WEBVTT - The Story: The World According to SimCity w/ Chaim Gingold 0:00:14.200 --> 0:00:17.680 Welcome to tech Stuff. This is the story. Each week 0:00:17.720 --> 0:00:20.360 on Wednesdays, we bring you an in depth interview with 0:00:20.440 --> 0:00:22.479 someone who has a front row seat to the most 0:00:22.480 --> 0:00:28.040 fascinating things happening in tech today. We're joined by Heim Gingold, writer, 0:00:28.560 --> 0:00:32.839 game designer, and author of the book building SimCity, How 0:00:32.880 --> 0:00:36.879 to Put the World in a Machine and SimCity is 0:00:37.040 --> 0:00:40.320 just that our modern world in the form of a 0:00:40.360 --> 0:00:44.680 computer game. SimCity was released in nineteen eighty nine, and 0:00:44.720 --> 0:00:47.400 it laid the foundation for the type of interactive world 0:00:47.400 --> 0:00:52.160 building games like Minecraft that's so popular today. For those 0:00:52.159 --> 0:00:56.320 who haven't played, it's a simulation game. Essentially, you're the 0:00:56.360 --> 0:00:59.520 mayor of a city, and to play, you decide where 0:00:59.560 --> 0:01:02.880 to construct buildings, where to build infrastructure like roads and 0:01:02.960 --> 0:01:06.319 power grids. The game opens with a menu full of 0:01:06.360 --> 0:01:10.040 scenarios to choose from a damage San Francisco that needs 0:01:10.080 --> 0:01:14.000 to be rebuilt after an earthquake, Tokyo left in disarray 0:01:14.160 --> 0:01:17.600 after a monster attack. From there, you have a few 0:01:17.640 --> 0:01:20.880 years to restore your city to its former glrry. You 0:01:20.920 --> 0:01:23.399 can decide that there needs to be more fire stations 0:01:23.440 --> 0:01:26.399 to help with disaster cleanup, all that the best thing 0:01:26.440 --> 0:01:29.959 to do is to repair all of those octover skyscrapers. 0:01:30.680 --> 0:01:34.440 And while it might sound boring, it was a sensation. 0:01:35.160 --> 0:01:36.560 Here's Heimgingold. 0:01:36.840 --> 0:01:39.360 I mean, who would have thought that a game about 0:01:39.880 --> 0:01:44.039 land zoning and setting tax rates? You know, I guess 0:01:44.040 --> 0:01:46.440 building roads maybe you know, but would be a big hit. 0:01:46.520 --> 0:01:49.800 But it was. It's in Newsweek. It was the first 0:01:49.960 --> 0:01:52.120 time that Newsweek can ever reviewed a computer games at 0:01:52.160 --> 0:01:53.440 very at least, it was very unusual. 0:01:53.720 --> 0:01:57.200 In many ways, sim City's popularity has a lot to 0:01:57.240 --> 0:02:01.040 do with how banal the concept really is. It was 0:02:01.360 --> 0:02:05.120 a simulation of our everyday lives and you were essentially 0:02:05.200 --> 0:02:09.320 playing god. The creator behind sim City is a man 0:02:09.400 --> 0:02:12.520 named Will Wright, a game designer who made a career 0:02:12.639 --> 0:02:17.040 out of creating simulation games. Following SimCity, he designed games 0:02:17.080 --> 0:02:21.720 like sim Earth, sim Ant, and The Sims, which Wright 0:02:21.800 --> 0:02:26.120 thought of as a virtual dollhouse and a not so 0:02:26.160 --> 0:02:30.440 subtle satire of modern consumer culture, a satire with a 0:02:30.520 --> 0:02:33.959 lasting impression. The Sims is about to get the movie 0:02:34.000 --> 0:02:37.720 treatment from none other than Margo Robbie, who produced and 0:02:37.800 --> 0:02:42.680 starred in the hit movie based off another beloved plaything, Barbie. 0:02:42.840 --> 0:02:46.160 Our guest today, Heigeingold is no stranger to the sim 0:02:46.240 --> 0:02:49.440 City franchise. He was an intern for Will Wright back 0:02:49.480 --> 0:02:52.160 when he was getting his master's in digital media design. 0:02:52.960 --> 0:02:55.720 Then in two thousand and eight, they collaborated to create 0:02:55.760 --> 0:02:59.280 the game's spare. But Gingill's book isn't just a history 0:02:59.280 --> 0:03:03.760 of SimCity. It also explores the deep human desire to play, 0:03:04.400 --> 0:03:09.119 the cultural history of games and why simulation is so alluring. 