Unboxing the hidden politics of SimCity
video description
Date: 2023-12-10
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Comments and reviews: 30
-googiegress7459
At this point it should be possible to make a city sim with SC2000 level graphics that can actually model each sim's specific needs and wants, supply and demand for those things, their work and its contribution to the economy, etc. Like, literally every granular thing, like how many slices of bread are in each sim's kitchen. And then the PC's limitation is on how large of a community it can simulate in realtime.
Typically in Sim City games you can speed up time, maybe 4x let's say. So the game's system requirements will assume that option needs to be possible. But if you're willing to let it process at say 1/4 speed, you should be able to simulate a much larger community than doing it at 4x speed. And of course, we're no longer accustomed to thinking this way, but it wasn't long ago that a computer would run for days to process a single important image using 3d software.
And a distributed computing system like they did with video game consoles, or maybe just racks and racks of servers in an AWS farm somewhere, should be able to run all these individual simulation calculations and pass the results to the coordinating server - for example, one computer could handle all the perceptions, thoughts, expectations, desires, and action commands for a large number of sims, and then just send commands to the main server. Excess processing cycles could go toward sending status updates of the sims' internal lives to a central database to speed up querying off it.
Point is, we could finally just set up all the pieces in motion, set realistic parameters with realistic variability, random fluctuations, and set it spinning. Compare the output to actuarial tables to see if things are working right, and if not then fix whatever is unrealistic, until the simulation output looks just like real-world situations. Then once you have one particular town simulated, make the adjustments necessary to achieve output that matches some other town in another country. This way you begin to learn what adjustments would change City A into City B. And in this way, you could locate real cities that have virtuous and desirable outcomes, simulate them, and be able to tell public leaders in some other city what to do to make those changes.
All without the researchers' political and philosophical baggage tainting their recommendations.
And of course you'd have to model the self-destructive traitorous political ridiculousness that some real citizens would use to fight the changes because the social change is (a) something they don't want, and (b) the advice isn't coming from their party's propagandists. But presumably with enough simulation work, the most effective approach could be devised that would both continue to include those poisonous people in the democratic process but also result in positive outcomes despite their thirst for apocalypse.
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At this point it should be possible to make a city sim with SC2000 level graphics that can actually model each sim's specific needs and wants, supply and demand for those things, their work and its contribution to the economy, etc. Like, literally every granular thing, like how many slices of bread are in each sim's kitchen. And then the PC's limitation is on how large of a community it can simulate in realtime.
Typically in Sim City games you can speed up time, maybe 4x let's say. So the game's system requirements will assume that option needs to be possible. But if you're willing to let it process at say 1/4 speed, you should be able to simulate a much larger community than doing it at 4x speed. And of course, we're no longer accustomed to thinking this way, but it wasn't long ago that a computer would run for days to process a single important image using 3d software.
And a distributed computing system like they did with video game consoles, or maybe just racks and racks of servers in an AWS farm somewhere, should be able to run all these individual simulation calculations and pass the results to the coordinating server - for example, one computer could handle all the perceptions, thoughts, expectations, desires, and action commands for a large number of sims, and then just send commands to the main server. Excess processing cycles could go toward sending status updates of the sims' internal lives to a central database to speed up querying off it.
Point is, we could finally just set up all the pieces in motion, set realistic parameters with realistic variability, random fluctuations, and set it spinning. Compare the output to actuarial tables to see if things are working right, and if not then fix whatever is unrealistic, until the simulation output looks just like real-world situations. Then once you have one particular town simulated, make the adjustments necessary to achieve output that matches some other town in another country. This way you begin to learn what adjustments would change City A into City B. And in this way, you could locate real cities that have virtuous and desirable outcomes, simulate them, and be able to tell public leaders in some other city what to do to make those changes.
All without the researchers' political and philosophical baggage tainting their recommendations.
And of course you'd have to model the self-destructive traitorous political ridiculousness that some real citizens would use to fight the changes because the social change is (a) something they don't want, and (b) the advice isn't coming from their party's propagandists. But presumably with enough simulation work, the most effective approach could be devised that would both continue to include those poisonous people in the democratic process but also result in positive outcomes despite their thirst for apocalypse.
