First, I had a similar feeling coming back to SimCity 4. Even a just a few years ago, I tried to optimize for maximum density and size - kinda like NYC where I lived.
Now I don't find that interesting and much more interested to sustain a leafy suburb like one I've chosen for my kids.
Second, it's not just games. In my NYC days I was a "transit and bike lanes" guy all the way. Now with kids, I understand why "Americans love their cars" - it switched form a derogatory statement to one of understanding. There's a reason that "ban the cars" posters never mention a partner or children in their bios.
There's less "objective good" or "objective bad" in these matters than I used to think. It's more about who you optimize for.
> Now with kids, I understand why "Americans love their cars" - it switched form a derogatory statement to one of understanding. There's a reason that "ban the cars" posters never mention a partner or children in their bios.
This seems very different from the large anti-car movement in the Netherlands in the 1970s (which eventually led to massive investments in bike infrastructure and car restrictions in the cities).
There was significant parent involvement, touting the memorable slogan "Stop de Kindermoord" ("Stop the Child Murder").
> Second, it's not just games. In my NYC days I was a "transit and bike lanes" guy all the way. Now with kids, I understand why "Americans love their cars" - it switched form a derogatory statement to one of understanding. There's a reason that "ban the cars" posters never mention a partner or children in their bios.
Buy a bakfiet cargo bike, there's models that can fit five kids under 7. Mine fits three.
Kids like them better and you get exercise. For the first time in my life I have a BMI of around 20 without having to waste time at the gym, the drop off, pick up, shopping, and work commute add up to an hour and a half of medium intensity cardio.
Every other parent my age in the neighborhood looks five years away from a heart attack. I'm fitter than I was in my 20s.
>There's less "objective good" or "objective bad" in these matters than I used to think. It's more about who you optimize for.
There are over 1,000 children killed in the US annually by cars. This is after we restrain them like Hannibal Lecter while in cars and don't let them out of our houses so they don't get run over.
That's before we talk about the child obesity epidemic, social media abuse, and on and on.
If given the choice between keeping cars or letting polio loose on the land you'd be hard pressed to figure out which will kill and disable more kids.
Spend 1 month with your kids in a place where cars are actually not needed, only then you can actually understand what you are denying your kids.
And if you want to know right away, think about who can drive your car, as supposed being able to walk or ride somewhere. You're limiting their own personal freedom by forcing them to have you always needed to go somewhere.
"Americans love their cars" isn't so much about the cars as it is about the lack of good alternatives. Other countries have great public transportation and good bike lanes and all that... in addition to car ownership. So people can get the best of both worlds. It's only a zero sum game if you want it to be one.
>Now with kids, I understand why "Americans love their cars"
In other words: I was okay with demanding change when it didn't inconvenience me, but now that I get to benefit from economic policy that heavily subsidize my lifestyle I rather keep the status quo.
The sad thing is that you _CAN_ have a leafy suburb without the roar of internal combustion and 8 lane stroads everywhere. Planners in the US just refuse to build them.
This morning the four of us biked to the grocery store (we loaded the groceries in the bakfiets). The kids bike to their daycare. We bike to the train when we feel like a day out.
I can't fathom trying to raise kids somewhere we need to use a car to do anything.
My biggest fear about cars is that one might kill my kid. This leads to impossing all sorts of play and travel restrictions on her that I wouldn't have to if there were fewer cars and more bikes. (Bikes which kids can ride independently to their friends' houses from a single-digit age, by the way, which I would allow her to do if she weren't sharing the streets with cars.)
Maybe the problem is that the leafy suburb you moved to is car-dependent? It doesn't have to be built that way, that's a design choice. It's possible to build a low density suburb that kids can bike through safely, for example: https://youtu.be/r-TuGAHR78w
> There's a reason that "ban the cars" posters never mention a partner or children in their bios.
To the extent that "ban cars" even exists as a real political archetype rather than a meme, this is just patently not true. At least one of the two co-hosts of The War on Cars (again, a title which is intentionally tongue-in-cheek) has a preteen son.
