It can be fun to try and spot the rhetorical sleight-of-hand trick that articles like this use to come to their eye-catching conclusions:
> The art project Magnasanti revealed the contours of the black box when it attempted to “beat” the game that famously doesn’t have a win state [...] Artist Vincent Ocasla accomplished this feat through rigorous trial and error, eventually creating a crime-free city that maintained a stable population of 6 million sims, but only by creating a dystopian nightmare. [...]
> Magnasanti reveals the contours of the black box, showing how citizen health and happiness were ultimately unimportant. What the game considers a successful city doesn’t look at all like one we would actually want to live in.
SimCity presents an open-ended simulation with a wide range of things players can decide to optimize for. An artist once built a city optimizing for population density and low crime to the exclusion of all other factors, and this resulted in a dystopian nightmare where all the simulated citizens were unhealthy and miserable.
But by describing what the artist did as "trying to 'beat' the game", the article pins the blame for the artist's choices on the game itself. Even though SimCity clearly does not think Magnasanti is a good city -- it's constantly flashing up warning messages and graphs showing that all the citizens are miserable and unhealthy! One could just as easily have argued that SimCity's black box is hiding a progressive ideology, one that warns us of the dangers of industrialization and over-policing! (Much like how the board game Monopoly is about the dangers of capitalism.)
In essence, an artist set out to 'beat' SimCity, the artist decided what 'beating' SimCity meant, and the article tricked us into thinking that said something about SimCity.
The game making it impossible to have a stable large city with low crime without dystopian modes of control absolutely communicates the ideology of the creators of the game, conscious or not.
It's really not a sleight of hand. The idea that it's natural for it being impossible to have a city with low crime and a high population without making everyone miserable is absolutely ideology, and it's just your own ideology that perceives this as somehow a neutral fact.
Its not progressive to say that without over-policing high crime is inevitable, or that industrialization means we have no choice but to be miserable either. Those are solidly reactionary beliefs.
I think you've found an interesting point here. I don't agree that this is some "slight of hand" by the author to try and convince your, but I do think you're correct that you can't draw your conclusion solely based on the one art project. I see it more as a failing of the author than a trick.
SimCity does have an ideology, and it does have something to say with how it has weighed it's measurements of citizen satisfaction, but the author seems to fail at capturing that ideology and instead just talks about how minmaxing is bad.
The rest of the article is interesting. There's plenty of people out there that don't even think about how the rules of the game frames the discussions you can have about it. It's just kind of a bad example.
SimCity very much does express an ideology, though generally not because the designer wanted to.
But try to zone something for mixed use.
SimCity itself tells you that certain things will happen under certain conditions, and it is generally wrong about those predictions. It's not intended to be an accurate simulation; it's intended to be amusing and to conform to people's intuitions about what they want to happen when they plan their city in a certain way. But people play it and feel they're learning something about how cities actually work.
I'd assume that having no win state in the game is precisely because the creator didn't want to make a statement about the ideal city. Instead, each person who plays the game can decide if and when they've created the ideal city for themselves. Calling a crime-free city with a stable population "ideal" is just as valid as calling a crime-filled city with happy citizens "ideal."
I love that you called it a sleight of hand because that's exactly what it is; just by assuming someone could beat the game, the authors have misunderstood Sim City.
Well, that one is pretty egregious but there are other blatantly misleading statements. I don't know what polygon is meant to be, but the author seems to be far more ideologically biased than SimCity ever was.
One example: "Scientific simulations, like those used to model climate change, don’t keep their formulas hidden in a black box because replicability is a big part of the scientific method."
But the black box nature of climate models was the core issue in one of the biggest disputes between sceptics and researchers of all time. It went to court and the researcher preferred to lose the suit than reveal his model (Michael Mann). The COVID model from Imperial College that justified lockdowns had to be extracted from the university via
FOIA requests which were stonewalled for months. The scientist who wrote it openly claimed in interviews nobody except him understood the model equations, which were all entirely undocumented. Probably the author doesn't know these things, but it shows a rather naive misunderstanding of the true nature of science. Black box models that encode ideological beliefs are common throughout serious research.
