Magnasanti – The largest and most terrible city of SimCity | Hacker News Reader

Magnasanti – The largest and most terrible city of SimCity

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174 pointsecliptik92 comments

This appears to be a low-quality partial copy of a more detailed blog post from 2010, now gone but still living on via archive.is: https://archive.ph/GokfI

Don't miss the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTJQTc-TqpU

Discussed previously on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16933265 (620 comments)

Thank you, I knew I've seen this before but couldn't remember where.

Probably here.

Archive.org link (that archive.ph one doesn't work for me):

https://web.archive.org/web/20170323054316/https://rumorsont...

Worth highlighting that part of the soundtrack of the video is from the 1982 movie "Koyaanisqatsi - Life Out of Balance" (as referenced in the blog post), soundtrack by Philip Glass, and which is an experimental movie about, I guess, humanity's urban life at odds with the natural world.

> I suspect that this made it possible to use a place that would otherwise have been occupied by roads under a real estate - as a result, the population density has increased. And precisely such a strategy is seriously considered by many cities, including Sydney. Down with cars - long live public transport. And this seems like a sound idea.

It mostly shows how much space can be freed if we were to abolish cars. The dreadfulness of this city does not come from the absence of cars, as the author acknowledges himself:

> High unemployment, horrific air pollution, almost no education, medical and fire services are absent, and residents do not live to retirement age. The police state made it possible to maximize the size of the city, while retaining full control over the citizens - but it minimized the quality of life and effectively destroyed free will.

> Born in Magnasanti, he spends his life working and living in a small but very efficient stretch of space, and dies at the age of about 50 years.

All of this has nothing to do with the absence of cars. To the contrary, combustion cars enhance air pollution and noise in a city, restricting livability.

The Strong Town blog has a bunch of really interesting ideas and retrospectives on how just parking lots alone have dramatically changed the landscape of many towns in America.

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/6/9/but-where-will-...

There's an issue in SimCity 3000 where your healthcare is overfunded, it becomes like a retirement community in florida. The % of your workforce drops compared to your population and so your city stops growing.

simcity is just a fun optimization game

The dreadfulness of the city comes from economic conditions, but if you are a citizen, economic conditions come from:

* How hard you can make business compete for your business (∝ range^2 * density)

* How hard you can make real estate compete for your business (∝ range^2 * density)

* How hard you can make business compete for your labor (∝ range^2 * density)

Having options is good, density gives you options, but range gives you options squared. The absence of cars improves density, but it also decreases range by 10x and range^2 by 100x. It is far from obvious to me that density improvements outweigh this on balance.

Density has undeniable efficiency benefits, but if they accrue to capital (primarily, entirely, or more-than-entirely) and you are a laborer in Magnasanti, the outcome is not good for you.

At even moderate traffic levels car speeds fall dramatically and often below speeds offered by trains. Trains have much higher capacities and so don’t fall victim to congestion as easily. And even commuter trains have higher speeds than cars.

> Trains have much higher capacities and so don’t fall victim to congestion as easily.

All it takes is one stopped train to cause a big mess on most commuter rail lines.

Commuter rail does better than cars on-peak, usually, especially with limited stop service. But off-peak, cars with no stops and point to point routing and no wait for the next take much less time.

You could say the same thing about car accidents, which are much more frequent, so I don’t know that it’s a disadvantage.

It's usually easier to route around an accident in a car than than in a train. A blocked lane can be passed on the shoulder, but trains have a hard time doing that.

At extremely low capacity and low speeds in any sort of meaningful traffic numbers, due to the reduced number of lanes and all the rubbernecking. And plenty of accidents close highways in one direction.

You have to walk to the train station, wait to get on the train (plus buffer for unreliable/full trains), wait at every stop in between, and walk to your final destination. You're right about congestion, though, and rush hour probably does dominate the equation for commuters.

Still, in the city you pay a lot more for real estate and get a lot less. It is very important for models to include that aspect: do the benefits of density accrue to you, or to your landlord?

Finding parking alone in a major downtown like Manhattan is time-consuming.