0:03:09.600 --> 0:03:12.600 After reading Building sim City, I knew that I needed 0:03:12.639 --> 0:03:15.520 to talk to Gingol on this show because his book 0:03:15.560 --> 0:03:19.080 illuminates how the way we use technology can say a 0:03:19.080 --> 0:03:22.079 lot about who we are and our desire to leave 0:03:22.080 --> 0:03:26.200 a mark on the world. So, without further ado Heim Gingold, 0:03:26.480 --> 0:03:29.120 Welcome to tech Stuff. Thank you. So I want to 0:03:29.160 --> 0:03:32.720 ask you, why is twenty twenty four a good year 0:03:33.120 --> 0:03:35.840 to write a book about a game that was released 0:03:36.080 --> 0:03:39.120 thirty five years ago, the year I was born nineteen 0:03:39.120 --> 0:03:39.640 eighty nine. 0:03:39.920 --> 0:03:40.840 Maybe it isn't. 0:03:45.760 --> 0:03:47.760 That, at least a certain extent, it is, Yeah, I 0:03:47.760 --> 0:03:48.120 think that. 0:03:48.480 --> 0:03:50.680 Well, Look, I was interested in part and why did 0:03:50.720 --> 0:03:54.400 this game capture so many people's imagination? Like what is 0:03:54.440 --> 0:03:57.240 the mystique of SimCity which still persists? It's still It's 0:03:57.280 --> 0:03:59.560 even that sim City is not a well known particularly 0:03:59.560 --> 0:04:02.840 success full franchise at this particular moment, and not say 0:04:02.880 --> 0:04:06.360 compared to like the sims or Minecraft or robox a Fortnite. 0:04:06.920 --> 0:04:08.840 SimCity is still a well known game, and I think 0:04:08.880 --> 0:04:10.880 that it's trying to figure out why. It was a 0:04:10.880 --> 0:04:13.720 big part of why I wrote this book. And for me, 0:04:14.440 --> 0:04:16.320 what I found is that a lot of it had 0:04:16.320 --> 0:04:19.240 to do with the mystique of simulation itself and the 0:04:19.279 --> 0:04:21.279 mystique of computing. And I think you see that not 0:04:21.320 --> 0:04:24.279 even with like for instance, generative AI, with chatchipt, it 0:04:24.400 --> 0:04:27.200 is a simulation of a conversation. You know, it's like 0:04:27.320 --> 0:04:31.040 not a real agent, not a real person, whatever it is, 0:04:31.040 --> 0:04:33.400 but it's a simulation of a conversation. And I think 0:04:33.400 --> 0:04:34.799 that is fundamental to computing. 0:04:34.960 --> 0:04:38.240 But it feels like magic is cool in response. 0:04:38.320 --> 0:04:41.159 It's totally magic, and SimCity also is totally magic, and 0:04:41.160 --> 0:04:42.599 people were in trance by that. So I think that 0:04:42.640 --> 0:04:46.320 there's this kind of magic holding power that simulations have 0:04:46.480 --> 0:04:50.440 over us, and I think that SimCity was an early, widespread, 0:04:50.440 --> 0:04:54.360 influential example of the powers of stimulation totally. 0:04:54.520 --> 0:04:56.000 And the subtitle of the book, I guess is what 0:04:56.160 --> 0:04:59.520 the book is called, building sim City. How to put 0:04:59.560 --> 0:05:02.680 the world the machine, which is such a rich an 0:05:02.680 --> 0:05:05.320 evocative phrase. What did you mean by that, like bringing 0:05:05.360 --> 0:05:07.440 the world in the machine? I mean you just mentioned simulation. 0:05:08.000 --> 0:05:10.840 Yeah, I mean it's a bit of a puckish title, 0:05:10.960 --> 0:05:13.240 the sense that there's a whole tradition of people that 0:05:13.320 --> 0:05:16.119 are building models of the world and putting them inside 0:05:16.160 --> 0:05:19.840 of computers or pre digital computers. And so I was 0:05:19.920 --> 0:05:23.360 very interested in how people sought to take the complex, 0:05:23.440 --> 0:05:26.320 messy world outside of them that was bigger than anything 0:05:26.320 --> 0:05:29.520 that they could understand, and make it into a model, 0:05:29.560 --> 0:05:32.000 a toy almost that they can play with. So the 0:05:32.080 --> 0:05:35.200 how tunis is more like how to do this impossible thing, 0:05:35.279 --> 0:05:36.880 like how do you take the infinite and put it 0:05:36.920 --> 0:05:39.760 in something very finite and limited? And so I was 0:05:39.800 --> 0:05:43.040 trying to point out the sort of the impossibility of 0:05:43.080 --> 0:05:45.159 putting the world in the machine. 