The comment about how SimCity doesn't simulate race or gender is also rather ideological. The belief that race and gender are central to everything is both quite new, very much a view of the left and totally USA centric, but SimCity was designed to sell to international markets too. "Cities are built on history, politics, and racial bias" is the sort of comment that gives away the article for what it is: a complaint that a a popular video game wasn't woke. We learn more about Polygon's ideology than that of Will Wright.
The ends are open but the means are limited by the design. Want to elevate your Sims out of poverty? Well you can't really, but you can tax the poor out of their inconvenient, property-value reducing existence by setting regressive tax rates and your city will function just fine. Want to build a European style city centre which is pedestrianised, mixed-use and has controls on building style? Nope, you can't, the game wants to fill a commercial zone with towers and parking lots.
Sure, not all the design assumptions align quite so neatly with American and right wing sterotypes: suburbs are really inefficient to provide services for and Sims aren't at all bothered about religion in many versions. But they are designed limitations rather than the product of players' imagination.
Well, of course, unless a video game company is staffed by macroeconomists, you know that you cannot hope that the modules governing "people and governmental institution behavior model" will be coded to some highly accurate level of realism, right?
Their job is to make something feel enough like reality to be plausible, not model real world accuracy to 5%. Just like they may cheat on what warped room reflections are rendered in a mirror you see on the wall, they're going to come up with cheats and simplifications to things about how cities, governments, people act and behave to get it "real enough" to be believable.
And just like you have to take with a grain of salt that you cannot jump through a portal and land on the other side of a building, or that women in virtual bars are interested in going on a crime spree, or that flying a plane in GTA IV makes you capable of being a pilot in real life, you have to do the same when a game tells you your choice of a property tax has caused your residents to rebel and lower your approval rating by 8 polling points.
Maybe the problem is that some game experiences are obviously not from the real physical world, while these are just enough on the edge of believable to be dangerously convincing. Perhaps the people who want to ensure realism could try coding up an engaging game, complete with IRS forms 8960 and 8825 to get people's behavior right...
I was disappointed when I learned Cities Skylines doesn’t have mixed use buildings: first 1-2 floors commercial/markets, with the rest residential which are very common where I live. Turns out interspersing residential and commercial zoning based on demand is very effective in their model though, which I was pleased by as that reflects reality.
I did find though that the game forces the player to limit the availability of education to provide a sufficient supply of low education workers, which I didn’t find very fun.
It's been a while since I played, but I'm pretty sure if you've filled all of your higher education jobs, the sims with education will start to fill into the lower education positions. Or perhaps I just sucked at the game and always had sims who my education system didn't reach....
I was hoping they had reverse engineered SimCity and were going to actually reveal some of those formulas, or at least go into more specific examples of non-obviously perverse results. Instead there's only the one example of Magnasanti. Oh well. It's a good topic.
Something of an informal reverse engineering of SimCity 3000 existed in sc3000.com's Knowledge Neighborhood. The original site is only partially available via the wayback machine now, though fortunately the articles have been preserved albeit in a slightly less convenient format here https://community.simtropolis.com/profile/157989-catty-cb/co...
The site contained a pretty amazingly comprehensive detailing of the game's mechanics and various algorithms scattered throughout the articles, to the point where it seemed to me like it'd be possible to implement a lot of the game's engine using it.
It's been a long time since I played sim City, but I recall one could build cities with only trains. It was weird because the citizens would complain they want more roads, but at the same time would be perfectly happy. IIRC they would be happier than if you build roads, I always thought it was an odd parallel to the real world.
One of the very few things I liked about the communist system was that something similar to 20 Minute Neighborhoods was very much in place then.
There was a rule, that each neighborhood had to have access to all the services (healthcare, kindergardens, schools, "stores" etc) within a walking distance - and you can really see it in the neighborhoods built in that period.
Multi-layered SimCity ideology example: SimNuclear power plants leave a circle of radiation if they explode. Sounds fine on the surface, since they had to balance the game to actually give nuclear a downside, but it accidentally interacts with other gameplay features to imo unfairly tarnish real-world nuclear in the minds of players.