Metro-North from Connecticut to NYC has a speed of 80MPH, and combined with pretty good acceleration from electric propulsion, is often traveling faster than cars.

---

You get a lot less real estate but you do get a lot more in terms of amenity.

* a lot of amenities found in major cities are there because the major city provides critical mass for niches. (If you don't have enough gay people you won't have gay bars, if you don't have enough Chinese people you are not going to have grocers with Chinese produce, you need a big enough population awake late nights to support diverse late-night food options, you need enough arts patrons to support a museum, etc.)

* switching jobs is easier in big cities, particularly for people with specialist jobs. Remote work is more of a thing post-COVID, but realistically speaking a lot of companies will limit that to areas where they are already set up (since even in the US tax, employment benefit, health insurance etc. regulation varies significantly by state), and major cities are better covered in terms of companies already being tax compliant.

Big cities aren't for everyone, but also suburbs are not for everyone, and small towns are not for everyone, and we are seeing that there is more demand for big city than is currently being satisfied.

I don't know where you're from but I view this sort of argument as basically american parochialism. The numbers don't mean anything, noticing square laws exist doesn't really have any affect on this domain. The dozens or hundreds of practical accommodations due to climate, culture, history, funding, aesthetics etc etc add up to much greater than "range ^ 2" or whatever.

Other configurations do work, in different ways and to varying degrees, all over the world. The people there aren't meaningfully less free because of the transit structure around them, and in fact the cars-only model is the absolute most restricting one you can have, given the obvious fact that not everyone can drive at all stages of their lives.

American society is structured around the idea that all gains outside the most private spheres rightfully belong to the corporate entities that can control them. But that isn't a given either; many places don't work that like and it's not necessary that we do.

> The people there aren't meaningfully less free

They pay twice my mortgage to rent a tiny, cramped apartment from a slumlord who can't keep the plumbing functional.

You can have that experience as well in an american mid-sized city or a large exurb in an area where you can only access work or a grocery store in a private car. I have lived in such places in fact. So I'm not at all convinced that accessible transit creates slumlords or whatever the argument even is there.

You can make shitty places to live with or without cars. That's not an argument, in itself, for making them with cars.

I lived in shitty apartments that cost a king's ransom before I escaped to the suburbs. Magnasanti reminds me of those.

An extortionate real estate situation can absorb all of the benefits brought by density, and more besides. It's great for the slumlords -- or, more accurately, the real estate investment trusts representing the interests of the Magnasanti quadrillionaires -- but it sure sucks to be a drone stuck in their factorio game. Why should I want that?

Square laws are applicable in situations where a traveler can travel from any arbitrary point to any other arbitrary point. Bandwidth isn't considered, but it's definitely the greatest limiting factor for routine human travel today.

Example: crowd crushes are bandwidth spikes

I think it's a little unfair to pretend the quadratic range term dominates the "linear" density term. If you think about it for a moment, the density describes area, so already has a ^-2 (to the -2 power) incorporated into it.

If we lived in a 3D world, there would be a negative third power incorporated into it (although you'd also have a range^3 term)

In reality both terms contribute equally.

Considering the range of densities and ranges available in the USA, density currently makes more of an impact. Speeds range from 10mph at the minimum (a typical net average speed if you're biking or taking subways and walking connections through Manhattan) to 60mph at the most (a typical speed limit on a rural highway) That's about one decimal order of magnitude.

Density on the other hand varies much, much more. There are rural areas with a handful of people in a square mile, and places with 50,000 or more people in a square mile. That's more like 4 orders of magnitude.

This matches up with the anecdotal observation that in terms of "How many employers/restaurants/people/etc can I get to within a 15 minute trip" is far larger in denser bigger cities, despite travel times being slower. Faster travel times just cannot keep up with the low density needed to allow cars to reach those speeds.

One of the reasons city builders don’t use realistic housing:population ratios, ie an average of 2 people in SFH and instead coding it as like 12, is that it makes the gameplay non-fun having to provision so many roads (also, performance - kinda sucks if your max city size can only support like 100,000 people). Just let that sink in

> Magnasanti is a “cage” in which six million “economic slaves” are enclosed.