0:05:45.720 --> 0:05:46.960 There's the kind of hubris to it. 0:05:47.120 --> 0:05:48.440 Totally, totally. 0:05:48.520 --> 0:05:50.440 We'll speak to that because I was also curious about 0:05:50.480 --> 0:05:53.880 the two epigrowths to the book, which one is we're 0:05:53.920 --> 0:05:57.880 almost certainly living in a computer simulation and the other 0:05:58.000 --> 0:06:00.960 is software is eating the world. Yeah, so the we're 0:06:01.000 --> 0:06:03.240 living in a simulation thing is a very well known 0:06:03.279 --> 0:06:06.760 and dominant sort of strand of silica value thought software 0:06:06.800 --> 0:06:08.920 is eating the world. That's, of course Mark Andrewson, one 0:06:08.920 --> 0:06:12.640 of the most influential venture capitalists of the last couple 0:06:12.640 --> 0:06:15.080 of decades. That's a little harder to understand on the 0:06:15.080 --> 0:06:17.000 face of it. What does that mean and why was 0:06:17.040 --> 0:06:19.280 that an important epigraph to choose for the book. 0:06:20.040 --> 0:06:22.680 I mean, perhaps it's that there are people who, by 0:06:22.920 --> 0:06:26.320 making simulations of the whole world or exercises, are power over. 0:06:26.360 --> 0:06:29.720 It is that kind of the experience of playing Same City, 0:06:29.720 --> 0:06:32.240 because just very concretely, these are big and fascinating and 0:06:32.279 --> 0:06:35.919 to your point, seductive ideas and worlds, But how do 0:06:35.960 --> 0:06:37.720 they connect to a nineteenth computer game? 0:06:38.040 --> 0:06:40.920 When Jack brown Will write, co founder of Maxis, saw 0:06:41.040 --> 0:06:43.400 sim City like part of the appealing silence, this power 0:06:43.440 --> 0:06:46.279 fantasy is incredible. This is going to appeal to the 0:06:46.400 --> 0:06:51.039 sort of like megalomaniac impulse that I think is actually common. 0:06:51.080 --> 0:06:52.960 I think it's fundamental, it's human. I think you see 0:06:52.960 --> 0:06:55.200 it with children and toys and model building. It is 0:06:55.200 --> 0:06:56.880 the seductive power of models. 0:06:57.839 --> 0:06:59.440 Yeah, I think there's a lot of truth to that. 0:06:59.440 --> 0:07:04.839 There's something intoxicating about taking something rights for mundane like 0:07:04.920 --> 0:07:09.760 city planning and then taking control of it yourself, rather 0:07:09.760 --> 0:07:13.160 than being the subject of it, being control of it. 0:07:13.680 --> 0:07:15.720 At least that's why it looked like as an observer. 0:07:15.760 --> 0:07:18.280 As I mentioned, I was born in nineteen eighty nine, 0:07:18.360 --> 0:07:20.560 so sim City was just a bit too hard for me. 0:07:20.680 --> 0:07:23.880 But I remember watching my dad play and just playing 0:07:23.880 --> 0:07:27.440 around with a bit myself, and I couldn't really crack it. 0:07:27.960 --> 0:07:30.119 But then a couple of years later, the SIMS came out, 0:07:30.240 --> 0:07:34.520 and I was immediately obsessed because here were these people 0:07:34.600 --> 0:07:38.920 doing all the things that I had to do, eat, sleep, socialize, 0:07:38.920 --> 0:07:41.400 But instead of my parents being in charge of me 0:07:41.480 --> 0:07:44.240 doing those things, I was in charge of these characters 0:07:44.320 --> 0:07:45.080 doing those things. 0:07:45.320 --> 0:07:47.400 I mean, I think there's a whole book written about 0:07:47.440 --> 0:07:49.760 the SIMS. I did dig into the SIMS a lot. 0:07:49.840 --> 0:07:52.000 In some sense, it's almost like the climax in the 0:07:52.040 --> 0:07:56.120 book is the production of the SIMS. Because SIMP City 0:07:56.160 --> 0:07:58.520 comes out in nineteen eighty nine, and then some earth 0:07:58.640 --> 0:08:00.800 will where it falls up a Simmer nineteen ninety and 0:08:00.840 --> 0:08:03.840 then Aunt in nineteen ninety one, and then and then 0:08:04.000 --> 0:08:06.239 these sort of weird will write games sort of stop. 0:08:07.400 --> 0:08:12.160 So talk about sim end where you essentially simulate an 0:08:12.160 --> 0:08:16.000 ant colony, and then the journey to the sims, where 