Case in point: I played a lot of SC3000, and that game doesn’t automatically replace utility buildings when they “age out” of their in-game design lifespan. As soon as any plopped utility building hits year N+1 it’s immediately destroyed and replaced with a nonfunctional ruined (“Defunct”) version of the tile. That feature is annoying enough when a bunch of your water pumping stations all blow up at once and cause water service disruptions, but it means all in-game nuclear plants will explode and spread radiation like that exactly 71 years after being plopped unless you manually bulldoze and rebuild them. Doing it earlier than 70 years is a waste of money since the new plant costs the same amount regardless, so players will always be tempted to let it go as long as possible and only replace at the last minute.
On top of that, any building (plopped or otherwise) that catches fire and is allowed to burn will also become destroyed/defunct. If your city’s total electrical usage exceeds any one power plant’s electrical capacity, that power plant will catch on fire. If it’s a nuclear plant and you don’t put the fire out, the plant is destroyed and spreads radiation.
If you have multiple nuclear plants and accidentally let one of them get to be 71 years old, it will explode and irradiate its surroundings as mentioned. The sudden drop in total electrical capacity will almost certainly overload the other plants, then they will catch fire and may also explode and irradiate their surroundings.
It’s a rather obvious flaw, to anyone who has been to any continent but North America.
Any old city of Europe, and many of South America, the Mideast and Asia, beats the generic, parking-lot dominated mid-sized American city in quality of Life.
NY, SF, and a select few others illustrate the old adage about Americans always doing the right thing, after exhausting all other options.
But the vast majority, operating with what planners seem to perceive as endless scrolling in all all directions, are dystopian.
Sim City replicates that scenario. Neither its tools, nor depth of simulation, allow for any emergent behaviour that doesn't fit the predefined mould (pun not intended, but appreciated).
It’s the grid, the strict zoning, and the coal or nuclear plant built as close to the neighboring city as possible.
If your map starts with any hilly terrain, you’ll better bulldoze it now, or you’ll regret it later. If there’s any river, it better fit the grid.
Good science is when you get out more than you put into you model. The same is true of simulations, and SimCity never did.
> I recall something about city planners using Sim City back in the day as part of their education, which horrified Will Wright since in his words (paraphrasing) “sim city is just cellular automata with some differential equations sprinkled on top.”
It was never intended to model the development of actual cities.
> Neither its tools, nor depth of simulation, allow for any emergent behaviour that doesn't fit the predefined mould [...] It’s the grid, the strict zoning, and the coal or nuclear plant built as close to the neighboring city as possible.
It's a 28-year-old game. These are technical limitations of computers of the time. You try to simulate an entire city on 1993 hardware while catering to every 2020 social justice warriors' desire.
> Algorithms are used to assess child welfare, evaluate teachers, and even “predict” where crime is likely to occur. When Yale researchers asked a bunch of cities to reveal the algorithms that controlled these systems, most of them either denied the request, gave the researchers everything but the actual formulas, or just didn’t respond at all.
And this is why at least some countries make this kind of black boxing illegal.
Ping DonHopkins who have done much development on Sim City. I remember reading his musings about testing different 'political' or ideological algorithms for city development.
Raid on Bungling Bay was a fantastic game for anyone who never played it back in the 80s. Spent a lot of hours finishing it - had just the right amount of difficulty as you progressed.
[+] [-] csande17|5 years ago|reply
> The art project Magnasanti revealed the contours of the black box when it attempted to “beat” the game that famously doesn’t have a win state [...] Artist Vincent Ocasla accomplished this feat through rigorous trial and error, eventually creating a crime-free city that maintained a stable population of 6 million sims, but only by creating a dystopian nightmare. [...]
> Magnasanti reveals the contours of the black box, showing how citizen health and happiness were ultimately unimportant. What the game considers a successful city doesn’t look at all like one we would actually want to live in.
SimCity presents an open-ended simulation with a wide range of things players can decide to optimize for. An artist once built a city optimizing for population density and low crime to the exclusion of all other factors, and this resulted in a dystopian nightmare where all the simulated citizens were unhealthy and miserable.
