Sim City isn’t a simulation. It’s a game. The reason it was commercially successful is because it was fun.

This is explicitly a different goal from creating a simulator. A simulator can be fun to certain groups of people, but it’s not designed to be fun to large groups of people. Games are.

So here’s the rub. When people draw a correlation between sim city and reality, are they saying that the way to make a simulation of reality is to make a fun game? Because sim city was designed to be a fun game first and foremost, not a simulator.

Can’t it be both? Well, sure. Lots of things are. But when you’re saying that you’re putting the world in a machine, it becomes a different discussion. Is the best way to put the world in a machine to make it fun? That doesn’t seem too plausible, even if the result is fun for some people. So both the title and the descriptions of world building (as in, the world we live in, not a fantasy world) seem off the mark.

I genuinely don’t know if it’s worth pointing this out. But then I read the description, and again, they’re saying very clearly that this book is comparing simulation of reality to a commercially successful game that was designed with a different goal in mind. Is this just coincidence?

If Chris Sawyer made a city builder that dived deep into simulation.. that's what I'm aiming for.

Still in early development: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2287430/Metropolis_1998/

Did you know that Maxis (creators of SimCity) sold investors on a vision a world where "simulation" was a common use-case for computers, and Maxis was the company at the center of simulation software?

This was the first of many fascinating revelations this book brought me. Reading it, I found myself getting caught up in their grand vision.

The first part of _Building SimCity_ is a deep dive into the game's historical antecedents: from tabletop city simulations and Vannevar Bush's analogue computers, to systems thinking and cellular automata. This part explores many ideas that I have briefly encountered before and wondered "why hasn't anyone taken these wonderful ideas and produced something great with them?" The book answers: "Will Wright did, you just didn't notice." More specifically, _Building SimCity_ argues that SimCity the game is a synthesis and application of many great ideas, which are mostly hidden to the player. This book gives us a look behind the curtain.

The second part of the book spends chapters on the design of SimCity, the history of Maxis, and the experience of playing SimCity. The implementation chapter has no code listings — as a programmer, reading it feels like reading an exceptionally clear design document, explaining the real-time (UI) clock and the simulation clock, the 16-bit representation of map tile state, the main simulation loop, and the map scan algorithm for information propogation across tiles. This chapter is accompanied by exceptionally well-designed diagrams, which I find quite valuable on their own.

To set expectations: this is an academic work. It contains war stories and technical details, but it also goes to great lengths to situate SimCity in its historical context, connecting it to previous ideas, and providing full citations. But though the prose has an academic bent, I find it very engaging and readable.

The only negative thing I can say about this book is that the printed edition has a chemical smell, which I assume is due to the full-color printing and will presumeably fade with time.

[Disclaimer: I haven't finished this book yet, I've read the first few chapters about the history of simulation and also skipped ahead to the chapter about SimCity's implementation details. I'm posting this here because it's what I've written out in emails to friends about the book; I'll update my review when I finish reading it.]

https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520208001/silicon-second-na...

Is it possible to create good simulation games of substantial global events and the subsequent possible outcomes. Some examples would be a pandemic like Covid and how it shaped societies differently based on preconditions and policies OR a discovery of nuclear fission that sparked building nuclear weapon (I.e the manhattan project) and fueled the cold war OR the realization and threat of man made global warming and the global reaction and policy making and many possible outcomes.

And if not why are they not feasible for games. Is there something that makes these types of events and their outcome hard to simulate?