But more importantly: car-dependent suburbs are an absolutely miserable place to grow up as a child if you're not wealthy enough to have one non-working parent and/or a nanny (or both). Being dependent on someone else to enable your entire social life until you turn 16 is a torturous enough experience that I'm not surprised that the first generation to have universal access to social media as teenagers has become the first generation to use social media to organize a teenage-driven movement for public transit.
FWIW, I’m not in NYC, but I’m in general a “ban the cars” type and have a wife and kid. We’re intentionally raising the kid in the city because we believe it’s a richer cultural environment than suburbs, and also because we both grew up in cities in our respective countries.
> Now with kids, I understand why "Americans love their cars" - it switched form a derogatory statement to one of understanding. There's a reason that "ban the cars" posters never mention a partner or children in their bios.
And I'm not sure how many folks are about banning cars (completely), as opposed to designing things so that (two) cars go from being mandatory to optional.
This is condescending and wildly inaccurate. My children are exactly the reason we live car-free and chose a town where you can bike safely - anything less is effectively condemning them to live in an outdoor prison until you can drive.
But, this is why we live in the Netherlands. If all you've seen is the US I can see how you might not understand that not being car-dependent is actually better for kids.
Actually, even for families with kids, the safer option is still bikes and low-car environments. Fewer cars means less air pollution, less noise, and less sedentary behavior for both kids and adults.
The data we have shows that the presence of cars is the main source of risk on the street, not the act of biking itself. Neighborhoods that design around walking and biking tend to have fewer serious accidents, not more.
If we're talking about optimizing for kids, then banning individual car use in residential neighborhoods would be the ideal. I know it’s not politically feasible in most of the US right now, but it’s worth keeping in mind that cars are the danger.
I live in a very walkable small town with lots of young families also biking and walking with their young children, as I am, and couldn’t disagree with you more about cars. It’s so nice to walk to the market instead of loading and unloading a car seat, to have the option of walking or taking a short bus ride to school, to walk to parks and playgrounds. I had the opposite reaction you did when I actually lived in a place that was kinda similar to what Europeans describe.
Just also as a note, you can create suburbs pretty easily where bikes use paths or whatever. I live in a suburb where I can ride 15 kms to work without riding on roads. The subsidy for bikes would actually be really low.
You can get quite a bit of advancements by having “one side” try to optimize for the other - if done honestly, you can get a “best of both worlds” as they learn what the others want (and need).
Interesting. To provide a different experience, I live in NYC with kids and I find it great here. Daycare/Kindergarten is at most 4 blocks away, grocery stores are less than a block away, it takes me 10 minutes to get to the office on the train (1/2/3). I still bike to the office often. If we need a car there is a rental less than a block away, but in practice we rent maybe once a year. Today there was an open street on Columbus Ave and it was lovely to meet co-workers with their kids and let them play there. To be fair, I wasn't born here even if I'm a citizen, so I guess I wouldn't be considered "American".
It’s funny because as a parent there’s nothing I want less than living somewhere I have to drive everywhere. I can walk 5 minutes to the nearest park, take a bus or a tram to be in a different one in 10 minutes, and I can’t fathom having to take our car for that kind of daily activity.
I'd love if more people on HN could read your post. As someone who's spent more than half of his life overseas in an ultra high density city, I wouldn't trade my quiet American suburb by a glamorous city with perfect public transportation anywhere in the world. It was great when I was single and cared about meeting girls and partying, but no more.
> There's a reason that "ban the cars" posters never mention a partner or children in their bios.
Seems very rare that people describe their families in here so I wouldn’t go to that conclusion. I didn’t even know this page had a “bio” section. Anyway, seems like a strawman to me.
I've lived in NYC without a car for the last decade, and I don't have kids, and even granting that, I still have grown to understand why Americans love cars.