0:08:16.040 --> 0:08:21.240 you essentially simulate a family life and control the dates 0:08:21.240 --> 0:08:24.640 to the actions of everyone in the household. How did 0:08:24.640 --> 0:08:27.440 the sims come into existence? And why was it almost 0:08:27.480 --> 0:08:29.440 a decade after sim end? 0:08:30.120 --> 0:08:32.960 Apparently one of the origin points is this wildfire that 0:08:33.080 --> 0:08:37.320 spreads through Oakland, the Oakland Hills. It's devastating and siempsly 0:08:37.360 --> 0:08:39.240 he like narrowly makes out of it, actually him and 0:08:39.280 --> 0:08:41.520 his family, but they lose everything in the process. There 0:08:41.559 --> 0:08:46.480 are all their worldly possessions and will hate shopping, and 0:08:46.520 --> 0:08:48.920 of course he and his wife and daughter have to 0:08:48.960 --> 0:08:53.720 now repopulate their house with stuff. And it's while filling 0:08:53.760 --> 0:08:56.680 up their house with stuff, he's reflecting as he does. 0:08:56.720 --> 0:08:59.240 He's thinking about what does all this stuff mean? Why 0:08:59.240 --> 0:09:03.199 do we want it and so, And of course he's 0:09:03.200 --> 0:09:07.360 also reading about architecture and psychology, and he starts moving 0:09:07.400 --> 0:09:11.560 towards a model of people simulation. But also importantly he's 0:09:11.559 --> 0:09:13.800 taking a lot of inspiration from the ants, which are 0:09:13.920 --> 0:09:16.400 he points out, one of the only life forms that 0:09:16.480 --> 0:09:20.319 survives this fire. And ants have very little internal cognitive state, 0:09:20.440 --> 0:09:23.760 but they're very responsible for their environment, and yet as 0:09:23.800 --> 0:09:28.120 a collective of the ants exhibit incredible intelligence. So ants 0:09:28.160 --> 0:09:32.080 are very popular simulation subjects for artificial life and artificial 0:09:32.120 --> 0:09:36.720 intelligence researchers at that time. Also and Will starts thinking 0:09:36.760 --> 0:09:40.160 about building a model of people, also informed by this emergent, 0:09:40.280 --> 0:09:43.840 bottom up, embodied interactionist frame. I don't think he used 0:09:43.880 --> 0:09:45.360 those terms the time, but those are the that's the 0:09:45.360 --> 0:09:50.240 academic terms. So he's thinking about consumerism, psychology, what is 0:09:50.240 --> 0:09:53.120 the meaning of this stuff, architecture, thinking about this embodied 0:09:53.120 --> 0:09:56.240 model of intelligence. But like with some City, he has 0:09:56.240 --> 0:09:58.600 a hard time getting people to take this idea seriously. 0:09:59.360 --> 0:10:01.560 Why would, as Jeff BoNT told me, why would you 0:10:01.640 --> 0:10:06.800 make a game about a dollhouse? Because dollhouses are for girls, 0:10:06.800 --> 0:10:09.880 and girls don't play computer games, of course, and the 0:10:09.920 --> 0:10:13.480 SIMS is not released until forget exactly ninety nineteen thousand, 0:10:14.080 --> 0:10:16.280 so it's like almost ten years of development. 0:10:16.760 --> 0:10:19.920 You're talking about Jeff Brown, who founded Maxis with Will Wright, 0:10:19.960 --> 0:10:22.800 which was the studio behind SimCity and its spin offs. 0:10:23.640 --> 0:10:26.199 I'd say today it's quite shocking to hear somebody's day 0:10:26.559 --> 0:10:29.599 girls don't play games. I guess the gaming culture was 0:10:29.679 --> 0:10:32.160 very different by it than hyper masculine totally. 0:10:32.200 --> 0:10:35.240 And I think the fact that SimCity appealed to not 0:10:35.360 --> 0:10:37.960 just boys, not just men and boys, but also girls 0:10:37.960 --> 0:10:40.880 and women is part of why the SIMS came into existence. 0:10:40.920 --> 0:10:43.520 Because you look at the history of Maxis, access attracts 0:10:43.520 --> 0:10:48.240 a lot of very talented women and roles of design, marketing, production, 0:10:48.679 --> 0:10:52.240 and that sort of sets the circumstances that enable the 0:10:52.240 --> 0:10:54.720 SIMS to come into existence and become what it becomes. 