Magnasanti: Large and Terrifying SimCity (2010)
rumorsontheinternets.org
rumorsontheinternets.org
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ix-aVhIgBO4 (the ride never ends)
For some context, in Civilization IV you play a civilization from the year 4000BC. One of the win conditions is to research all the way into the information era, and build a spaceship that goes to Alpha Centauri.
Through horrible game mechanic abuse, this player managed to tech all the way up and launch the spaceship in the BCs, before 1AD, on the highest difficulty level.
It got into a chronic recession. The city became a ghost town at some point despite having a massive population.
It is a shame that I didn't have a backup for that particular city (no dropbox back then)
I find it absurd but also inspiring that someone can devote that much time and energy to a hobby or unfunded personal research project.
But then again I spend my time daily in other meaningless activities that won't even be noticed by a single person. So good for him. I hope I'll reach that level of determination in the future.
Few games offer the same level of openness and depth as the (old) Simcity games does.
Creating content (or any creative endeavour) is hard, and most people don't like hard work.
The amount of time that free's up for activities is insane, I go to Chess twice a week, cycle, spend time keeping up to date on programming stuff and still have time to read.
3hrs a day over a year is the same as 6mths of working a 40hr week.
E.g. give a simulator the current population and layout of NYC with the current influx of people with a budget and see what the results are? It would be fascinating to see people try and "beat" the high scores on different cities (i.e. Austin would be an easy level, Boston harder, and NYC the hardest level, etc.). Then we could collate what worked and what didn't without dumb projects like the Mopac Expressway.
Either way I'd play that game.
OT, but, er, what's wrong with Mopac? I didn't really have any problems with it while I lived in Austin, but it's been quite a while now.
The construction lobby strikes again I guess...
[1] https://www.austinchronicle.com/news/2017-08-04/mopac-and-th...
I guess I’ll think about this every time someone says, “But why don’t we just focus on solving the problems on Earth, first?”
This guy did “solve” those problems.
Sims don’t need to travel long distances, because their workplace is just within walking distance. In fact they do not even need to leave their own block. Wherever they go it’s like going to the same place.
(devil's advocate) Singapore?
But from an "artsy" point of view, this is so much more, it's actually saying something. And all that by just playing the game like it's intended (mostly), no modding at all, just working with what's there and trying to min-max the given systems.
Reminded me of Plan Voisin: http://www.businessinsider.com/le-corbusiers-plan-voisin-for...
Facism appealed to Le Corbusier and some other modernists (Mies van der Rohe), partially because they hoped it would lead to top-down huge projects like the Plan, or Brasilia (https://bombmagazine.org/articles/a-day-in-brasilia/)
At London’s density (about 1000 people per sqkm), LA would have ~95 million inhabitants. Close to Deckard’s estimate.
And though I don’t like London much, it doesn’t seem hellish to me.
Densities in these cities are not so outrageously different. ~5,600/sqkm in London vs ~3,300/sqkm in LA
https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/uxpil/ive_been_play...
They could even promote the dense urban clusters as "utopia" at first, attracting most of the populace. Once they are in, the conditions of the city would slowly deteriorate; but a population that was born in the city and never moved beyond a few blocks would just not know that there is anything better.
The current regime seems to be acutely aware of this and has been actively spreading Chinese influence (and finances) over the rest of the world.
There's a lot of mismanagement and climactic shifts in the pre-modern period. Often those are tied together, with failures of the hydrological infrastructure. But another common thread is high imbalances in male/female populations, leading to lots of disaffected young men, and millenarian religious movements.
[0] http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/201801/04/WS5a4d8db6a31008cf1...
With really good and fast transit I don't see a reason why we have to live physically near where we work though.
From Niven's "The Mote in God's Eye"
It's best looked at as more of a "city painter" than something which is going to be challenging to build a large, successful city in.
I prefer it to Cities: Skylines but it's extremely buggy and you'll probably face a ton of crashes (and lose data in the process).
Someone needs to make a FOSS clone of SimCity 4 or 3000. I'm not the only simcity fan that dislikes Skylines.
1: https://community.simtropolis.com/forums/topic/73555-simcity...
However, the idea of making the state responsible for reproduction and child-rearing is promising, considering how awful so many parents are, and the fact that economically comfortable people generally don't have enough kids to maintain the population.
I've seen some out-there political opinions on HN, but I never thought I'd see someone calling a totalitarian eugenics program "promising".
And that's not hyperbole. "Making the state responsible for reproduction" necessarily means them deciding who can and can't reproduce, which is literally eugenics.
The only alternative plan I can think of is to hope that anti-aging treatments advance enough so that people live much, much longer lives, thus greatly reducing the need for replacement people (instead of increasing the birth rate, decrease the death rate). But this is just sci-fi at this point.
As a hypothetical situation, imagine that, for some strange reason, all immigration between countries was suddenly stopped magically, so they had to either come up with some new solution to get people to have more kids, or face population decline and the economic problems that come with that. What's your solution to this? Forcing citizens to have more children at gunpoint sounds a lot worse than having the state create and raise children (which, BTW, does not necessarily mean that private individuals/couples are prevented from having their own children; I never advocated preventing people from reproducing).