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-q335r49
Absolutely awful video. Sim city -does- model happiness, it's up to the player whether to build for it or build for population. It's a -sandbox- game. I didn't hear that word mentioned once In this video, however many times I've heard the sinister-sounding -black box-. Sandbox not blackbox.
You can do whatever you want. -If- you decide, as a player, to min max for population, or land value, you make certain choices, but you can also min max for health and education and happiness. Put it another way, the fact that you can be an orc in d&d, min max for strength or hp or whatever, doesn't make the game about toxic masculinity or whatever. Very minor tweaks to the games flows (scare quotes, black box, scare quotes, system dynamics) will radically affect how to optimize it, and how players glean patterns from the sandbox. The scare quotes black box is not intrinsically an ideology that is at the core of this game, unshaken from a book in the 60s, just like the scare quotes orc isn't at the core of d&d. That association, while a good link in most situations, is here basically used as an implicit -guilt by association- fallacy.
The sense of discovery and wonder at any sandbox game (cf, minecraft, which is the primary reason why they are played, and almost all board games, is the discovery of -many- archetypes, and how the designers are able to incorporate those -many- archetypes in a single model, and the sense of discovery or wonder at the emergent complexity via the interaction of simple rules. This is in general why people love -city-like- games, from Sim city to Terraforming Mars or Terra Mystica or whatever -- for these games, the primary appeal is the sense of discovery of rules and strategy of the pipelined resources (scare quotes system dynamics) and not to -win-, all of which generally support the existence of -many- archetypes.
To reduce this effort in game or archetype design in a sandboxed game design to a single scare quotes black box ideology mystically hidden within the game is not only utter nonsense but also to utterly completely misunderstand the point of any of these games. It's like saying d&d has an -orc ideology- because the creator read some book about orcs.
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Absolutely awful video. Sim city -does- model happiness, it's up to the player whether to build for it or build for population. It's a -sandbox- game. I didn't hear that word mentioned once In this video, however many times I've heard the sinister-sounding -black box-. Sandbox not blackbox.
You can do whatever you want. -If- you decide, as a player, to min max for population, or land value, you make certain choices, but you can also min max for health and education and happiness. Put it another way, the fact that you can be an orc in d&d, min max for strength or hp or whatever, doesn't make the game about toxic masculinity or whatever. Very minor tweaks to the games flows (scare quotes, black box, scare quotes, system dynamics) will radically affect how to optimize it, and how players glean patterns from the sandbox. The scare quotes black box is not intrinsically an ideology that is at the core of this game, unshaken from a book in the 60s, just like the scare quotes orc isn't at the core of d&d. That association, while a good link in most situations, is here basically used as an implicit -guilt by association- fallacy.
The sense of discovery and wonder at any sandbox game (cf, minecraft, which is the primary reason why they are played, and almost all board games, is the discovery of -many- archetypes, and how the designers are able to incorporate those -many- archetypes in a single model, and the sense of discovery or wonder at the emergent complexity via the interaction of simple rules. This is in general why people love -city-like- games, from Sim city to Terraforming Mars or Terra Mystica or whatever -- for these games, the primary appeal is the sense of discovery of rules and strategy of the pipelined resources (scare quotes system dynamics) and not to -win-, all of which generally support the existence of -many- archetypes.
To reduce this effort in game or archetype design in a sandboxed game design to a single scare quotes black box ideology mystically hidden within the game is not only utter nonsense but also to utterly completely misunderstand the point of any of these games. It's like saying d&d has an -orc ideology- because the creator read some book about orcs.
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-q335r49
The other critique of this video is just little it engages with the problem. A black box, scare quotes, is simply something that takes inputs and produces outputs. The black box itself, as traditionally understood in engineering, signifies, not the heart or irreplaceable core, but precisely an -exchangeable- component, a -non-essential- unit. The alternator in my car is a black box because it can be replaced by any other unit with the same inputs, outputs, and behavior. An alternator is a black box because we -don't care- how it works, but care primarily about the inputs and outputs.
In other words, a black box is a black box, not because it's some mysterious heart of darkness, but rather because it's implementation details are so rote or trivial that we -don't generally care- about the details of implementation, only its overall behavior. A black box is generally understood as something -very easy to critique-, to -adjust-, to talk about or engage with, to -replace-. And this is precisely its function in SimCity.