0:10:55.080 --> 0:10:58.040 Of course, you don't just write about these games. You've 0:10:58.080 --> 0:11:01.319 also made them. You work with will write as an intern, 0:11:01.360 --> 0:11:03.600 and I think my favorite quote from your whole book 0:11:03.720 --> 0:11:07.040 is quote my job was to make software toys for 0:11:07.080 --> 0:11:10.480 the world's most talented toy maker. I was in Wonker's 0:11:10.520 --> 0:11:14.520 chocolate factory. What were these software toys? 0:11:15.320 --> 0:11:17.760 My job was to make prototypes. I was very good 0:11:17.880 --> 0:11:20.679 at making bits of software like sketches in a sense, 0:11:21.160 --> 0:11:23.120 and so I just make these sketches. When I built 0:11:23.240 --> 0:11:28.160 models of I don't know, cultural evolution, bacteria growing in 0:11:28.200 --> 0:11:31.959 a Putri dish, civilization spreading in the galaxy, like, it 0:11:32.080 --> 0:11:33.599 was just all kinds of stuff that we made and 0:11:33.760 --> 0:11:34.720 it was just really fun. 0:11:35.520 --> 0:11:37.720 You know. It strikes me that part of building a 0:11:37.760 --> 0:11:41.480 game is hardcore programming that the other part is coming 0:11:41.520 --> 0:11:45.160 up with the rules. And in these simulation games, the 0:11:45.280 --> 0:11:47.840 rules were designed to mimic life as much as possible, 0:11:48.280 --> 0:11:50.440 So to make them you had to be thinking pretty 0:11:50.440 --> 0:11:54.800 expansively and philosophically and critically about how culture is formed 0:11:54.880 --> 0:11:59.600 and how it functions. I think will Wright's first interview question, 0:11:59.679 --> 0:12:01.640 get it exactually this, that's right. 0:12:01.640 --> 0:12:03.280 That was the interview question that he gave me over 0:12:03.360 --> 0:12:06.720 email when I, uh what I went to work with him. 0:12:07.360 --> 0:12:09.680 He said, yeah, here's an exercise for you to think about. 0:12:09.720 --> 0:12:13.319 If you had to define all possible intelligent cultures, historic 0:12:13.360 --> 0:12:17.320 and future, biological to mechanical, with less than ten parameters, 0:12:17.360 --> 0:12:20.240 what would they be. These parameters should be high enough 0:12:20.480 --> 0:12:23.240 to apply to any conceivable culture, yet low enough to 0:12:23.280 --> 0:12:28.200 derive tangible assets our technology, cities, behavior. A couple of 0:12:28.280 --> 0:12:31.679 candidates we've come up with are introverted extroverted. How much 0:12:31.760 --> 0:12:34.360 is the culture's attention focused on itself first understanding the 0:12:34.360 --> 0:12:38.120 outside world? And how static or expansionistic is it. I'd 0:12:38.160 --> 0:12:40.839 be interested to hear your list of parameters. So he 0:12:40.960 --> 0:12:43.160 sends that on March twenty fifth, two thousand and two, 0:12:43.880 --> 0:12:45.640 and I just want to comment that it's not just 0:12:45.760 --> 0:12:49.720 that the sort of that marvelous sense of abstraction that 0:12:49.960 --> 0:12:52.320 Will is pointing to you here that is so beautiful. 0:12:52.320 --> 0:12:54.560 It's also he's saying that they should be high enough 0:12:54.600 --> 0:12:57.440 to apply any conceivable culture. So he wants this generality. 0:12:57.679 --> 0:12:59.880 But it can't just be some thought experiment. It's got 0:12:59.920 --> 0:13:03.400 to be conquered enough that we could derive tangible assets 0:13:03.400 --> 0:13:05.520 for our game from it, right, Like, It's like, it's 0:13:05.559 --> 0:13:08.960 got to be actionable in a way, there's a meaningful 0:13:09.000 --> 0:13:09.520 to all player. 