chaimgingold

Yes, it's great!

I forgot to answer your first two questions:

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

A lot; it all goes together.

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

Yes. And not just games, but computer history and simulation practices (like system dynamics, cellular automata, artificial life) that influenced SimCity and shaped its reception.

Thanks for sharing this!

Feels like there should be an xkcd about this. I asked Claude to write one, but it wasn't very funny. Actually, Claude agrees with you that the energy used for training AIs is mere pocket change compared to climate simulations. (Can I trust Claude? Seems far from disinterested.)

Thank you. Hmm, a big existential question and I haven't had any coffee yet. There is certainly anxiety in the uncertainty. (Was spending over ten years researching and writing this book––intermixed with other things--a good use of time?) But I think I'd be unhappy with something safe. It's an ongoing surprise to me that my career continues to work, but I do occasionally wonder if this is a wise course. My parallel counterfactual selves are doing really different things, but I think I like the real one more. (Though they probably feel the same way.)

Should be! ROMchip posts recordings on their YouTube channel afterwards: https://www.youtube.com/@ROMchipJournal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LOL. This must be the reason the Chicago Manual of Style indicates hyphens here. And it must also be the reason an MIT Press copyeditor reviewed the whole manuscript very carefully. (Which then triggered some legalistic arguments from me citing chapter and verse of said stye manual.)

Definitely not a videogame. I wouldn't want the responsibility of allocating that quantity of energy and resources. I think ChatGPT and its brethren are fascinating, amazing, and useful, but your question makes me think probably nobody should have that compute power. Maybe it's hubris to think one could responsibly use it. (Now I feel uncool for failing to have fun with your question.)

You're welcome, and thank you!

I agree! There's a lot of talented people out there. Hopefully someone will make something like that one day.

This is fascinating! (All simulation requires abstraction.)

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

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

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

Your film has some beautiful stuff in it!

I definitely feel like I've made a new internet friend. :D

That’s a fascinating idea! One of the surprising things I learned while researching this book was that Maxis was actually trying to do that at one point, and in fact more. They had an initiative called SimWorld that would allow all their sim games to link together and even be open to third party development. This very ambitious OS-like architecture meant that The Sims really was seen as zooming into SimCity, and in fact early prototypes of what became The Sims let you do just that. And SimCopter did let you open SC2k save files and fly through them. While SimWorld didn’t take off it seems that without it we wouldn’t have The Sims, which introduced an innovative object-oriented architecture that underwrote its cutting-edge AI, UI, and business model (modular expansion packs).

Some fun primary sources:

[1] Will Wright interview for SimCity 2000 CDROM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcgV4YolDkg

[2] Game Developer magazine piece on SimWorld and early The Sims: https://ubm-twvideo01.s3.amazonaws.com/o1/vault/GD_Mag_Archi... (An old Game Developer magazine piece)

[3] Will Wright shows a very early The Sims demo at Terry Winograd’s Stanford seminar: https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/yj113jt5999

Thank you!

Not to be defensive, but I want to say more about this because I think it's a fascinating subject with Spore in particular and games, software, and technology generally. My take is that Will Wright had a very exciting vision but visions are just that: not real. They are inherently nebulous and everyone on the team (and many many people beyond it) had their own idea on what Spore would be or turn into. We converged on something and negotiated with one another and many constraints, social and technical, and arrived at something. It didn't help that part of the game's marketing appeal was a bit Rorschach-y in the first place and capitalized on the exciting but vague promise of Will Wright (Sim-) + Universe (-Everything).

LOL. Thanks!

I think a lot of videogaming ideas took off after Spore that were very likely influenced by it. Shades of Jodorowsky's Dune? (But I think Spore was actually more successful than many give it credit for, which has been pointed out to me many times. 191m+ creations and counting on Sporepedia.)

Generative AI certainly opens up new possibilities! It's analogous to GPUs (enabled real-time 3D) which opened new possibilities and audiences for videogames. I also think that the fundamental magic of creative tools doesn't actually need fancy tech at all.

Honestly, I'm not much of a building sim player these day! I love videogames but they're so complicated and take so much time, right? Seems like City Skylines is the heir, right? Or maybe it's Minecraft and Tiny Glade? I think that SimCity and Maxis can be seen as helping establish the whole world of open-ended creative sandbox games that have since proven to be dominant. A big takeaway from this book for me, looking at the history of videogames and computing, is that the medium of videogames is really about creativity and making games. (Look at the top-selling games of all time.)

Thank you!!! (He really did make that typo and REALLY wanted to be inside my laptop screen and tap the keys just like me and was being super aggressive.)

Hi Ryan!! I got a PhD, did some indie game stuff, made some babies (with some help, mainly from my wife), design consulting. You can see more of my projects here: https://chaim.io, like some tangible/mixed reality computing (done while I was working at a research lab with Bret Victor), and Earth: A Primer, a science book made of simulation toys.

The main thing I did was design the Editors (like the Creature Creator), but I initially joined as an intern in 2001 and did some really fun divergent prototypes for Will Wright while the project was in a nascent state, and a bunch of other stuff during development.

There's a whole book to be written about Spore (but I'm done writing books for now), but the simple answer is that the difference between "hoping for" and "final" product encompasses a lot of what makes software and game development (or really any creative project for that matter) interesting. Especially when multiple people are involved. And that is part of what sparked this project, which took over a decade to research and write.

(Also, many years ago I wrote a chapter for another MIT Press book about some early Spore history. It's reproduced on this deprecated blog: http://www.levitylab.com/blog/2011/02/brief-history-of-spore...)

Hi! I wrote this book. Ask me anything. I also was a designer on Spore. I'm also trying to feed my 8 month old lunch and he is very excited to asn``wer anything too.

PC Gamer just ran a piece on some of the Nintendo history in there. Includes a fun old pic of Will Wright, Shigeru Miyamoto, and Jeff Braun.

https://www.pcgamer.com/games/sim/in-1989-a-nintendo-bigwig-...

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

Thanks, Don! Please scan that!

She recently found a shrink wrapped copy of a teacher guide she coauthored with Michael Bremer and opened it (!) because we disagreed about what was in there, LOL. It's destined now for her UCLA archive. Apparently she also wrote guides for many other Maxis titles but not all saw the light of day. Or maybe they did but need to be recovered.

Building SimCity only talks about pre-EA SimCity. So there's SimCity, SimCity 2000, and SimCity for SNES, but not much else—aside from how SimCity 3000 was a train wreck that helped destroy Maxis.

Hi! The focus is SimCity, but once the book gets into Maxis I get into SimEarth, SimAnt, SimLife, and The Sims. They aren't treated in as much detail, but they are here because they are crucial for understanding the overall arc of Maxis, SimCity's consequences, and Will Wright's career.

You can't understand Maxis without understanding the relationship they had with the world beyond videogames. Consider SimEarth. Stewart Brand (should need no intro; Kevin Kelly introduced them—he and Wright bonded over their love of social insects) introduced Wright to James Lovelock (co-inventor of Gaia hypothesis), who happily collaborated, and Maxis donated money to Lovelock's nonprofit. And Brand's GBN consultancy was interested in using SimEarth for their work. There's more context to all this I get into, but that's the super short version.

I'm still stunned by how much Brand thinks I got all this right (and how much he loves the book): "Of course I checked the few moments where I intersected with the events in the story. They are tone-perfect, detail-perfect, and context-perfect. More so than I've ever seen before." See his review on X:

https://x.com/stewartbrand/status/1800941614287946003

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

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