SimCity Player Spends 3 years on optimal city design
youtube.com
youtube.com
It's interesting to see the way "perfectionist" players approach their games. The details of the optimization are often surprising. Even the specific choice of factors to optimize for are interesting. In SimCity, one player shoots for maximum population; another might go for the quickest time to reach a particular population level; yet another might seek to maximize industrial production. I like seeing how they work within the rules to reach those different goals.
It's interesting, that the kind of people, that see this as wasted time, because they think this isn't changing the world, that it isn't ethical to use your own time this way, that these people will always criticize themself and others regardless what they do, because there's always something more meaningful to do.
At the end these people won't change anything in the world, but just bring harm to themself and others.
Logan's Run or Soylent Green?
What I found totally amazing wasn't spending years trying to optimize solutions to random problems others have created, but how this guy made a super-awesome video explaining how he did it. Very impressive. Loved the music and the camera movements. This guy should start charging to do demo videos for software products.
You can share your digital artefacts with people all over the world. Isn't that much better by your metric than a model railroad?
The problem with spending so much time optimizing an artificial mathematical model (game) is that less work and time is required to create the model than to optimize it. Therefore (to me), it's the losers than spend time working on other people's problems that never move up to the next level: being creative. It's just a mechanical process. (and yes, I'm aware that some creativity is involved in the optimization)
My value system is in creating something for other people. So creativity and value to others, are the metric I use when allocating my time. I guess if such a electronic work could benefit people -- by making them happy for a bit or providing them with information they needed or something, it would be worthwhile. I mean heck, under my value system you can stretch a lot of things to make them work. The question (for me) is whether or not those 3 years could have been better spent.
Yes, at the end it's all gone anyway. That doesn't mean piss away your life. If anything, it means you only have a certain amount of time to do things you find valuable.
My opinion only. To each his own.
Lucy: I'm intrigued by this view you have on the purpose of life, Charlie Brown. You say we're put on this earth to make others happy? ... What are the others put here for?
I can see where you are coming from. But I do not entirely share your view. E.g. inventing the game of Go is much simpler than mastering it. But I would not call go players losers.
> My value system is in creating something for other people. So creativity and value to others, are the metric I use when allocating my time.
Why make an exception? Just use: "My value system is in creating something for people." You are worthwhile, too.
What did Steve Martin say once? He didn't have a lot of philosophy in college, just enough to screw him up for the rest of his life. :)
I don't seek validation in others -- but I do seek validation in my own assurance that I am creating something that will prove of value to others. By that metric, I question if I would be able to be so certain about that if I had spent those 3 years doing what he did.
Game-playing, drinking, singing, hiking, flying, etc are all wonderful activities -- but they are wonderful because they help me optimize the other things I am doing. When I start focusing on the pleasure they give me in themselves, I lose track of the larger goal. Perhaps even forgetting I have a larger goal. Not a good thing.
It's the pure science vs. engineering chestnut, that old favourite of science fiction: the pursuit of understanding for its own sake vs. making something useful (the trope has abstract knowledge as crucial in the end). But in reality, one isn't better than the other, both are needed, and it is, as you say, a matter of personal value.
Here's a related comment (you might like the cartoon too): http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/bw3le/caveman_science_...
Personally, I think SC4 teaches people a bad lesson - that cars are an absolute necessity to urban planning.
How do you expect to even build the place without a road? Much less deliver furniture and other things?
It wasn't meant to be snarky.
A couple of square blocks? But still I'm sure there are roads in between the buildings. And you have to transport the couch in a car or truck at least to the general area don't you?
No one builds buildings that have no road access whatsoever, and the only travel is via subway or walking.
This is impossible in SC4, since every single building must be directly adjacent to a road.
Also, because of the city size limit increases between SC3000 and SC4, the pathfinding algorithm used for transit calculations is really barebones - your sims will only ever travel towards their destination. Even there was a direct subway line to their destination right behind them, they won't take it. This makes transit in the game a complete pain, since the model the game follows is counter-intuitive to the max.
The trick of course is, with a grid road network, this pathfinding works really well. This only compounds the problem - since a subway system, no matter how well designed, has a hell of a time competing with a road network - and in no time at all you have citizens screaming about congested roads, and a perfectly good subway system that's sitting at 5% capacity.
There are ways to "trick" the game - mostly involving designing your road networks in such a way that you create disconnected islands between demand zones. In essence, you're creating a ludicrously broken road network nobody will ever use just to get people onto mass transit. But it's worth it (in the game, and IMHO maybe real life also) - the capacity and density of rail mass transit blows the crap out of driving, and allows you to get people much further, much more quickly. Air pollution becomes a complete non-problem
But I think the idea of a city without roads is unrealistic, except in the case of Venice where canals take the place of roads for delivery and construction purposes.