Amazing. -ly awful.

Amazong. -ly awful.

I've never been able to enjoy these kinds of games because whenever I play them I just feel like I'm trying to figure out what ideologically dubious and half-informed beliefs and assumptions about urban management the developers baked into the game logic

And if I realize those opinions don't align with my own, I am now faced with the choice between failing at the game or succeeding by doing things that I think should fail.

No thanks. I'll take my strategy abstract, please

Thinking like this would drive you off many many games.

Very true, and it does. But there are fortunately still plenty to enjoy (as well as plenty of pleasures outside of games!). I mean, just chess and Geometry Wars are enough for a lifetime.

Also, it's easier for me to stomach/look past the ideological biases in stuff like FPS and action adventure games, because they tend to largely be right out in the open on the surface narrative / world-building layers. For example, if you don't like the Guardian feminism of Horizon Zero Dawn or the jingoism of CoD, you can just kinda ignore those aspects and enjoy the mechanics, art, exploration, etc - or at least I can. Vs. the bias black box of simulation games

> just chess

Ah yes a game that reinforces that lowly peons should be sacrificed in battle so that the 1% can come out on top. No possible conflicts in morality there /s

Sometimes sacrificing queen and bishops for a promoted pawn is the way to go ;)

I'm no GM but I'm decent (USCF 2100+ peak) and that is a chess novice take. The game's ideological subtext is much more complex and nuanced than that

But that's why modding and breaking them is so fun.

That would be true for so many other games. Sports games, first person shooters, etc.

No doubt...it's a big part of what makes games so fascinating and perennially relevant and fun to talk/think about

As an anarchist hippie, I still enjoy the Civ series, including decimating neighboring countries and claiming their territory as my own… after they declare war on me first, anyway. And the FPS genre has been brought up in another subthread - though to be sure I greatly prefer sci-fi or fantasy-themed ones like Halo or Quake to the more "realistic" Collar Doody games.

This kind of smart, walkable, mixed-use urbanism is illegal to build in many American cities

I'll admit I was greatly entertained by this roast, but SimCity is unable to represent smart, walkable, mixed-use urbanism with its Euclidean RCI zoning approach.

Just to let everyone else in on it, using the text “This kind of smart, walkable…” together with some uninviting locale is a bit of a meme. It was a cheap joke and I do not regret it :D

There's even a moma entry about it: https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2013/designand...

Just to be clear, the music in the video is not Philip Glass' Koyaanisqatsi at all. FWIW, Koyaanisqatsi was a 1982 film [1], effectively a 90 minute music video before videos were a thing.

The film has lots of unsavory city clips in contrast with nature clips [2] to make the point of Life Out of Balance, the subtitle of the film. The music and film clips are frequently used to illustrate decay. or the unhealthy nature of city life in general, most notably in a Grand Theft Auto commercial [3].

[1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koyaanisqatsi

[2]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDW-1JIa2gI

[3]. https://www.thefader.com/2007/03/30/video-grand-theft-philip...

Samsara [1][2], from 2011, is a more recent take on the same theme, directed by Koyaanisqatsi’s cinematographer, Ron Fricke. Shot on 70mm film over the course of 5 years in 25 countries, it’s every bit as awe inspiring and chilling as the earlier film.

[1]: https://youtu.be/iQzpExpsezI

[2]: https://youtu.be/HCkEILshUyU

I wonder why a student from Philippines is using a Russian version of the game (as evidenced by labels on screenshots with various charts)?

Spy obviously

Most likely he is using a cracked version downloaded from a russian forum. Russian piracy subculture is rather strong and powered by deep disrespect toward copyright and copyright law.

It is generally far easier to get a cracked version of an original game.

As for 'piracy subculture', I guess that now with Steam refusing to accept payments from Russian users (who couldn't pay by Mastercard/visa anyway) it'll receive a powerful boost.

When Iran went into a similar position there were rumours that the state undertook its own piracy efforts. Incidentally there are a lot of software you'll only find cracks for in Iranian website if you use an Iranian IP.

