https://obscuritory.com/sim/when-simcity-got-serious/
"
SimCity wasn’t meant to be taken seriously.
The game was inspired by research on real-world urban planning concepts and
although it was created as a way for players to experiment with running a city,
the goal was to be fun rather than accurate. “I realized early on, because of
chaos theory and a lot of other things,” said designer Will Wright, “that it’s
kind of hopeless to approach simulations like that, as predictive endeavors.
But we’ve kind of caricatured our systems.
SimCity was always meant to be a
caricature of the way a city works, not a realistic model of the way a city
works.”
“I think if we tried to make it realistic, we would be doing something that we
wouldn’t want to do,” Wright said in an interview in 1999. But that didn’t stop
companies from believing Maxis could design realistic simulations. Will Wright
didn’t believe that was even possible. “Many people come to us and say, ‘You
should do the professional version,'” he continued. “That really scares me
because I know how pathetic the simulations are, really, compared to reality.
The last thing I want people to come away with is that we’re on the verge of
being able to simulate the way that a city really develops, because we’re not.”
Maxis didn’t want to make professional simulation games. But for two brief,
strange years, they did."
Via Esther Schindler.
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