There is no effort here to substantially critique, outside of fear mongering, the inputs, outputs, or behavior of this scare quotes black box. Perhaps because the Sim city black box already models most of the things that the video claims it doesn't. A far better video, one that shows engagement with the subject of critique rather than an attempt to shoehorn any and all games into some banal political ideology, would be to (gasp) actually play the game, suggest new inputs and outputs, critique why certain input behaviors are inadequate (i. e. point to behavioral anomalies, etc. Instead of hearing from someone who actually has some insight into the game from love of the series or playing the series, we get click bait fear mongering like the local news reporting on rabid raccoons
I'll end on perhaps a too broad an edict. In the same way the psychologists analyzing a person they have never met or engaged with is unethical, a critic analyzing a work that they haven't read -- played, engaged with, have insight into -- is unethical. Or, at least, manipulative ideology.
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The other critique of this video is just little it engages with the problem. A black box, scare quotes, is simply something that takes inputs and produces outputs. The black box itself, as traditionally understood in engineering, signifies, not the heart or irreplaceable core, but precisely an -exchangeable- component, a -non-essential- unit. The alternator in my car is a black box because it can be replaced by any other unit with the same inputs, outputs, and behavior. An alternator is a black box because we -don't care- how it works, but care primarily about the inputs and outputs.
In other words, a black box is a black box, not because it's some mysterious heart of darkness, but rather because it's implementation details are so rote or trivial that we -don't generally care- about the details of implementation, only its overall behavior. A black box is generally understood as something -very easy to critique-, to -adjust-, to talk about or engage with, to -replace-. And this is precisely its function in SimCity.
There is no effort here to substantially critique, outside of fear mongering, the inputs, outputs, or behavior of this scare quotes black box. Perhaps because the Sim city black box already models most of the things that the video claims it doesn't. A far better video, one that shows engagement with the subject of critique rather than an attempt to shoehorn any and all games into some banal political ideology, would be to (gasp) actually play the game, suggest new inputs and outputs, critique why certain input behaviors are inadequate (i. e. point to behavioral anomalies, etc. Instead of hearing from someone who actually has some insight into the game from love of the series or playing the series, we get click bait fear mongering like the local news reporting on rabid raccoons
I'll end on perhaps a too broad an edict. In the same way the psychologists analyzing a person they have never met or engaged with is unethical, a critic analyzing a work that they haven't read -- played, engaged with, have insight into -- is unethical. Or, at least, manipulative ideology.
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-bijibadness
you're gonna dunk on SimCity for being a product of its time?
fine, whatever. take whatever quotes you need, trump your points up to try and make them seem damning, whatever. do your thing.
this is just so _lame. _ so, so lame.
_the bleeping objective of the game_ is to make a thriving city, which will hopefully grow and have problems you need to manage. there are no races because none were required. everyone can play it; the game's for everyone. it's non-exclusionary.
what, are all the citizens in SimCity 2013 white? is that what the problem is? what even _IS_ the problem? to me - from my view - there's no problems you're not trying to make yourself for your corporate content.
I hate this sort smug, scandalizing discontent about old famous things. as if your life or your company's history has no such problems. we're all imperfect; we're all on some level working from flawed foundations.
we gotta try and do better than this. that's what I believe - that YOU make YOUR art, YOU make YOUR mark. but don't have YOUR mark be dependent on destroying on desecrating someone ELSE'S.
that's what I think. that's all. good luck.
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you're gonna dunk on SimCity for being a product of its time?
fine, whatever. take whatever quotes you need, trump your points up to try and make them seem damning, whatever. do your thing.
this is just so _lame. _ so, so lame.
_the bleeping objective of the game_ is to make a thriving city, which will hopefully grow and have problems you need to manage. there are no races because none were required. everyone can play it; the game's for everyone. it's non-exclusionary.
what, are all the citizens in SimCity 2013 white? is that what the problem is? what even _IS_ the problem? to me - from my view - there's no problems you're not trying to make yourself for your corporate content.
I hate this sort smug, scandalizing discontent about old famous things. as if your life or your company's history has no such problems. we're all imperfect; we're all on some level working from flawed foundations.
we gotta try and do better than this. that's what I believe - that YOU make YOUR art, YOU make YOUR mark. but don't have YOUR mark be dependent on destroying on desecrating someone ELSE'S.
that's what I think. that's all. good luck.