Probably when a country falls out of an international community with more or less consistent approach to enforcement of IP laws, it creates a certain Wild West-like environment.

Not quite, it's really that poorer countries don't want to enforce IP laws, they only do so under pressure from richer countries. There are international communities such as as the African Union that really don't give a shit about IP, it's really the US and Europe that press for it in Africa.

Why are the sim city screenshots in Russian? Kinda odd.

Because 156 million people in the world speak Russian. Why would that be odd?

The original author of the post is theoretically an architect student from the Philliphines, according to some articles. I agree, however, who knows... just screenshots.

It's odd because the original version was written in English. Then somebody (Alconost) translated to Russian, without giving credit to the original source, but putting in a bunch of advertisements for their own site, then somebody poorly translated it back to English.

How many people in the world speak Russian is irrelevant and has nothing to do with the fact that it's odd that whoever translated it to Russian didn't bother crediting the original, and just credited themselves a lot.

Then because of that omission, somebody wasted their time making such a terrible redundant translation back to English, with bizarre phrases like "Transferred to Alconost" and "The article is translated in Alconost", which make one question the skills of the translator so bent on claiming credit for themselves without giving proper credit to others.

https://archive.ph/GokfI

The original author of the city was indeed an architecture student from the Philippines, Vincent Oscala. At least Alconost left Vincent's name in when he misappropriated somebody else's article to advertise his low quality translation and advertising services.

The odd and terrible Russian translation also omits important links, including this interview with Vincent:

Viceland Games: The Totalitarian Buddhist Who Beat SimCity

https://archive.ph/eA7CX

Mammoth:

http://m.ammoth.us/blog/2010/10/magnasanti/

to better convey the gloomy dystopian nature of this city to the western reader

There are plenty of gloomy and dystopian cities that are not Russian, let's not get weird about this

There's a lot of influence from Le Corbusier, particularly Plan Voisin.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_Voisin

Vaguely reminds me of Kowloon city

Introduction (audio): https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/episode-66-kowloon-wa...

Maxis actually distributed a model of Kowloon as one of the original cities included with SimCity Classic (before it was called "Classic").

I recall that it was from the Japanese Fujitsu FM Towns version of SimCity, which included several extra Japanese cities that weren't shipped with other versions, but that I dug up from my archives and included with Micropolis, the open source version of SimCity Classic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FM_Towns

https://www.mobygames.com/game/fmtowns/simcity

https://www.retroplace.com/en/games/46874--simcity

Directory of original Maxis SimCity save files, including Kamakura, Kobe, Kowloon, Kyoto, Senri, and Yokohama from the FM Towns version:

https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/tree/master/Micropol...

Kowloon save file:

https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/blob/master/Micropol...

Tokyo was also one of the original SimCity scenarios, shipped with every version of the game. That was the one that caused Toho (Godzilla's owner) to sue Maxis because the scenario originally referenced Godzilla, and the box featured a picture of Godzilla. Maxis had to change it to a generic orange monster and call it a "large reptillian creature" instead, and change the Godzilla on the box to a tornado. Original versions of the box with Godzilla are valuable collectors items!

>TOKYO, JAPAN 1957: A large reptilian creature has been spotted heading for Tokyo bay. It seems to be attracted to the heavy levels of industrial pollution there. Try to control the fires, then rebuild the industrial center. You have 5 years.

https://imgur.com/z5gy9GW

https://twitter.com/dancingcrab/status/928792064736874496

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godzilla_in_popular_culture#Vi...

>The "Monster" disaster in the computer game SimCity depicted an unnamed green monster that resembled Godzilla. A scenario in the game: Tokyo, Japan 1954 parodies the original movie. The depiction of the monster in-game and on the boxart led to legal issues with Toho, with Maxis changing the Monster's design in-game and swapping it on the packaging for the "Tornado" disaster instead.

Kowloon City is specifically listed as an inspiration.

