre-release prototype version of Dollhouse (which eventually became The Sims), describing how the AI models personalities and behavior, and is distributed throughout extensible plug-in programmable objects in the environment, and he thoughtfully answers many interesting questions from the audience.

This is the lecture described in "Will Wright on Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games (1996)": A summary of Will Wright’s talk to Terry Winograd’s User Interface Class at Stanford, written in 1996 by Don Hopkins, before they worked together on The Sims at Maxis.

Use and reproduction: The materials are open for research use and may be used freely for non-commercial purposes with an attribution. For commercial permission requests, please contact the Stanford University Archives (universityarchives@stanford.edu).

https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/yj113jt5999

Will Wright on Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games (1996) (2023 Video Update)

https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-user-interfaces-to-s...

A summary of Will Wright’s talk to Terry Winograd’s User Interface Class at Stanford, written in 1996 by Don Hopkins, before they worked together on The Sims at Maxis. Now including a video and snapshots of the original talk!

Will Wright and Brian Eno discussing generative systems at a Long Now Foundation talk:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UqzVSvqXJYg

SimCity takes a lot of short cuts to fool you. It's what Will Wright calls the "Simulator Effect":

Will Wright defined the “Simulator Effect” as how players imagine the simulation is vastly more detailed, deep, rich, and complex than it actually is: a magical misunderstanding that you shouldn’t talk them out of. He designs games to run on two computers at once: the electronic one on the player’s desk, running his shallow tame simulation, and the biological one in the player’s head, running their deep wild imagination.

"Reverse Over-Engineering" is a desirable outcome of the Simulator Effect: what game players (and game developers trying to clone the game) do when they use their imagination to extrapolate how a game works, and totally overestimate how much work and modeling the simulator is actually doing, because they filled in the gaps with their imagination and preconceptions and assumptions, instead of realizing how many simplifications and shortcuts and illusions it actually used.

The trick of optimizing games is to off-load as much as the simulation from the computer into the user's brain, which is MUCH more powerful and creative. Implication is more efficient (and richer) than simulation.

Some muckety-muck architecture magazine was interviewing Will Wright about SimCity, and they asked him a question something like “which ontological urban paradigm most influenced your design of the simulator, the Exo-Hamiltonian Pattern Language Movement, or the Intra-Urban Deconstructionist Sub-Culture Hypothesis?” He replied, “I just kind of optimized for game play.”

During development, when we first added Astrological signs to the characters, there was a discussion about whether we should invent our own original "Sim Zodiac" signs, or use the traditional ones, which have a lot of baggage and history (which some of the designers thought might be a problem). Will Wright argued that we actually wanted to leverage the baggage and history of the traditional Astrological signs of the Zodiac, so we should just use those and not invent our own.

The way it works is that Will came up with twelve archetypal vectors of personality traits corresponding to each of the twelve Astrological signs, so when you set their personality traits, it looks up the sign with the nearest euclidian distance to the character's personality, and displays that as their sign. But there was absolutely no actual effect on their behavior.

That decision paid off almost instantly and measurably in testing, after we implemented the user interface for showing the Astrological sign in the character creation screen, without writing any code to make their sign affect their behavior: The testers immediately started reporting bugs that their character's sign had too much of an effect on their personality, and claimed that the non-existent effect of astrological signs on behavior needed to be tuned down. But that effect was totally coming from their imagination! They should call them Astrillogical Signs!

The create-a-sim user interface hid the corresponding astrological sign for the initial all-zero personality you first see before you've spent any points, because that would be insulting to 1/12th of the players (implying [your sign] has zero personality)!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffzt12tEGpY

    From: "Gavin Clayton" <gavinc@eidosnet.co.uk>
    Newsgroups: alt.family-names.sims,alt.games.the-sims
    Sent: Tuesday, April 11, 2000 2:59 PM
    Subject: No other game has done this...

    > Hi... no need to reply to this cos it's just a whimsical thought :-)
    > 
    > When I first got the game I tried to make my own family, trying to get 
    > their personalities accurate too. When making myself, my dad and my 
    > sister, I attributed points to all the personality categories, and I 
    > found I had points left over. But when I made my mum I ran out of 
    > available points and was wishing for more -- I wanted to give her more 
    > points than are available. It made me realise for the first time in 
    > years how much I love my mum :-)
    > 
    > Now what other game has ever done *that*? :-)
    > 
    > Gavin Clayton

Sounds interesting, if perhaps less fun than Masters of Doom. I look forward to reading it for free some day. And I probably like that ink smell, although I agree that it's important that a book should smell good.

Other than the retro art style what are the main ideas you have going in that you want to implement in the game?

Game looks great and is on my wishlist!

Woah this is awesome, added it to my wishlist.

I've been following your development for a while. Love the new take you have for the genre.

Is there a plan to have a creative mode?

On the roadmap I saw "Intelligent traffic lights". Can you elaborate further on this? Are going as far to let people set the timers of the lights?

I've got it on my wishlist. Looking forward to see what you come up with.

Hey, make me a game where you start out running a business like the old days where you own the company store and own the workers homes, so you manage all that plus the business operations. I don't know, it could be a logging business or coal mine, whatever.

And then at some point the workers revolt against the "company owns everything" system and the game becomes a city simulator.

You just basically start small scale and then zoom out to manage the big scale.

Hell, make it two games as long as I can import the first game map as my starter city.

Thanks.

wishlisted, please keep going !

Stefan Helmreich's book is indeed brilliant! I used it extensively when writing Building SimCity. Stefan was quite helpful in researching my book, sharing and checking some old SFI documentation so I could determine things like who visited SFI when for what event (and with whom).