Besides, all attempts to build "perfect" cities in real life have resulted in dull and lifeless places. A certain amount of chaos is necessary to keep cities liveable.
I use the rail system in Portland for transportation, and I can say that they fairly regularly have issues with trains on the tracks, or taking down sections of track for maintenance over a weekend.
What Jacobs found is that communities thrive when there's a certain amount of chaos and layered complexity that arises from people interacting withe each other and the environment. That's why places such as Greenwich village and many old European cities seem so vibrant and full of life - they're not centrally planned, they've had time to mature and people have had the possibility to interact with the environment and each other in the chaotic neighborhood.
No intentionally-designed system has ever scaled to match the nuance of emergent complexity.
The reason that overly-planned cities (I live in one: Phoenix) don't work is that it's impossible to out-think millions of people all working to optimize your city in parallel all the time.
Obviously you need some urban planning to assist with things that regular citizens don't understand (utilities), but for the most part, if you let people be, they will build a city on their own.
I don't know what the ideal level of urban planing and regulation is, but I think it's probably somewhere in the middle of the road.
It was ostensibly a city-building sim set in ancient Rome, but gameplay was more like a supply-chain logistics simulator. About 3/4 of the time spent playing was in allocating raw materials to production facilities and designing distribution networks for finished goods.
If Impressions or Maxis decided to start writing enterprise software, they'd probably dominate the market within a couple of years.
Yes, if the enterprise software makers would compete on their software. They seem to compete more on having better sales teams.
To everyone belittling his 'waste' of 5 years of his life on a pointless endeavour, remember that in life, everything is essentially pointless, you are born, you live, you die. And thats that.
You may in life build the perfect Simcity city, or refurbished a muscle car, or discover electricity. But at the end of the day you end up dead, and its all irrelevant.
Your life doesn't have to be pointless.
The assertion was that life or existence itself is pointless, nothing to do with the esteem of individuals. You say "people like Martin Luther King Jr" would beg to differ about gtt's assertion, but you follow-up by saying "your life doesn't have to be pointless." So, a life can be pointless? So you disagree with MLK? Either that, or your entire comment doesn't really have anything to do with gtt's.
Regardless, the worth of an individual wasn't really what gtt was getting at.
So, SimCity guy felt compelled to be awesome at SimCity, besides that I don't know much else about him. But there are billions of people in the world, so there is room for someone like him and there is almost no reason to stifle diversity in personalities. After all, that's how MLK eventually came to be. Perhaps the same force that compels SimCity guy to build awesome Megacities is compelling him to do something else that most people would consider more worthwhile.
I know, I know, I'm only envious :-)
This is just a video game, but there are still a lot of transferable skills that are practiced: concentration, planning, forethought, logical thinking, multi-variable problem solving, persistence, etc. These habits would serve him well on a programming job, for instance.
As a result of this fear anything that resembles a comment that might have been made on Reddit will get downvoted.
[1] I have nothing against Reddit, on the contrary I personally write loads of silly comments there and enjoy the oneliners.
Granted, from a purely logical viewpoint this city wouldn't work, but that's not the challenge. The challenge was to beat Sim City 3000 and he did that. Think of it as trying to get the highest score in Pac Man or Super Mario Brothers. There are competitions on that! And from one screenshot from the videos, it seems as though there are competitions for Sim City 3000 too.
Yes this city wouldn't work in real life. The subway system would be prohibitably expensive; getting all the power from neighboring cities wouldn't work; having groups of buildings to satisfy a citywide requirement wouldn't work. Yet he beat the game. That is all.
I have 2 pieces of advice for anyone who habitually mutters about the levels of discourse not reaching their intellectual standards:
A) You're nowhere near as smart as you think you are. B) Relax, it's ok.
Like Douglas Hofstadter said: "Small-souled men, beware!"
I (and a lot of us here) have no patience with constrictive thinking. In this case, why was sex brought in? Trying to artificially decrease a person's worth is petty.
But I also see a fair bit of "oh my beautiful mind is too good to read this pointless article" on occasion -- That's simply a perhaps-better-spelled version of the same small mindedness.
Perhaps it's just that time and attention are limited...
I desire to read thoughtful, insightful commentary, and I don't want to get bogged down reading boring garbage. Therefore, I upvote comments that I find thoughtful or isnightful (even if I disagree with them) and I downvote anything I think detracts from that.
I don't have anything against snarky one-liners, memes, or silliness per se. They just have to be remarkably clever or insightful in order to meet my standards. The "nerds have no sex life" comment that triggered this subthread was a boring retread of a tired joke, and the whining about downvotes that followed it was even more boring.
Don't think you can't be silly or snarky or post memes on HN. Just understand, the bar is set a lot higher here -- your silly/snarky/meme-filled comment needs to provide a lot more value than on other sites.