{"id":14361,"date":"2024-07-03T11:09:00","date_gmt":"2024-07-03T11:09:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/?p=14361"},"modified":"2025-03-16T11:16:38","modified_gmt":"2025-03-16T11:16:38","slug":"simcity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/2024\/07\/03\/simcity\/","title":{"rendered":"simcity"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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2024sep4:<\/strong> I started playing a new game of Simcity 2000 in my browser, mainly out of nostalgia and curiosity. I never really understood how to play it as a kid. I would level the map to make it look like a nice pristine slab of flat ground, and then spend all of my budget building roads circling a non-existent city. I\u2019d then run up a massive deficit in road maintenance fees, not have any tax revenue to pay for them, and then get fired as mayor. And yet, I would start over again, doing roughly the exact same thing, and somehow I found that to be a fun experience. I think when I was a kid\u2013 I must have been about 7 years old\u2013 it was fun simply to click on things and see things happen, to see the roads getting built, to hear the construction sounds. I was failing miserably at the \u2018actual\u2019 objective of the game, but I was satisfied with just the lights and sounds. You could say that I was playing a smaller game within the larger gameworld that was available to me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2731 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

jun2024: watching an sc3k playthrough
Nice to toggle views
Nice to click something to change something
Nice to hear bus sound when you put down a bus stop
Nice to see diagonal pipes and roads
Nice to see natural undulating terrain outside the city
Smoke coming out of industrial building chimneys
Under construction
Nice to talk to individual citizens about their concerns<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2731<\/p>\n\n\n\n

About a month before our son was born, my wife went to get her hair done at a salon. I accompanied her, and got myself a haircut and a wash too. I\u2019m guessing most men, like me, never really experience getting your hair shampooed and washed by a professional. I found it to be a luxurious, deeply relaxing, meditative experience. And it didn\u2019t even cost that much!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But what really stuck with me was the following realization: I\u2019ve shampooed my own hair regularly all my life, and yet I had never thought of it as something that could be done pleasurably. It was always just a mundane task, to be done with, for the sake of hygiene. The next time I shampooed my hair in the shower, I made a deliberate effort to recreate the salon experience on my own, and that alone gave me probably 80% of the same effect. (If I were to guess, I could probably get to 90% with practice, whereas the last 10% comes from the pleasure of having someone else do it. I\u2019d also guess that my chosen hairstylist wasn\u2019t a grandmaster at shampooing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2731<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I can\u2019t remember how I got my first copy of Simcity 2000; it feels like I always had it. Nobody else in my family was interested in the city simulation game. I liked everything about it\u2013 I liked the soundtrack, I liked the newspapers with the strange and silly headlines, I liked the \u201cbzzzt\u201d sound when you laid down power lines. I like how, despite the somewhat limited technology of the time, the game felt alive<\/em>. The cars (little blue squares) were moving on the roads, the train moved along the rails, the smoke came out of the factories, the planes fly in the sky, the water pumps are alive. Buildings go up. A cargo ship leaves the seaport. A voice radios in to say, \u201cSimCopter One, reporting heavy traffic.\u201d The annual budget comes up, and the police chief tells me we need more police stations. All of this is done with a remarkably small number of pixels, frames, text. It is, after all, a simulation, and one that was developed in 1993.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m replaying the game right now in a web browser<\/a>. I thought I would play it for a few minutes for nostalgia\u2019s sake, but I\u2019ve kept that browser tab open for over a week now. There\u2019s just something about this game that really draws me in, and I\u2019d like to think about it for a bit. Before that, first some observations from my earliest playthroughs vs my latest one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2731<\/p>\n\n\n\n

while researching some details about simcity for this post I learned some funny things. I already knew that SimCity 2000 was a sequel to a simpler SimCity (1989)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2731<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a child I remember being obsessed with trying to smooth out shapes. I would actually spend hours using the editor tool to modify a somewhat organic looking landscape into<\/p>\n\n\n\n

there was something about the sense of possibility that these games gave me. you could inspect on every building~<\/p>\n\n\n\n

i dont think its an exaggeration to say that i kind of think of my body of work as a city. i even think of my friends\u2019 work as part of a wider \u2018mindcity\u2019 that we all share and inhabit together. (quote lewis thomas?)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

i remember being mindblown watching a video by jason silva titled \u201cto understand is to perceive patterns\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

there\u2019s an incredible reading list courtesy of will wright and team, the booklets, so much love and care put into the products, so much thinking. i find it very compelling how they had such wide-ranging interests, they weren\u2019t just game devs who were inspired solely by other games. they tried to bring in other influences, which is likely why the games feel so fresh. which makes me think about essays. sometimes i feel like it\u2019s a bit wrong of me to think of myself as an essayist if i\u2019m not reading tonnes of essays from other people<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2731<\/p>\n\n\n\n

mainly this post is to be a love letter to the game,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

but also i think i want to reflect on how my approach to playing twitter, playing computer, playing the internet feels different\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n