The attendee list for some of the early Artificial Life conferences was quite cool. Peter Molyneux shows up as well as one of Maxis's venture capitalists.

And the paperback is $50. What happened here?

and "6 x 9 in", I thought only PDFs were fixed sizes :)

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262537759/minitel/ is $39.99 ebook, $40 paperback, but $35 hardcover. bizarre pricing.

The Kindle version is $36

As a conspiracy theorist, my intuition suggests to me that there are people within the government that would frown upon the general public getting too interested in (and skilled in) the complexities and nuances of human coordination. That sort of thing is The Experts job.

I think yes, and so did Vannevar Bush (OK, not the game part). The first two chapters of Building SimCity are dedicated to non-computer simulations for this reason. Vannevar Bush and his analog instruments, like the differential analyzer, are the subject of chapter 2. Bush (and others) argued that good tangible models were excellent complements to, and sometimes superior to, abstract symbolic representations. For this reason he and his colleagues grieved the transition to digital computing.

For example, he writes in Pieces of the Action (p. 262) of "an example of how easy it is to teach fundamental calculus," about a mechanic with a high school education who learned calculus by working on the differential analyzer. "It was very interesting to discuss this subject with him because he had learned the calculus in mechanical terms ‐ a strange approach, and yet he understood it. That is, he did not understand it in any formal sense, but he understood the fundamentals; he had it under his skin."

I think this is fascinating stuff, and chapter 2 goes deep into the subject. Chapter 1 is about Doreen Gehry Nelson and city simulations made by school kids--it's all about games, simulation, tangibility, and learning.

Procedural Rhetoric: Ian Bogost, Janet Murray (Chaim's advisor and Building SimCity endorser)

For better or worse, games can deliver pre-programmed propaganda and procedural rhetoric for advancing ideologies and changing minds. Some designers push clichéd narratives, stereotypical characters, and institutionalized prejudices that normalize and encourage homophobia, sexism, racism, bigotry, and violence. Others like Will Wright conscientiously use it for good.

Ian Bogost defined the “Procedural Rhetoric” game design philosophy as an unholy blend of Will Wright and Aristotle, that explains how people learn through rules and processes, analyzes the art of persuasion, and focuses on conveying ideology by crafting laws and rules within games.

“I developed my own design philosophy that I called procedural rhetoric, an unholy blend of Will Wright and Aristotle.” -Ian Bogost, Video Games Are Better Without Characters

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procedural_rhetoric

Ian Bogost, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames.

Procedural rhetoric or simulation rhetoric[1] is a rhetorical concept that explains how people learn through the authorship of rules and processes. The theory argues that games can make strong claims about how the world works—not simply through words or visuals but through the processes they embody and models they construct. The term was first coined by Ian Bogost in his 2007 book Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames.[2]

Procedural rhetoric analyzes the art of persuasion by rule based representations and interactions rather than spoken or written word. Procedural rhetoric focuses on how game makers craft laws and rules within a game to convey a particular ideology.

[1] Frasca, Gonzalo (2003). “Simulation versus Narrative: Introduction to Ludology.” In The Video Game Theory Reader. Ed. by Mark J. P. Wolf and Bernard Perron. New York: Routledge. 221–37 ISBN 9780415965798

[2] Bogost, Ian (2008). "The Rhetoric of Video Games." The Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning. Ed. by Katie Salen. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. 117–40. ISBN 9780262693646

https://docs.google.com/document/d/13u-kNaWC2AAd-L0_5OoLc_-x...

The Sims has evolved with society over two decades towards a more inclusive, tolerant world celebrating diversity and creativity. Its procedural rhetoric promotes inclusivity, diversity, personalization, and tolerance, and supports self-expression, creativity, storytelling, and sharing. Players imprint their own identities, families, homes, communities, and stories into the game, and share their own personal emergent narratives using online community tools like The Sims Family Album and The Sims Exchange.

mistermann: The intuition of a conspiracy theorist is not useful nor interesting nor falsifiable, by definition. Please stop posting unsubstantive flamebait comments and parroting harmful anti-vax lies, and don't try to argue with the moderator, dang. Reminder: "If you keep posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments, we're going to have to ban you. We've warned you countless times already, and it's not good that you're still doing it. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html" -dang https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40660693

Yes. There's a whole chapter on this with tons of diagrams, not code.

Thanks for sharing this!

Focus is the original SimCity, but many Maxis Sim- games up to EA acquisition are touched upon, especially the long saga of what became The Sims.

I'd be very interested to hear of other books and articles like this, too.

Edwin Hutchins's Cognition in the Wild is one of my favorite books. It's very technical and ethnographic, but less historical. It doesn't deal with code, but that's because it's about the nitty gritty of navigation on a Navy ship (pre digital computing), and (here's the historical aspect) it compares this to some traditional Polyponesian navigational practices.

The closest thing off the top of my head are titles in MIT Press's Platform Studies series, like Racing the Beam, about the Atari 2600, which is historical and technical. https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262539760/racing-the-beam/

Maybe Casey O'Donnell's Developer's Dilemma? https://direct.mit.edu/books/monograph/4469/Developer-s-Dile...

If you make a Venn diagram with history, ethnography, technical details, and code as different circles, the central intersection may not be huge, but I think there may be a lot more if you remove some of the constraints. But I want to see more work at this intersection, and I hope more people do it.

I don't see anything wrong with posting about a book, a course, etc., especially if it's a newly released product. It's good to know what's being done.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1800941614287946003.html

It shows the ebook by itself as more expensive than the paperback, which is a first for me.