Getting groceries is a particular pain in the ass; I either need to go to the (very limited) grocery selections in my neighborhood with a cart, or lug the cart up and down the stairs of the subway, or be ok with only taking as much as I'm able carry with my hands in a few bags. I could get delivery, and I do that fairly often, but there are things that I prefer to get in person, like fruits or vegetables.
There's also just large things you cannot realistically take on a train, like large sheets of plywood at Home Depot. Again, you can of course get this stuff delivered, but then you run the risk of them sending you the worst, most warped piece of wood available, which has happened to me multiple times.
I've grown to sympathize with most Americans as a result.
> Now with kids, I understand why "Americans love their cars" - it switched form a derogatory statement to one of understanding. There's a reason that "ban the cars" posters never mention a partner or children in their bios.
That's because the infrastructure doesn't exist in lots of the US, either it never existed or it got ripped out during the car boom phase.
Here in a suburb of Munich (Germany), almost everything one needs in life - all four large supermarket chains, a veterinarian, a hardware store, daycare and school for children - is walkable in less than half an hour, or 5-10 minutes with a bike.
Our city replaced some train tracks with high quality separated bike streets (no cars allowed, obviously). Biking five kilometers each way with only three street crossings is perfectly doable, even with small children on their own bikes.
There's another phase we forget about. If I could choose, I'd like to grow up in a giant forest arcology and go hang out with my friends like it's a giant vertical mall with lots of places to go get lost.
When I finally got access to grocery delivery to my door, I could see how it all will work. Carrying things for one person is fine. It's carrying groceries for a household for a week where things break down. Even putting all that on an elevator would be really unwieldy compared to unloading from the garage.
Self-driving and the evolution of early-life education will play a big role in simplifying life without the parents needing to ferry the kids around five days a week.
I live in Tokyo and have kids. Both cycling and transit are essential to most parents lives here. It is not that these are incompatible with family life, it’s that as it is implemented and maintained in the USA (read: badly), it is incompatible.
An example that’s minor for young singles but major for parents: train stations here pretty much all have elevators and they almost always are working. This alone changes the game.
Nope. Just more selfish choices. Resources are finite. The further we can move away from cars, THE better for kids. Less risk of them being run over by a 7 foot tall Dodge Ram, more chances for independence because actually going places doesn't require a car.
Coming from Spain it was always a difficult game to see as a simulation: What do you mean, commercial zones? What in the world it this low density residential? It was basically impossible to try to make a city like the one I lived in.
Seeing American suburbia, decades later, explained everything.
Unfortunately, the transport model in SC2K is broken, and by that, you have to design your transport network to work for the game, rather than design it as you would wish to do so.
Each tile emits "journeys", which travel down transport routes connected to the tile, with a view to finding other types of tile (residential needs to find industrial and commercial, for example, but commercial IIRC needs to find only industrial). When a journey meets a junction, it randomly chooses one of the exits. The choice is not directed toward a suitable tile.
So if you make say a block of road tiles, in the shape of a square, say 4x4, any journey entering that tile usually times out (travels too far) before by chance managing to emerge from all the junctions.
As such, for example, hub-and-spoke subway systems basically do not work.
You basically need to design the transport network to specifically, and without junctions, go from a set of source tiles of a given type, to the necessary destination tiles, and that's not how real cities look, nor what you would naturally do.
I liked SC2K a lot, but in the end I had to give up on it, because of the transport system; the game couldn't be played realistically. I've not yet tried SC3K, and I don't know how transport is modeled there - hopefully better.
Will Wright gave postmortems for SimEarth, SimAnt, and SimCity 2000, and previewed an extremely early pre-release prototype version of Dollhouse (which eventually became The Sims). SimAnt was too simple, SimEarth was too complex, SimCity 2000 was just right, and Dollhouse (The Sims) was what he was working on next.
Will Wright on Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games (1996) (2023 Video Update)
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.
I have the opposite takeaway. The city should be mutable. A subway line should be buildable within one political term. The property tax rate should rise or fall within a time frame that would incentivize people to vote with their feet. A lot of the author’s learnings are actually indicators of 21st century American stagnancy. Real life should be more like Sim City.