But by describing what the artist did as "trying to 'beat' the game", the article pins the blame for the artist's choices on the game itself. Even though SimCity clearly does not think Magnasanti is a good city -- it's constantly flashing up warning messages and graphs showing that all the citizens are miserable and unhealthy! One could just as easily have argued that SimCity's black box is hiding a progressive ideology, one that warns us of the dangers of industrialization and over-policing! (Much like how the board game Monopoly is about the dangers of capitalism.)
In essence, an artist set out to 'beat' SimCity, the artist decided what 'beating' SimCity meant, and the article tricked us into thinking that said something about SimCity.
[+] [-] sudosysgen|5 years ago|reply
It's really not a sleight of hand. The idea that it's natural for it being impossible to have a city with low crime and a high population without making everyone miserable is absolutely ideology, and it's just your own ideology that perceives this as somehow a neutral fact.
Its not progressive to say that without over-policing high crime is inevitable, or that industrialization means we have no choice but to be miserable either. Those are solidly reactionary beliefs.
[+] [-] delusional|5 years ago|reply
SimCity does have an ideology, and it does have something to say with how it has weighed it's measurements of citizen satisfaction, but the author seems to fail at capturing that ideology and instead just talks about how minmaxing is bad.
The rest of the article is interesting. There's plenty of people out there that don't even think about how the rules of the game frames the discussions you can have about it. It's just kind of a bad example.
[+] [-] thaumasiotes|5 years ago|reply
But try to zone something for mixed use.
SimCity itself tells you that certain things will happen under certain conditions, and it is generally wrong about those predictions. It's not intended to be an accurate simulation; it's intended to be amusing and to conform to people's intuitions about what they want to happen when they plan their city in a certain way. But people play it and feel they're learning something about how cities actually work.
[+] [-] antasvara|5 years ago|reply
I love that you called it a sleight of hand because that's exactly what it is; just by assuming someone could beat the game, the authors have misunderstood Sim City.
[+] [-] thu2111|5 years ago|reply
One example: "Scientific simulations, like those used to model climate change, don’t keep their formulas hidden in a black box because replicability is a big part of the scientific method."
But the black box nature of climate models was the core issue in one of the biggest disputes between sceptics and researchers of all time. It went to court and the researcher preferred to lose the suit than reveal his model (Michael Mann). The COVID model from Imperial College that justified lockdowns had to be extracted from the university via FOIA requests which were stonewalled for months. The scientist who wrote it openly claimed in interviews nobody except him understood the model equations, which were all entirely undocumented. Probably the author doesn't know these things, but it shows a rather naive misunderstanding of the true nature of science. Black box models that encode ideological beliefs are common throughout serious research.
The comment about how SimCity doesn't simulate race or gender is also rather ideological. The belief that race and gender are central to everything is both quite new, very much a view of the left and totally USA centric, but SimCity was designed to sell to international markets too. "Cities are built on history, politics, and racial bias" is the sort of comment that gives away the article for what it is: a complaint that a a popular video game wasn't woke. We learn more about Polygon's ideology than that of Will Wright.
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] notahacker|5 years ago|reply
Sure, not all the design assumptions align quite so neatly with American and right wing sterotypes: suburbs are really inefficient to provide services for and Sims aren't at all bothered about religion in many versions. But they are designed limitations rather than the product of players' imagination.
[+] [-] supernova87a|5 years ago|reply
Their job is to make something feel enough like reality to be plausible, not model real world accuracy to 5%. Just like they may cheat on what warped room reflections are rendered in a mirror you see on the wall, they're going to come up with cheats and simplifications to things about how cities, governments, people act and behave to get it "real enough" to be believable.
And just like you have to take with a grain of salt that you cannot jump through a portal and land on the other side of a building, or that women in virtual bars are interested in going on a crime spree, or that flying a plane in GTA IV makes you capable of being a pilot in real life, you have to do the same when a game tells you your choice of a property tax has caused your residents to rebel and lower your approval rating by 8 polling points.
Maybe the problem is that some game experiences are obviously not from the real physical world, while these are just enough on the edge of believable to be dangerously convincing. Perhaps the people who want to ensure realism could try coding up an engaging game, complete with IRS forms 8960 and 8825 to get people's behavior right...