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-Hammerheadcruiser
Reminds me of the game Stellaris. Years and many updates back, population units would spawn with certain ideologies. Which ideology they spawn with was reliant on your government type and what ideology the other units around them had. But roughly 10% of the time they'd pick something at random.
Now, when you took over a new planet with it's own population, generally through conquest, the population almost always had ideologies that didn't mesh well with yours and would often cause rebellions. The most reliable way to fix that was to find the pop unit with the ideology closest to your own or that hated you the least. and kill everyone else. Then you wait for the planet to repopulate again find the least bad ideological pop and kill everyone else again. Repeat till the planet is filled with pops that like you.
Now while this was the most efficient way to shift a planet into not hating you, it did cause the slight issue that it horrified the rest of the galaxy and would start many, many wars. Enough wars that you would eventually collapse. Suffice to say, the ideology system for pops changed not long after this was discovered.
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Reminds me of the game Stellaris. Years and many updates back, population units would spawn with certain ideologies. Which ideology they spawn with was reliant on your government type and what ideology the other units around them had. But roughly 10% of the time they'd pick something at random.
Now, when you took over a new planet with it's own population, generally through conquest, the population almost always had ideologies that didn't mesh well with yours and would often cause rebellions. The most reliable way to fix that was to find the pop unit with the ideology closest to your own or that hated you the least. and kill everyone else. Then you wait for the planet to repopulate again find the least bad ideological pop and kill everyone else again. Repeat till the planet is filled with pops that like you.
Now while this was the most efficient way to shift a planet into not hating you, it did cause the slight issue that it horrified the rest of the galaxy and would start many, many wars. Enough wars that you would eventually collapse. Suffice to say, the ideology system for pops changed not long after this was discovered.
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-BlackDragonAJ89
I watched this after watching the recent Call of Duty video because I was thinking to myself -I didn't really play CoD to get hit by the military-entertainment complex, but then again I played a lot of city-builders, 4X games, and the sims. -
And it always felt odd how everything was pushing towards constant growth as opposed to say, interaction within the community or different cities. I guess that's why I liked SC2013 so much despite the bugs because you actually got more of a sense of the different cities interacting and working with each other, and that having the smaller amount of land to work with actually made you really think about what went where and how it affected stuff around it. Eventually I'd like to build my own city building game in the future, but I want the little computer people to actually feel like a community and not just numbers.
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I watched this after watching the recent Call of Duty video because I was thinking to myself -I didn't really play CoD to get hit by the military-entertainment complex, but then again I played a lot of city-builders, 4X games, and the sims. -
And it always felt odd how everything was pushing towards constant growth as opposed to say, interaction within the community or different cities. I guess that's why I liked SC2013 so much despite the bugs because you actually got more of a sense of the different cities interacting and working with each other, and that having the smaller amount of land to work with actually made you really think about what went where and how it affected stuff around it. Eventually I'd like to build my own city building game in the future, but I want the little computer people to actually feel like a community and not just numbers.
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-brandonmorel2658
Yeah but Imperar Omnika never did beat the game. The game never told him that he won at the simulation. The only thing that even resembles measuring victory are the charts that tell the player about crime, pollution, etc, and those meters are just factual information not milestones or banners that say -lower crime to this value and you will win-. Imperar's ultimate objective was to satirize capitalism's goal to maximize profit, he explore what would happen if we pursued only efficiency and neglected everything else. That's why Magnasanti is the way it is, the citizens there just exist to work and please the government.
Simcity3k even proposes the player to enact ordinances like -free clinics- and different other programs to help the populace. Simcity3k even states that overfunding the police will lead to an oppresive state.
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Yeah but Imperar Omnika never did beat the game. The game never told him that he won at the simulation. The only thing that even resembles measuring victory are the charts that tell the player about crime, pollution, etc, and those meters are just factual information not milestones or banners that say -lower crime to this value and you will win-. Imperar's ultimate objective was to satirize capitalism's goal to maximize profit, he explore what would happen if we pursued only efficiency and neglected everything else. That's why Magnasanti is the way it is, the citizens there just exist to work and please the government.