I think about the Magnasanti sim city a lot when thinking about how simcity's game mechanics were designed - see an earlier comment with more references : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19313380

Another great video about this by HBO's John Wilson: https://vimeo.com/238073511

I wonder just how many problems would be solved with mixed zoning in that city.

That would not be optimally efficient. Back to planning school for you. The happiness of the citizens was not a concern.

Its not about happiness but cutting down on unnecessary travel.

Do you want to add mixed zoning as a mechanic in Sim City?

Kinda, yeah. Thats actually the reason why I originally started reverse engineering the game.

In real life, planners are well advised to employ a laissez faire approach in many cases. But it wouldn't be too much of a game, if Sim City would let you just stick to the minimum and let citizens handle the rest.

For me, simcity is, and probably always will be, a simulation. And you tend to lose out on efficiency (Not covering as many people with a school, for example), so I don't see it as going to be too unbalanced

You can check out the original SimCity Classic source code here, which I cleaned up, refactored and renamed for consistency and readability, documented, and translated to C++, but it still retains the original behavior and intent:

https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/tree/master/Micropol...

This is also an earlier version which that code was derived from, that I started from the Mac version, ported to Unix, cleaned up and translated old C and 68k assembly to ANSI C, and made a user interface with the TCL/Tk scripting language and X11 GUI toolkit:

https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/tree/master/micropol...

The one little "modernization" I made to the simulation was to copy the radar dish tile animation from the airport, and make it individually placeable as a "high speed network connection" that let people telecommute from home without generating traffic and pollution.

That was a tip of the hat to John Gauge's "Net Day", a mid-90's internet craze of hooking schools up to the net.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetDay

Chaim Gingold mentions the function s_traf.c/FindPTele in his SimCity Reverse Diagrams animation characters atlas of tiles, under "Telecommunications" -- /* look for telecommunication on edges of zone */ -- if there is a telecommunication dish adjacent to a residential zone, then its residents can telecommute without driving around generating traffic and pollution. I turned that off for the OLPC release, though.

https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/blob/master/micropol...

Chaim Gingold has analyzed the code and visually documented how it works, in his beautiful "SimCity Reverse Diagrams":

https://lively-web.org/users/Dan/uploads/SimCityReverseDiagr...

>SimCity reverse diagrams: Chaim Gingold (2016).

>These reverse diagrams map and translate the rules of a complex simulation program into a form that is more easily digested, embedded, disseminated, and and discussed (Latour 1986).

>The technique is inspired by the game designer Stone Librande’s one page game design documents (Librande 2010). If we merge the reverse diagram with an interactive approach—e.g. Bret Victor’s Nile Visualization (Victor 2013), such diagrams could be used generatively, to describe programs, and interactively, to allow rich introspection and manipulation of software.

>Latour, Bruno (1986). “Visualization and cognition”. In: Knowledge and Society 6 (1986), pp. 1– 40. Librande, Stone (2010). “One-Page Designs”. Game Developers Conference. 2010. Victor, Bret (2013). “Media for Thinking the Unthinkable”. MIT Media Lab, Apr. 4, 2013.

Earlier I wrote about the "Simulator Effect" aka "apophenia", and "Reverse Over Engineering":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22062590

DonHopkins on Jan 16, 2020 | parent | context | favorite | on: Reverse engineering course

Will Wright defined the "Simulator Effect" as how game players imagine a simulation is vastly more detailed, deep, rich, and complex than it actually is: a magical misunderstanding that you shouldn’t talk them out of. He designs games to run on two computers at once: the electronic one on the player’s desk, running his shallow tame simulation, and the biological one in the player’s head, running their deep wild imagination.

"Reverse Over-Engineering" is a desirable outcome of the Simulator Effect: what game players (and game developers trying to clone the game) do when they use their imagination to extrapolate how a game works, and totally overestimate how much work and modeling the simulator is actually doing, because they filled in the gaps with their imagination and preconceptions and assumptions, instead of realizing how many simplifications and shortcuts and illusions it actually used.

https://www.masterclass.com/classes/will-wright-teaches-game...