> A subway line should be buildable within one political term.
That used to be the case maybe 50 years ago, when we had the first network built in Munich.
The problem is, since then a loooooot of stuff was built underground. Not just more and more tunnels, but also so many subterranean lines for power, POTS, internet... and a lot of what was built 50 years ago was built by literally ripping open a street, excavating tunnel space, building a roof of concrete and backfilling everything with soil. You simply can do this exactly once and you need a wide enough street to do this. Once all these "cheap and easy" routes are built over, it becomes a multi-billion-dollar project as you have to make sure you don't endanger the buildings on top - in Cologne, that cost the lives of two people and destroyed a good portion of the City Archives [1].
> The property tax rate should rise or fall within a time frame that would incentivize people to vote with their feet.
People should not be forced to move, at all. Incentivizing movement, okay, but forcing people around like we do now (mostly, by not having any kind of modern jobs in rural areas) has a lot of nasty side effects - not everyone can move, so you get resentment building up against those that did move (eventually culminating in the "these librul cities turn our kids gay!!!" bullshit and, subsequently, the massive urban-rural political disconnect), and a lot of old people in rural areas end up having no one to take care of them in old(er) age, and young people in urban areas don't have kids because they don't have family to support them in raising said children.
To me, the clunky and annoying UI of Sim City 2000 is part of the charm of it.
Is it dated? Yep, but it's intuitive enough for nine-year-old tombert to have figured it out ok, and to me part of the fun is trying to use the UI quickly enough to put out fires and the like.
It could just rose-tinted glasses on my end, very likely honestly, but I still find the entire experience to be pretty fun. I liked Sim City 3000 and Sim City 4, and they are arguably better games, but for me Sim City 2000 hit the right balance of "easy" and "complicated" that I find myself most drawn to. I will load up Sim City 2000 about once a year off of my GOG purchase, and still thoroughly enjoy it, and find myself wasting way more hours than I budgeted for it.
I remember being terribly confused by the lack of options for a good while, before somehow finally discovering that some buttons you had to hold for more options.
Discoverability aside, it made the UI nicely compact while being easy enough to access, so the city could fill most of the screen instead.
> I find it much harder to callously play with the lives of my virtual citizens.
I am considering the morality of future mods, where the Sim City masses, Frog in Frogger, and characters like Ulfric Stormcloak and Paarthurnax in Skyrim, are replaced with individual persistent self-aware world-aware in-game reinforcement models. Entirely replacing game-designed behaviors (programmed reflex, caricature, or intricate) with spontaneous situation processing, needs and decisions.
Strange that this could credibly happen this decade.
Science fiction has long considered conundrums around robot rights. But the crux of the moral issues will be relevant regardless whether self-aware models have physical/3D or digital/abstract environments.
I think language is not a good prime modality for self-aware assistants. By being trained to deeply mimic us, they (already, but not yet problematically) absorb views on their identity and survival that are not at all compatible with what we will do with them.
Beating SimCity 2000 was one of my favorite gaming moments in my life.
If you haven't seen it and think it's weird to beat a city game; if you fill the entire board with Arcologies, they all become rockets and take off into space. What a thrilling science-fictional way to end the experience. Loved it.
It speaks to the quality of the SimCity games that they offer something for all ages. I also changed my perspective on a few violent scenes in games when I had a child, I could no longer stomach scenes such as No Russian (iykyk), which I had no problem at all as a teen.
yeh when playing cities skyline i am always traffic managing it seems to be my biggest job to always have 0 traffic in my cities im guessing it boils down to the fact i hate traffic
... How well does that work? Asking because my SC3K runs always ended up being boring cases of "yes, we sell landfill space to the surrounding 4 cities, and if people want education they're going to have to go to a library and learn to read themselves, and we're obviously too broke to improve things."
"When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things."
But, being humans, the "I put away" is always a bit aspirational. And part of being older and wiser (or at least aspiring to the latter) is more maturely reflecting upon your own younger years.