Simcity3k even proposes the player to enact ordinances like -free clinics- and different other programs to help the populace. Simcity3k even states that overfunding the police will lead to an oppresive state.
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-crisoliveira2644
Rudy Giuliani is the son of a mobster who certainly was a major influence on his morality sense. As mayor, when he went for law enforcement, this should come as no surprise, since mobsters enforce order ruthlessly in their territories. That always reminds me of the old hypothesis of conquest as the origin of the state. Barbarians come, conquer and force the local population to pay taxes and keep the order so they can have the colony administered. When there's no barbarian, but a local family of warlords who climb the power ladder and divide the land among them, you have a feudal system. In short, the difference between a state and crime syndicate or an invading army is just formalization. Rudy Giuliani simply applied mafia culture into professional politics like a trunchoen on the poor and people of color.
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Rudy Giuliani is the son of a mobster who certainly was a major influence on his morality sense. As mayor, when he went for law enforcement, this should come as no surprise, since mobsters enforce order ruthlessly in their territories. That always reminds me of the old hypothesis of conquest as the origin of the state. Barbarians come, conquer and force the local population to pay taxes and keep the order so they can have the colony administered. When there's no barbarian, but a local family of warlords who climb the power ladder and divide the land among them, you have a feudal system. In short, the difference between a state and crime syndicate or an invading army is just formalization. Rudy Giuliani simply applied mafia culture into professional politics like a trunchoen on the poor and people of color.
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-Tom--Ace
The political and underlying algorithms to SimCity are irrelevant, really overblown here!
Most players tried to make a city they liked the look of, not one that the game scored highly. And then they'd burn it down with disasters and try to fix it again.
It's a sandbox - players know they are learning to operate an arbitrary set of rules, the same way that counter-strike players don't go shooting people on the streets.
Trying to make the rather overblown -political- assumptions of the game out to be a boogey monster is rather ridiculous.
It's like saying transport tycoon damaged people's understanding of mass transport - a huge stretch at best.
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The political and underlying algorithms to SimCity are irrelevant, really overblown here!
Most players tried to make a city they liked the look of, not one that the game scored highly. And then they'd burn it down with disasters and try to fix it again.
It's a sandbox - players know they are learning to operate an arbitrary set of rules, the same way that counter-strike players don't go shooting people on the streets.
Trying to make the rather overblown -political- assumptions of the game out to be a boogey monster is rather ridiculous.
It's like saying transport tycoon damaged people's understanding of mass transport - a huge stretch at best.
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-pop5678eye
Perhaps not surprisingly once Sim City finally included a lot of nuances about city dynamics in SC2013 the players hated it so much they turned
instead to the rip-off Cities Skylines where they could play god without having to worry about any simulated responsibilities. In fact CS is much more notorious for video posts about how to treat citizens as just a bunch of numbers and to have fun making their lives catastrophic.
I would love a social science analysis of this regression in city simulation to people's desire to play god with a revulsion to social responsibility.
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Perhaps not surprisingly once Sim City finally included a lot of nuances about city dynamics in SC2013 the players hated it so much they turned
instead to the rip-off Cities Skylines where they could play god without having to worry about any simulated responsibilities. In fact CS is much more notorious for video posts about how to treat citizens as just a bunch of numbers and to have fun making their lives catastrophic.
I would love a social science analysis of this regression in city simulation to people's desire to play god with a revulsion to social responsibility.
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-bijibadness
The guy you got in the video says it perfectly: -It gets the basics right. -
BASICS. _SimCity_ is extremely BASIC as a -simulator-, despite the name.
and anyway, -Simulation Game- meant a _whole_ lot different back when the first game came out then it does now. -SimCity- was a great and catchy title, but _SimCity_ isn't a good simulator for running a real city any more than _Roller Coaster Tycoon_ is an accurate simulator for running a real theme park. and I know most people know this, and I'm sure you do too.
it's easy to make a mark, much harder to leave one.
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The guy you got in the video says it perfectly: -It gets the basics right. -
BASICS. _SimCity_ is extremely BASIC as a -simulator-, despite the name.
and anyway, -Simulation Game- meant a _whole_ lot different back when the first game came out then it does now. -SimCity- was a great and catchy title, but _SimCity_ isn't a good simulator for running a real city any more than _Roller Coaster Tycoon_ is an accurate simulator for running a real theme park. and I know most people know this, and I'm sure you do too.
it's easy to make a mark, much harder to leave one.
