Is that kind of thing necessary for a good city builder, though? I ask this because I’ve been plugged into Cities: Skylines for the last week, and it’s a game which a lot of people are saying is the game that SimCity (the 2013 version, not the 1989 one) should have been. James Lovelock even wrote the intro to the SimEarth manual. And, as a geek, I loved, and pretended to understand, the short essays from each game’s lead designer, explaining which social theorist or scientist they’d been reading when drawing up their first drafts. There was a black coffee, short-sleeved shirt and tie tone, shared with reference apps like Encarta. The Maxis of the mid-90s, when I bought that triple-pack of games, had a very particular aesthetic that reflected this psuedo-educational side. The relative unlikelihood of global influenza pandemic absent a perfect storm of rapid, transcontinental transmission.” The relationship between serving size consistency and profitability in an ice cream parlor.

The amplifying effect of natural disaster and global unrest on oil futures. Just as photography offers a way of seeing aspects of the world we often look past, game design becomes an exercise in operating that world, of manipulating the weird mechanisms that turn its gears when we’re not looking. “The best games model the systems in our world – or the ones of imagination – by means of systems running in software. “In these games, players experience a model of some aspect of the world, in a role that forces them to see that model in a different light, and in a context that’s bigger than their individual actions. (Not that there was much left of the company from its heyday Wright left in 2009, after the release of Spore, to run an entertainment think tank.) Games developer and theorist Ian Bogost has a thoughtful eulogy for Maxis over at the Atlantic, in which he argues that the “abstraction” of the Sim games successfully helped “wrest us from the temptation of personal identification”: A couple of weeks ago, EA announced it would be closing the Maxis studio in Emeryville, California, which it’s owned since 1997, and was absorbing most of its staff.

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