[+] [-] xyzelement|5 months ago|reply
Now I don't find that interesting and much more interested to sustain a leafy suburb like one I've chosen for my kids.
Second, it's not just games. In my NYC days I was a "transit and bike lanes" guy all the way. Now with kids, I understand why "Americans love their cars" - it switched form a derogatory statement to one of understanding. There's a reason that "ban the cars" posters never mention a partner or children in their bios.
There's less "objective good" or "objective bad" in these matters than I used to think. It's more about who you optimize for.
[+] [-] em500|5 months ago|reply
This seems very different from the large anti-car movement in the Netherlands in the 1970s (which eventually led to massive investments in bike infrastructure and car restrictions in the cities).
There was significant parent involvement, touting the memorable slogan "Stop de Kindermoord" ("Stop the Child Murder").
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_transport_in_the_Netherla...
[+] [-] noosphr|5 months ago|reply
Buy a bakfiet cargo bike, there's models that can fit five kids under 7. Mine fits three.
Kids like them better and you get exercise. For the first time in my life I have a BMI of around 20 without having to waste time at the gym, the drop off, pick up, shopping, and work commute add up to an hour and a half of medium intensity cardio.
Every other parent my age in the neighborhood looks five years away from a heart attack. I'm fitter than I was in my 20s.
>There's less "objective good" or "objective bad" in these matters than I used to think. It's more about who you optimize for.
There are over 1,000 children killed in the US annually by cars. This is after we restrain them like Hannibal Lecter while in cars and don't let them out of our houses so they don't get run over.
That's before we talk about the child obesity epidemic, social media abuse, and on and on.
If given the choice between keeping cars or letting polio loose on the land you'd be hard pressed to figure out which will kill and disable more kids.
[+] [-] xandrius|5 months ago|reply
And if you want to know right away, think about who can drive your car, as supposed being able to walk or ride somewhere. You're limiting their own personal freedom by forcing them to have you always needed to go somewhere.
[+] [-] dataflow|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] rglullis|5 months ago|reply
>Now with kids, I understand why "Americans love their cars"
In other words: I was okay with demanding change when it didn't inconvenience me, but now that I get to benefit from economic policy that heavily subsidize my lifestyle I rather keep the status quo.
[+] [-] CalRobert|5 months ago|reply
We live in a lovely leafy suburb completely car free. But it's this one - https://youtu.be/r-TuGAHR78w
This morning the four of us biked to the grocery store (we loaded the groceries in the bakfiets). The kids bike to their daycare. We bike to the train when we feel like a day out.
I can't fathom trying to raise kids somewhere we need to use a car to do anything.
[+] [-] mitthrowaway2|5 months ago|reply
Maybe the problem is that the leafy suburb you moved to is car-dependent? It doesn't have to be built that way, that's a design choice. It's possible to build a low density suburb that kids can bike through safely, for example: https://youtu.be/r-TuGAHR78w
[+] [-] JambalayaJimbo|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] chimeracoder|5 months ago|reply
To the extent that "ban cars" even exists as a real political archetype rather than a meme, this is just patently not true. At least one of the two co-hosts of The War on Cars (again, a title which is intentionally tongue-in-cheek) has a preteen son.
But more importantly: car-dependent suburbs are an absolutely miserable place to grow up as a child if you're not wealthy enough to have one non-working parent and/or a nanny (or both). Being dependent on someone else to enable your entire social life until you turn 16 is a torturous enough experience that I'm not surprised that the first generation to have universal access to social media as teenagers has become the first generation to use social media to organize a teenage-driven movement for public transit.
[+] [-] cblum|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] throw0101a|5 months ago|reply
Maddy Novich, https://www.instagram.com/cargobikemomma/, for one, may disagree with you. Interviews:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PoKcQRlDGs
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDhJt26dQTs
And I'm not sure how many folks are about banning cars (completely), as opposed to designing things so that (two) cars go from being mandatory to optional.