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-deboozombie23
To quote another author:
Greebo had spent an irritating two minutes in that box. Technically, a cat locked in a box may be alive or it may be dead. You never know until you look. In fact, the mere act of opening the box will determine the state of the cat, although in this case there were three determinate states the cat could be in: these being Alive, Dead, and Bloody Furious.
Terry Pratchett
Also someone named Kaczynski becoming Mayor because while having tie ins to a Machine-algorythm is somewhat ironic.
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To quote another author:
Greebo had spent an irritating two minutes in that box. Technically, a cat locked in a box may be alive or it may be dead. You never know until you look. In fact, the mere act of opening the box will determine the state of the cat, although in this case there were three determinate states the cat could be in: these being Alive, Dead, and Bloody Furious.
Terry Pratchett
Also someone named Kaczynski becoming Mayor because while having tie ins to a Machine-algorythm is somewhat ironic.
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-lopiklop
Crime wouldn't just start to decrease because there are more police stations. If anything it would be the opposite, because there would be more instances of reported crime. The act of apprehending a criminal would constitute as -crime- for a city. The fundamental problem is that these are complex social issues being represented as positive and negative statistics in a game.
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Crime wouldn't just start to decrease because there are more police stations. If anything it would be the opposite, because there would be more instances of reported crime. The act of apprehending a criminal would constitute as -crime- for a city. The fundamental problem is that these are complex social issues being represented as positive and negative statistics in a game.
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polygon
Y-all are dumb. Rudy was not part of coup. And he was a better mayor than the disaster causing an exodus from nyc.
-
Ah, yes magnasanti. that ridiculousness. - that works if you-re going for only maximum population density, but it-s not at all perfect. It-s a game, with some accuracies, but has flaws. The architect of magnasanti exploited the flaws of the game.
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Y-all are dumb. Rudy was not part of coup. And he was a better mayor than the disaster causing an exodus from nyc.
-
Ah, yes magnasanti. that ridiculousness. - that works if you-re going for only maximum population density, but it-s not at all perfect. It-s a game, with some accuracies, but has flaws. The architect of magnasanti exploited the flaws of the game.
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-pop5678eye
Fun fact: the board game Monopoly was originally designed to teach people about the dangers of capitalism, how it is exploitative, cut-throat and leaves others to ruin except the greediest and most selfish player.
. Guess how that lesson turned out. People learned they should get ahead by stepping on each-others' throats!
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Fun fact: the board game Monopoly was originally designed to teach people about the dangers of capitalism, how it is exploitative, cut-throat and leaves others to ruin except the greediest and most selfish player.
. Guess how that lesson turned out. People learned they should get ahead by stepping on each-others' throats!
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-snowstrobe
I got into the 2000 game when it first came out, but become quickly frustrated with it's limitations. Of course, I didn't understand why, but I knew the issue was political. For a time I tried to force the game to have more decent outcomes, but gave up. This background explains a lot.
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I got into the 2000 game when it first came out, but become quickly frustrated with it's limitations. Of course, I didn't understand why, but I knew the issue was political. For a time I tried to force the game to have more decent outcomes, but gave up. This background explains a lot.
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-altectechy
Dang that sucks, was interested in your video but then realized you made it political (wow) and now I'm completely turned off.
Say what you want about Giuliani, he brought the crime rate down in NYC to lower levels than it has ever been. Now crime is rising, hmmm, wonder why!
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Dang that sucks, was interested in your video but then realized you made it political (wow) and now I'm completely turned off.
Say what you want about Giuliani, he brought the crime rate down in NYC to lower levels than it has ever been. Now crime is rising, hmmm, wonder why!
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-well5007
I've always wondered about the consequences of games with necissary evils. Like, not like SimCity, which pose them as neutral, but games that encourage you do slavery because its objectively more profitable. I wonder how what kind of message is really being passed through them.
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I've always wondered about the consequences of games with necissary evils. Like, not like SimCity, which pose them as neutral, but games that encourage you do slavery because its objectively more profitable. I wonder how what kind of message is really being passed through them.