0:13:14.840 --> 0:13:16.520 We're going to take a quick break, but when we 0:13:16.559 --> 0:13:19.920 come back, we explore the very human need to play 0:13:20.440 --> 0:13:24.679 and just how serious games can get. From Viking burials 0:13:24.880 --> 0:13:38.000 to World War two. Stay with us. So, I'm your 0:13:38.040 --> 0:13:40.520 book is as much a history of sim City as 0:13:40.520 --> 0:13:43.559 it is a history of gaming itself. There's one part 0:13:43.559 --> 0:13:45.240 of your book that I couldn't resist bringing up, which 0:13:45.280 --> 0:13:48.840 is about Vikings, who it turns out were avid gamers 0:13:48.840 --> 0:13:50.520 in their own right. Can you talk a little bit 0:13:50.520 --> 0:13:50.880 about that? 0:13:51.480 --> 0:13:55.440 Yeah, so, right, Vikings, we think of that. There's these 0:13:55.679 --> 0:13:59.000 you know, I in my imagination, perhaps the cinematic imagination, 0:13:59.200 --> 0:14:02.760 is bloodthirsty warriors, which perhaps they were bold warriors, but 0:14:03.240 --> 0:14:06.079 they also really loved board games, apparently, and they were 0:14:06.080 --> 0:14:10.000 buried with them. And these elite burials, they had people 0:14:10.000 --> 0:14:13.400 in their boats with their music instruments and weapons and 0:14:13.440 --> 0:14:17.440 their playing pieces for their games. The Anthropolis don't really 0:14:17.440 --> 0:14:19.640 know why they're there, but they speculate that they indicate 0:14:20.280 --> 0:14:22.960 ability to fight, the ability to think strategically, that these 0:14:23.040 --> 0:14:27.440 represent values that Vikings treasured in their warrior life also 0:14:28.040 --> 0:14:29.200 their playing life. 0:14:29.480 --> 0:14:31.080 I think one of the themes of your book is 0:14:31.080 --> 0:14:33.600 that games are a serious matter. I mean, the Vikings 0:14:33.600 --> 0:14:36.280 obviously thought so enough to be buried with their board games, 0:14:36.800 --> 0:14:40.080 and the sim franchise was in part to teach us 0:14:40.080 --> 0:14:43.800 more about how the modern world worked. But more recently, 0:14:44.600 --> 0:14:48.280 gaming was the backbone of another very serious matter. Last 0:14:48.320 --> 0:14:51.040 year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to a team that 0:14:51.080 --> 0:14:54.680 developed an AI program that predicts the structure of proteins 0:14:54.680 --> 0:14:57.960 called Alpha Fold, and Alpha Fold was based off another 0:14:58.000 --> 0:15:01.560 program called Alpha Go, which had a very different objective, 0:15:01.640 --> 0:15:03.680 which was to beat the game Go, which is a 0:15:03.760 --> 0:15:07.600 kind of Asian game with some similarities to chess. And 0:15:07.640 --> 0:15:10.080 it's just part for me to get over how this 0:15:10.240 --> 0:15:14.520 Nobel Prize winning AI program that's kind of you know, 0:15:14.600 --> 0:15:17.280 doing the impossible, building new types of protein that could 0:15:17.320 --> 0:15:20.640 help us fight, you know, diseases in the future. Entire 0:15:20.720 --> 0:15:24.960 new ways is based off a program that was developed 0:15:25.000 --> 0:15:27.640 to beat a game. And so I want to ask you, 0:15:27.720 --> 0:15:30.280 is this kind of a one off connection or is 0:15:30.280 --> 0:15:34.520 there a deeper connection here between advances in computing and 0:15:34.800 --> 0:15:35.720 playing games. 0:15:36.080 --> 0:15:38.600 So you look at the history of computing, it is 0:15:38.800 --> 0:15:41.240 sort of games and the history of computing are inseparable, 0:15:41.440 --> 0:15:44.600 and chess figures probably a history of artificial intelligence. Games 0:15:44.600 --> 0:15:47.400 I've all started to do. And then Demissabas, the co 0:15:47.520 --> 0:15:50.560 founder of DeepMind, who was one of the co winners 0:15:50.600 --> 0:15:53.080 of the Nobel Prize. He started his career as a 0:15:53.120 --> 0:15:55.600 game developer, worked for Peter Model and another very well 0:15:55.680 --> 0:15:59.600 known game game creator who had one game, I believe 0:15:59.640 --> 0:16:04.640 where you play a golden age Hollywood studio boss and 0:16:04.680 --> 0:16:07.080 you have to like manage your stable of talent. So 0:16:07.160 --> 0:16:11.440 Demostovas works for Peter Malnu and then the his own 0:16:11.520 --> 0:16:13.040 game thing for a while, and then at some point 0:16:13.160 --> 0:16:16.360 he leaves games and goes back to do a PhD. 0:16:16.720 --> 0:16:19.600 And he starts going on this path that leads him 0:16:19.640 --> 0:16:22.080 to doing this work with machine learning and heural networks 0:16:22.880 --> 0:16:24.920 from from there and then but