[+] [-] CalRobert|5 months ago|reply
But, this is why we live in the Netherlands. If all you've seen is the US I can see how you might not understand that not being car-dependent is actually better for kids.
[+] [-] darkamaul|5 months ago|reply
The data we have shows that the presence of cars is the main source of risk on the street, not the act of biking itself. Neighborhoods that design around walking and biking tend to have fewer serious accidents, not more.
If we're talking about optimizing for kids, then banning individual car use in residential neighborhoods would be the ideal. I know it’s not politically feasible in most of the US right now, but it’s worth keeping in mind that cars are the danger.
[+] [-] mrgoldenbrown|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] mapotofu|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] sien|5 months ago|reply
The subsidy per passenger mile in the US is :
0.019 for road transport, 0.021 for air transport, 0.710 for Amtrak and 2.300 for transit.
From : https://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=22592
Just also as a note, you can create suburbs pretty easily where bikes use paths or whatever. I live in a suburb where I can ride 15 kms to work without riding on roads. The subsidy for bikes would actually be really low.
[+] [-] bombcar|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] casta|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] crooked-v|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] jjmarr|5 months ago|reply
Meanwhile my friends in the suburbs had to walk 30 minutes to get Starbucks. And it was a gruelling march without sidewalks or tree cover.
[+] [-] thatfrenchguy|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] loglog|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] glimshe|5 months ago|reply
To each their own, right?
[+] [-] barbazoo|5 months ago|reply
Seems very rare that people describe their families in here so I wouldn’t go to that conclusion. I didn’t even know this page had a “bio” section. Anyway, seems like a strawman to me.
[+] [-] tombert|5 months ago|reply
Getting groceries is a particular pain in the ass; I either need to go to the (very limited) grocery selections in my neighborhood with a cart, or lug the cart up and down the stairs of the subway, or be ok with only taking as much as I'm able carry with my hands in a few bags. I could get delivery, and I do that fairly often, but there are things that I prefer to get in person, like fruits or vegetables.
There's also just large things you cannot realistically take on a train, like large sheets of plywood at Home Depot. Again, you can of course get this stuff delivered, but then you run the risk of them sending you the worst, most warped piece of wood available, which has happened to me multiple times.
I've grown to sympathize with most Americans as a result.
[+] [-] thfuran|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] mschuster91|5 months ago|reply
That's because the infrastructure doesn't exist in lots of the US, either it never existed or it got ripped out during the car boom phase.
Here in a suburb of Munich (Germany), almost everything one needs in life - all four large supermarket chains, a veterinarian, a hardware store, daycare and school for children - is walkable in less than half an hour, or 5-10 minutes with a bike.
[+] [-] tstenner|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] positron26|5 months ago|reply
When I finally got access to grocery delivery to my door, I could see how it all will work. Carrying things for one person is fine. It's carrying groceries for a household for a week where things break down. Even putting all that on an elevator would be really unwieldy compared to unloading from the garage.
Self-driving and the evolution of early-life education will play a big role in simplifying life without the parents needing to ferry the kids around five days a week.
[+] [-] presentation|5 months ago|reply
An example that’s minor for young singles but major for parents: train stations here pretty much all have elevators and they almost always are working. This alone changes the game.
[+] [-] goosedragons|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] hibikir|5 months ago|reply
Seeing American suburbia, decades later, explained everything.
[+] [-] casenmgreen|5 months ago|reply
Each tile emits "journeys", which travel down transport routes connected to the tile, with a view to finding other types of tile (residential needs to find industrial and commercial, for example, but commercial IIRC needs to find only industrial). When a journey meets a junction, it randomly chooses one of the exits. The choice is not directed toward a suitable tile.
So if you make say a block of road tiles, in the shape of a square, say 4x4, any journey entering that tile usually times out (travels too far) before by chance managing to emerge from all the junctions.
As such, for example, hub-and-spoke subway systems basically do not work.
You basically need to design the transport network to specifically, and without junctions, go from a set of source tiles of a given type, to the necessary destination tiles, and that's not how real cities look, nor what you would naturally do.