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-juliamonem133
its the de-personification of the population that really exposes this issue. In the defcon video (the one I just came from) its the exact same thing that made it terrifying. and in BDG's sims video, it was the human aspects that made his apartment more perfect in the end.
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its the de-personification of the population that really exposes this issue. In the defcon video (the one I just came from) its the exact same thing that made it terrifying. and in BDG's sims video, it was the human aspects that made his apartment more perfect in the end.
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-mhwtf5965
Reminds me of post-cyberpunk stories like Little Brother and Watch Dogs 2 (which really needs to give more due credit to the former. Both stressed heavily on the danger of blackbox algorithms, an idea dangerously overlooked by us and the consequences are certainly showing: (
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Reminds me of post-cyberpunk stories like Little Brother and Watch Dogs 2 (which really needs to give more due credit to the former. Both stressed heavily on the danger of blackbox algorithms, an idea dangerously overlooked by us and the consequences are certainly showing: (
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-xdarin_
Imagine a SimCity game like the Manhack Arcade of the Half-Life universe, where people think that they are playing a game, but they're actually affecting real life events.
You would have to add realistic timers and remove disasters though, which would make the game boring.
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Imagine a SimCity game like the Manhack Arcade of the Half-Life universe, where people think that they are playing a game, but they're actually affecting real life events.
You would have to add realistic timers and remove disasters though, which would make the game boring.
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-Ubersupersloth
I don-t understand the issue. If -one-way bus tickets- or getting rid of garbage or the like mean less homeless people in your city then an accurate model should reflect that.
Whether it-s a -moral- thing to do or not is irrelevant.
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I don-t understand the issue. If -one-way bus tickets- or getting rid of garbage or the like mean less homeless people in your city then an accurate model should reflect that.
Whether it-s a -moral- thing to do or not is irrelevant.
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polygon
simcity is based on 1980s technology, 1980s societal knowledge, and has for 30 years stayed true to the original 1980s game. you look too far into this and try to create imaginary problems that both do not exist and do not affect anybody
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simcity is based on 1980s technology, 1980s societal knowledge, and has for 30 years stayed true to the original 1980s game. you look too far into this and try to create imaginary problems that both do not exist and do not affect anybody
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-567secret
I always hated these sorts of sims as I found them lacking in options, eg. there are proposed IRL solutions not available in these games, they're designed to lock you into a certain, capitalist, mindset.
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I always hated these sorts of sims as I found them lacking in options, eg. there are proposed IRL solutions not available in these games, they're designed to lock you into a certain, capitalist, mindset.
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-NathanKidd9
Please get a new mic, I can't understand half the stuff you're saying and I'm listening to this through music production monitors. So I know it's not my setup causing the problem
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Please get a new mic, I can't understand half the stuff you're saying and I'm listening to this through music production monitors. So I know it's not my setup causing the problem
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-h0tba1100n
Wow. I know city building games have real world implications but not on this level. I guess it's better to focus on the aesthetics than the mechnism when playing these games-
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Wow. I know city building games have real world implications but not on this level. I guess it's better to focus on the aesthetics than the mechnism when playing these games-
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-SeraphX2
So this is more a commentary on how you think socialism is better and how you think we should be forcing your ideals down people's throats with these games.
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So this is more a commentary on how you think socialism is better and how you think we should be forcing your ideals down people's throats with these games.
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-MatthiasGorgens
Interesting video. But I still don't really get what the politics of Sim City are, apart from a few insinuations that it must be something sinister.
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Interesting video. But I still don't really get what the politics of Sim City are, apart from a few insinuations that it must be something sinister.
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-Mark-xh8md
What I want to know is: Despite the -Police bad mkay! --tone of this wokefest of a video: Did Giuliani's reforms decrease NYC's crime rate or didn't it?
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What I want to know is: Despite the -Police bad mkay! --tone of this wokefest of a video: Did Giuliani's reforms decrease NYC's crime rate or didn't it?
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-safe-keeper1042
Reminds me of the controverse with Cities Skylines and how it through its mechanics 'forces' you to build car-centric North American-style suburbs.
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Reminds me of the controverse with Cities Skylines and how it through its mechanics 'forces' you to build car-centric North American-style suburbs.
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