[+] [-] jpttsn|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lwansbrough|5 years ago|reply
I did find though that the game forces the player to limit the availability of education to provide a sufficient supply of low education workers, which I didn’t find very fun.
[+] [-] kmeisthax|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] waiseristy|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bschne|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] comex|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 0x09|5 years ago|reply
The site contained a pretty amazingly comprehensive detailing of the game's mechanics and various algorithms scattered throughout the articles, to the point where it seemed to me like it'd be possible to implement a lot of the game's engine using it.
Some good examples of the more detailed articles:
The economy https://community.simtropolis.com/omnibus/other-games/the-ec...
Land value specifics https://community.simtropolis.com/omnibus/other-games/land-v...
Traffic and transportation specifics https://community.simtropolis.com/omnibus/other-games/traffi...
Zone development rules https://community.simtropolis.com/omnibus/other-games/zone-d...
[+] [-] infogulch|5 years ago|reply
I wonder what kind of simulation model would produce a game where the 20 Minute Neighborhood design is optimal.
[+] [-] cycomanic|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kolinko|5 years ago|reply
There was a rule, that each neighborhood had to have access to all the services (healthcare, kindergardens, schools, "stores" etc) within a walking distance - and you can really see it in the neighborhoods built in that period.
[+] [-] Lammy|5 years ago|reply
Case in point: I played a lot of SC3000, and that game doesn’t automatically replace utility buildings when they “age out” of their in-game design lifespan. As soon as any plopped utility building hits year N+1 it’s immediately destroyed and replaced with a nonfunctional ruined (“Defunct”) version of the tile. That feature is annoying enough when a bunch of your water pumping stations all blow up at once and cause water service disruptions, but it means all in-game nuclear plants will explode and spread radiation like that exactly 71 years after being plopped unless you manually bulldoze and rebuild them. Doing it earlier than 70 years is a waste of money since the new plant costs the same amount regardless, so players will always be tempted to let it go as long as possible and only replace at the last minute.
On top of that, any building (plopped or otherwise) that catches fire and is allowed to burn will also become destroyed/defunct. If your city’s total electrical usage exceeds any one power plant’s electrical capacity, that power plant will catch on fire. If it’s a nuclear plant and you don’t put the fire out, the plant is destroyed and spreads radiation.
If you have multiple nuclear plants and accidentally let one of them get to be 71 years old, it will explode and irradiate its surroundings as mentioned. The sudden drop in total electrical capacity will almost certainly overload the other plants, then they will catch fire and may also explode and irradiate their surroundings.
Maxis plz
[+] [-] IAmEveryone|5 years ago|reply
Any old city of Europe, and many of South America, the Mideast and Asia, beats the generic, parking-lot dominated mid-sized American city in quality of Life.
NY, SF, and a select few others illustrate the old adage about Americans always doing the right thing, after exhausting all other options.
But the vast majority, operating with what planners seem to perceive as endless scrolling in all all directions, are dystopian.
Sim City replicates that scenario. Neither its tools, nor depth of simulation, allow for any emergent behaviour that doesn't fit the predefined mould (pun not intended, but appreciated).
It’s the grid, the strict zoning, and the coal or nuclear plant built as close to the neighboring city as possible. If your map starts with any hilly terrain, you’ll better bulldoze it now, or you’ll regret it later. If there’s any river, it better fit the grid.
Good science is when you get out more than you put into you model. The same is true of simulations, and SimCity never did.
[+] [-] thaumasiotes|5 years ago|reply
> I recall something about city planners using Sim City back in the day as part of their education, which horrified Will Wright since in his words (paraphrasing) “sim city is just cellular automata with some differential equations sprinkled on top.”
It was never intended to model the development of actual cities.
[+] [-] hypertele-Xii|5 years ago|reply
It's a 28-year-old game. These are technical limitations of computers of the time. You try to simulate an entire city on 1993 hardware while catering to every 2020 social justice warriors' desire.
[+] [-] BlueTemplar|5 years ago|reply
And this is why at least some countries make this kind of black boxing illegal.
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] lalalandland|5 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Hopkins
[+] [-] dwd|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] steve76|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ChicagoDave|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChicagoDave|5 years ago|reply