In the US, the population is only growing because of immigration, not from Catholics. To be fair, they're a big contributor, so the demographics are shifting in their favor, but if it weren't for immigration, our population would not be growing I'm pretty sure. And Mormons, while they have a bunch of kids, are still a very small portion of the overall population.
If they keep having a bunch of kids, and the rest of America doesn’t, they won’t stay a very small portion of the overall population forever.
Also, I've worked with and known Mormons, and I've never known them to be huge kid-producers, so I'm questioning this assumption. They have more kids than the current white American average AFAICT, but not hugely so. They tend to be higher income and put a lot of energy and resources into their kids; you can't do that and have 10 kids. In general, it's low-education people who have tons of kids. Mormons are not like this; they're generally very well educated.
I don't have one; just the principle that the government deciding who can reproduce is wrong. There are many problems that could be solved by killing or imprisoning large swarthes of the population, but we don't do that, because it's wrong on principle.
>state create and raise children (which, BTW, does not necessarily mean that private individuals/couples are prevented from having their own children; I never advocated preventing people from reproducing)
OK, between saying "considering how awful so many parents are" and "economically comfortable people generally don't have enough kids", it really sounded like you were saying "the poors shouldn't be able to reproduce". I'm sorry if that's not the case. But still, how do you "create children"? We can't grow them in vats, so it would necessarily mean the state selecting people to carry them, and again, that selection would be eugenics.
Working from home, of course! Surely the Magnasantonians run their public service infrastructure in the neighbouring areas from their laptop, the few that are required to maintain it.
With the density of your average block I'd imagine the police force has way more applicants than they need.
The article argues that SimCity encodes a set of neoliberal assumptions into its game play that make imagining other forms of city-building impossible.
If you install the Network Addon Mod (NAM) it includes, among other things, a new traffic model that's closer to the original design.
I think my ME system currently contains (among other things) some 6 million pieces of coal and nearly 2 million iron ingots. Even rare metals like gold count in the 100,000s of ingots. Then there's 10,000s of each kind of common mob drop (e.g. spider eyes, bones), even thousands of creeper heads.
The globally accepted freely convertible currency is Octuple Compressed Cobblestone, a single block of which contains 9^8 = 43046721 blocks of cobblestone. It takes my cobblestone generator about 1 real-life month to generate another one of these. I could easily expand it, but I choose not to to not cause deflation. :)
The point is, we're waaaaay past the point where any of this scale is actually necessary, and the other players on the server are pointing this out to us when visiting our vast facilities and the giant holes that our quarries rip into the landscape. For all practical purposes, you're fine with 10000 iron ingots, you don't need millions of the things.
We're actually sitting around now and wondering what to do with all this wealth. My friend suggested building a temple in a jungle out of pure gold, but that doesn't even begin to decimate our gold reserves. Maybe we need to build something out of octuple compressed cobblestone. :D
>Other people wanted to use SimCity for the less noble goal of teaching people what to think, instead of just teaching them to think.
>Everyone notices the obvious built-in political bias, whatever that is. But everyone sees it from a different perspective, so nobody agrees what its real political agenda actually is. I don’t think it’s all that important, since SimCity’s political agenda pales in comparison to the political agenda in the eye of the beholder.
>Some muckety-muck architecture magazine was interviewing Will Wright about SimCity, and they asked him a question something like “which ontological urban paridigm most influenced your design of the simulator, the Exo-Hamiltonian Pattern Language Movement, or the Intra-Urban Deconstructionist Sub-Culture Hypothesis?” He replied, “I just kind of optimized for game play.”
Constructionist Educational Open Source SimCity: https://medium.com/@donhopkins/har-2009-lightning-talk-trans...
>I’ve programmed a plug-in church with a plug-in agent: the Church of Pacmania, and the PacBot. The church spawn PacBots on the road next to it, which eat the traffic on the roads (lowering the pollution and raising their score, of course). So naturally the Church of Pacmania generate a lot of traffic, to attract and feed the PacBots. I’m going to have a “Tax the Churches” option, too. If I lower the taxes, then more people will come in, and the churches will recruit them, and they’ll all drive to church. So then there will be a lot more traffic for the PacBots to eat.
https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/blob/b0c5a3f495ebabb...
https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/blob/b0c5a3f495ebabb...
Somewhere I've still got a copy of Sim City 2000: Power, Politics and Planning[1], which was really interesting. Some of the elaborate cities featured in there are still available at: http://patcoston.com/sc2k/cities.asp, and you can still load them up and play them.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/SimCity-2000-Politics-Planning-Revise...
Why the scaremongering?
https://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/Graphs/DemographicProfiles/ has data if you want to make a statistical argument.
I call cheating.
That said, that power and water isn't free. The city must be paying through the nose for all that power and water.
It has been a while since I played SimCity 3000, but IIRC those deals become extortionate after you hit a certain scale.
The whole article is about using simcity as a (distorted) reflection of reality. (And that reality may be tending towards sim city's outcome).
This is not even close to an accusation that city planners have learned poor city design by playing simcity