then at deep Mind 0:16:24.960 --> 0:16:27.800 deep minds early some of its early breakthrough work was 0:16:27.800 --> 0:16:31.320 in making artificial intelligences that could play Atari twenty six 0:16:31.440 --> 0:16:34.840 hundred games. And part of the reason that this works 0:16:34.880 --> 0:16:37.520 is that games are so important to AI more generally, 0:16:37.560 --> 0:16:42.320 is that games provide these very constrained environments with clear 0:16:43.280 --> 0:16:46.240 winning and losing conditions. So that's like, that's perfect for 0:16:46.880 --> 0:16:50.440 an artificial intelligence to work. I mean games, life is complex, 0:16:50.520 --> 0:16:55.120 it's messy, there is no clear winning and losing, but 0:16:55.240 --> 0:16:57.760 a game provide gives you this illusion or this it 0:16:57.840 --> 0:17:02.160 creates this this little fictional make believe spaces where you 0:17:02.200 --> 0:17:06.040 can have clear agency, clear outcomes, clear moves, clear rules. 0:17:06.040 --> 0:17:07.320 So it's perfect for computing. 0:17:08.400 --> 0:17:10.960 I think going back to sim City specifically in this 0:17:11.080 --> 0:17:13.800 moment in the late eighties early nineties, did sim City 0:17:14.040 --> 0:17:19.080 contribute to the development of computing? Did it popularize it? 0:17:19.160 --> 0:17:22.639 What is sim City's role in this incredibly rich history 0:17:22.640 --> 0:17:25.280 of the interaction between games and developments and computing. 0:17:25.520 --> 0:17:27.000 Well, that was one of the things that I really 0:17:27.000 --> 0:17:30.919 got lost in writing this book was looking at the 0:17:31.359 --> 0:17:34.600 looking at how simp City sort of starts interactslect just 0:17:34.600 --> 0:17:39.760 with popular culture, and Nintendo's Shigaro Miomoto comes out. He 0:17:39.960 --> 0:17:42.479 sets in motion the licensing of SimCity so that they 0:17:42.520 --> 0:17:45.199 can put it on the Nintendo right away. But at 0:17:45.200 --> 0:17:49.040 the same time, Access is also making deals with enterprise 0:17:49.359 --> 0:17:52.080 firms like Chevron to create things like some refinery. And 0:17:52.119 --> 0:17:54.639 then there's the Santa Fe Institute, which is a recently 0:17:54.720 --> 0:17:59.119 founded research institution that's all about complexity, science and emergence, 0:17:59.119 --> 0:18:01.720 and they established a rich set of connections with will 0:18:01.800 --> 0:18:04.360 Right and Maxis as well. So Maxis sort of traffics 0:18:04.359 --> 0:18:06.840 between these different computing worlds. I think that was also 0:18:06.880 --> 0:18:09.399 part of the magic and the mystique of some City 0:18:09.520 --> 0:18:13.480 is how it brought these esoteric subjects that people knew 0:18:13.520 --> 0:18:17.960 about into some into like this toy, this toy forum 0:18:18.000 --> 0:18:18.800 that can come home. 0:18:19.920 --> 0:18:24.760 So Maxus introduced to popularize the notion of simulation as 0:18:24.800 --> 0:18:28.440 something which everyone could kind of understand and literally play with. 0:18:28.720 --> 0:18:32.439 They weren't the company who then, you know, developed the 0:18:32.520 --> 0:18:37.320 enormous commercial opportunity of simulation. But fast forward into today, 0:18:38.240 --> 0:18:41.359 you know, what role does simulation play in all of 0:18:41.400 --> 0:18:44.640 our lives? Versus the nineties. I mean, how how ubiquity 0:18:44.800 --> 0:18:48.000 is computer simulation in terms of our everyday lives. 0:18:48.640 --> 0:18:50.760 I think simulation is everywhere. I think even at the 0:18:50.800 --> 0:18:54.560 time people were playing Nintendo games, they were playing with simulations. 0:18:54.560 --> 0:18:56.560 I think sim City just sort of made it overt 0:18:56.640 --> 0:18:59.000 in a sense. This is a simulation and playing with 0:18:59.040 --> 0:19:02.200 a model of a city people witness. I think about there. 0:19:02.480 --> 0:19:05.040 I argue that all of computing is in effect a 0:19:05.119 --> 0:19:07.600 kind of simulation. I think that's basically what Alan Turing 0:19:09.200 --> 0:19:10.000 how he has it. 0:19:10.640 --> 0:19:12.720 Are you putting the world in the machine? 