I liked SC2K a lot, but in the end I had to give up on it, because of the transport system; the game couldn't be played realistically. I've not yet tried SC3K, and I don't know how transport is modeled there - hopefully better.
[+] [-] DonHopkins|5 months ago|reply
Will Wright on Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games (1996) (2023 Video Update)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34573406
https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-user-interfaces-to-s...
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.
[+] [-] yonran|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] mschuster91|5 months ago|reply
That used to be the case maybe 50 years ago, when we had the first network built in Munich.
The problem is, since then a loooooot of stuff was built underground. Not just more and more tunnels, but also so many subterranean lines for power, POTS, internet... and a lot of what was built 50 years ago was built by literally ripping open a street, excavating tunnel space, building a roof of concrete and backfilling everything with soil. You simply can do this exactly once and you need a wide enough street to do this. Once all these "cheap and easy" routes are built over, it becomes a multi-billion-dollar project as you have to make sure you don't endanger the buildings on top - in Cologne, that cost the lives of two people and destroyed a good portion of the City Archives [1].
> The property tax rate should rise or fall within a time frame that would incentivize people to vote with their feet.
People should not be forced to move, at all. Incentivizing movement, okay, but forcing people around like we do now (mostly, by not having any kind of modern jobs in rural areas) has a lot of nasty side effects - not everyone can move, so you get resentment building up against those that did move (eventually culminating in the "these librul cities turn our kids gay!!!" bullshit and, subsequently, the massive urban-rural political disconnect), and a lot of old people in rural areas end up having no one to take care of them in old(er) age, and young people in urban areas don't have kids because they don't have family to support them in raising said children.
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historisches_Archiv_der_Stadt_...
[+] [-] tombert|5 months ago|reply
Is it dated? Yep, but it's intuitive enough for nine-year-old tombert to have figured it out ok, and to me part of the fun is trying to use the UI quickly enough to put out fires and the like.
It could just rose-tinted glasses on my end, very likely honestly, but I still find the entire experience to be pretty fun. I liked Sim City 3000 and Sim City 4, and they are arguably better games, but for me Sim City 2000 hit the right balance of "easy" and "complicated" that I find myself most drawn to. I will load up Sim City 2000 about once a year off of my GOG purchase, and still thoroughly enjoy it, and find myself wasting way more hours than I budgeted for it.
[+] [-] Modified3019|5 months ago|reply
Discoverability aside, it made the UI nicely compact while being easy enough to access, so the city could fill most of the screen instead.
[+] [-] Nevermark|5 months ago|reply
I am considering the morality of future mods, where the Sim City masses, Frog in Frogger, and characters like Ulfric Stormcloak and Paarthurnax in Skyrim, are replaced with individual persistent self-aware world-aware in-game reinforcement models. Entirely replacing game-designed behaviors (programmed reflex, caricature, or intricate) with spontaneous situation processing, needs and decisions.
Strange that this could credibly happen this decade.
Science fiction has long considered conundrums around robot rights. But the crux of the moral issues will be relevant regardless whether self-aware models have physical/3D or digital/abstract environments.
I think language is not a good prime modality for self-aware assistants. By being trained to deeply mimic us, they (already, but not yet problematically) absorb views on their identity and survival that are not at all compatible with what we will do with them.
[+] [-] MattGrommes|5 months ago|reply
If you haven't seen it and think it's weird to beat a city game; if you fill the entire board with Arcologies, they all become rockets and take off into space. What a thrilling science-fictional way to end the experience. Loved it.
[+] [-] ermir|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] RodgerTheGreat|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Ozzie_osman|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] FugeDaws|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] card_zero|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] NortySpock|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] ionwake|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] bell-cot|5 months ago|reply
But, being humans, the "I put away" is always a bit aspirational. And part of being older and wiser (or at least aspiring to the latter) is more maturely reflecting upon your own younger years.
[+] [-] curtisszmania|5 months ago|reply
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