>There's a name for what Wright calls "the simulator effect" in the video: apophenia. There's a good GDC video on YouTube where Tynan Sylvester (the creator of RimWorld) talks about using this effect in game design.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia

>Apophenia (/æpoʊˈfiːniə/) is the tendency to mistakenly perceive connections and meaning between unrelated things. The term (German: Apophänie) was coined by psychiatrist Klaus Conrad in his 1958 publication on the beginning stages of schizophrenia. He defined it as "unmotivated seeing of connections [accompanied by] a specific feeling of abnormal meaningfulness". He described the early stages of delusional thought as self-referential, over-interpretations of actual sensory perceptions, as opposed to hallucinations.

RimWorld: Contrarian, Ridiculous, and Impossible Game Design Methods

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdqhHKjepiE

5 game design tips from Sims creator Will Wright

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scS3f_YSYO0

>Tip 5: On world building. As you know by now, Will's approach to creating games is all about building a coherent and compelling player experience. His games are comprised of layered systems that engage players creatively, and lead to personalized, some times unexpected outcomes. In these types of games, players will often assume that the underlying system is smarter than it actually is. This happens because there's a strong mental model in place, guiding the game design, and enhancing the player's ability to imagine a coherent context that explains all the myriad details and dynamics happening within that game experience.

>Now let's apply this to your project: What mental model are you building, and what story are you causing to unfold between your player's ears? And how does the feature set in your game or product support that story? Once you start approaching your product design that way, you'll be set up to get your customers to buy into the microworld that you're building, and start to imagine that it's richer and more detailed than it actually is.

Clearly a labor of love. Thanks for having built this.

Sorry for the LATE reply, but it took me awhile to work through the whole comment.

Very interesting stuff. Sadly, I meant simcity 4, rather than the original, so this isn't too useful to me directly. But some of the methodology, I reckon, will be quite helpful.

I don't understand how the city doesn't just burn down. If I created that in SimCity I can only imagine the raging firestorm that it would be in less than a year.

just turn off disasters

Are you even playing SimCity anymore if you don't have disasters? Might as well turn on unlimited money while you are at it.

Saying you can break the game, but first you have to turn off the balancing mechanics doesn't seem as impressive.

It's not breaking the game if it is a check box in the settings for the game.

sometimes, you just want to do things and not be interrupted. othertimes, you want arrmageddon. that's why they offered so many prebuilt scenarios.

check these coordinates on google/apple/bing maps. 28.56795257061634, 77.28627687655779

this is in india and looks vaguely familiar to the image on the blogpost

I mean "deprive people of services, police them brutally, stuff them into a small area, and work them like mules until they die" was pretty much the reigning strategy in the industrial era, and frankly we're returning to that now in slightly altered form under neoliberalism, so it's not that far fetched.

See also https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/16/book-review-seeing-lik... if you're into evenly-spaced rectangular grids.

I see myself in the picture and I'm offended.

That's Hong Kong

For some reason, people have a disproportionate trust in city-building game designers' view of civic planning. Magnasanti is meaningful because it exposes some of the biases and simplifications that pervade the genre.

The reason certain strategies work in city-building games isn't because they're realistic simulations of how cities function and those strategies would work in real life, it's because it's a game made by human designers who decided that that's a strategy that should work, or made certain assumptions (that may or may not be true) while designing the game's systems that allow the strategy to work.

See also Polygon's "The ideology hiding in SimCity’s black box": https://www.polygon.com/videos/2021/4/1/22352583/simcity-hid...

Some select quotes:

> How SimCity’s hidden ideology affects the people who play it is difficult to untangle. An article from 1992 quotes a player saying “I became a total Republican playing this game,” and even modern versions of the game contain oddly conservative viewpoints, including a preference for regressive taxation.

> On more than one occasion, politicians have been “tested” in the game to see how well they can manage a pretend city.

This is pervasive in games with simulated markets and economies as well - both the built-in somewhat regressive assumptions as well the tendency to treat them as examples of understanding the real world.

Games market themselves as simulations, but in the end of the day a game needs to be fun, and overly accurate or complex simulations easily get in the way of that.

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