0:19:12.880 --> 0:19:14.159 Are you putting the world in the machine? I mean 0:19:14.200 --> 0:19:16.640 you look at the idea of a turning machine, which 0:19:16.640 --> 0:19:19.000 is fundational in the computer science and computing. It's all 0:19:19.000 --> 0:19:21.560 about how one machine can pretend to be another kind 0:19:21.560 --> 0:19:26.359 of machine. So that this very mathematical idea has very 0:19:26.520 --> 0:19:30.840 sort of he has a very clear narrative and philosophical resonances. 0:19:30.920 --> 0:19:33.200 It's there from the very outset, and I think that 0:19:33.200 --> 0:19:37.200 that's what software is. Software is a way to tell 0:19:37.240 --> 0:19:39.520 a machine how to pretend to be another kind of machine. 0:19:39.560 --> 0:19:42.000 That's why you can download an app on your smartphone, 0:19:42.080 --> 0:19:44.680 and now your smartphone does something new. It can pretend 0:19:44.760 --> 0:19:48.040 to be some other thing now, whether it's a video 0:19:48.080 --> 0:19:51.040 player or messaging app or a particular game. 0:19:51.880 --> 0:19:55.320 And in terms of the history of simulation, the book 0:19:55.400 --> 0:19:59.439 suggests that basically the end of World War two was 0:19:59.520 --> 0:20:03.119 when and of the possibilities and the reality of simulation 0:20:03.320 --> 0:20:05.520 became a thing. Is that right? 0:20:06.160 --> 0:20:10.360 Modern digital computing really is born in a sense in 0:20:10.400 --> 0:20:12.560 the wake of World War two, or sort of during 0:20:12.600 --> 0:20:14.959 and after World War Two. The reason the military had 0:20:14.960 --> 0:20:18.280 a lot of computing hardware, not just like modern computers, 0:20:18.400 --> 0:20:21.439 was to calculate the trajectory of bullets so that they 0:20:21.440 --> 0:20:23.919 can make these artillery firing tables that you needed for 0:20:23.960 --> 0:20:26.240 any new munitions you were going to deploy in the field. 0:20:26.280 --> 0:20:28.280 So the gunners would look up at these tables like, oh, 0:20:28.320 --> 0:20:29.800 I want to aim at this target. I need to 0:20:29.840 --> 0:20:31.639 look what is what I need to dial in. That 0:20:31.720 --> 0:20:34.600 requires a lot of simulation to simulate these shells. So 0:20:34.880 --> 0:20:36.720 and these were often done by hand, you know, there 0:20:36.760 --> 0:20:40.000 were these often women, these calculating girls. And at some 0:20:40.000 --> 0:20:42.720 point the digital computers became faster that they can compute 0:20:43.080 --> 0:20:46.359 the trajectory of the shell faster than that actual shell 0:20:46.400 --> 0:20:49.920 could travel. Like that is the moment when simulations sort 0:20:49.920 --> 0:20:53.000 of become something new, really new, where the computer can 0:20:53.000 --> 0:20:55.359 simulate faster than real time, in this case just a 0:20:55.400 --> 0:20:58.560 single bullet shell, and that being you know, nowadays, of 0:20:58.560 --> 0:21:01.600 course you can simulate a gagiliar of these things, you know, 0:21:01.680 --> 0:21:02.520 at a plank of an eye. 0:21:02.960 --> 0:21:05.080 There's this sort of theme in the book which also 0:21:05.119 --> 0:21:07.320 has to do with the birth of sim City, which 0:21:07.359 --> 0:21:11.440 is all of these technologies that were developed as military 0:21:11.440 --> 0:21:15.399 technologies then in fact became sort of city management and 0:21:15.480 --> 0:21:19.480 behavior economics technologies, which then showed up represents in sim 0:21:19.480 --> 0:21:22.720 City in the nineties. Can you kind of shot that frogransion. 0:21:22.840 --> 0:21:25.119 Yeah. I mean it's almost like a cliche of the 0:21:25.160 --> 0:21:29.159 history of technology that technologies developed for war purposes, for 0:21:29.240 --> 0:21:34.520 military purposes, then becomes something else that becomes commonplace. And 0:21:34.520 --> 0:21:37.439 that's definitely the case with computing and simulation. And I 0:21:37.480 --> 0:21:40.159