Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff. This is the story. Each week
Speaker 1: on Wednesdays, we bring you an in depth interview with
Speaker 1: someone who has a front row seat to the most
Speaker 1: fascinating things happening in tech today. We're joined by Heim Gingold, writer,
Speaker 1: game designer, and author of the book building SimCity, How
Speaker 1: to Put the World in a Machine and SimCity is
Speaker 1: just that our modern world in the form of a
Speaker 1: computer game. SimCity was released in nineteen eighty nine, and
Speaker 1: it laid the foundation for the type of interactive world
Speaker 1: building games like Minecraft that's so popular today. For those
Speaker 1: who haven't played, it's a simulation game. Essentially, you're the
Speaker 1: mayor of a city, and to play, you decide where
Speaker 1: to construct buildings, where to build infrastructure like roads and
Speaker 1: power grids. The game opens with a menu full of
Speaker 1: scenarios to choose from a damage San Francisco that needs
Speaker 1: to be rebuilt after an earthquake, Tokyo left in disarray
Speaker 1: after a monster attack. From there, you have a few
Speaker 1: years to restore your city to its former glrry. You
Speaker 1: can decide that there needs to be more fire stations
Speaker 1: to help with disaster cleanup, all that the best thing
Speaker 1: to do is to repair all of those octover skyscrapers.
Speaker 1: And while it might sound boring, it was a sensation.
Speaker 1: Here's Heimgingold.
Speaker 2: I mean, who would have thought that a game about
Speaker 2: land zoning and setting tax rates? You know, I guess
Speaker 2: building roads maybe you know, but would be a big hit.
Speaker 2: But it was. It's in Newsweek. It was the first
Speaker 2: time that Newsweek can ever reviewed a computer games at
Speaker 2: very at least, it was very unusual.
Speaker 1: In many ways, sim City's popularity has a lot to
Speaker 1: do with how banal the concept really is. It was
Speaker 1: a simulation of our everyday lives and you were essentially
Speaker 1: playing god. The creator behind sim City is a man
Speaker 1: named Will Wright, a game designer who made a career
Speaker 1: out of creating simulation games. Following SimCity, he designed games
Speaker 1: like sim Earth, sim Ant, and The Sims, which Wright
Speaker 1: thought of as a virtual dollhouse and a not so
Speaker 1: subtle satire of modern consumer culture, a satire with a
Speaker 1: lasting impression. The Sims is about to get the movie
Speaker 1: treatment from none other than Margo Robbie, who produced and
Speaker 1: starred in the hit movie based off another beloved plaything, Barbie.
Speaker 1: Our guest today, Heigeingold is no stranger to the sim
Speaker 1: City franchise. He was an intern for Will Wright back
Speaker 1: when he was getting his master's in digital media design.
Speaker 1: Then in two thousand and eight, they collaborated to create
Speaker 1: the game's spare. But Gingill's book isn't just a history
Speaker 1: of SimCity. It also explores the deep human desire to play,
Speaker 1: the cultural history of games and why simulation is so alluring.
Speaker 1: After reading Building sim City, I knew that I needed
Speaker 1: to talk to Gingol on this show because his book
Speaker 1: illuminates how the way we use technology can say a
Speaker 1: lot about who we are and our desire to leave
Speaker 1: a mark on the world. So, without further ado Heim Gingold,
Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff. Thank you. So I want to
Speaker 1: ask you, why is twenty twenty four a good year
Speaker 1: to write a book about a game that was released
Speaker 1: thirty five years ago, the year I was born nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty nine.
Speaker 2: Maybe it isn't.
Speaker 1: That, at least a certain extent, it is, Yeah, I
Speaker 1: think that.
Speaker 2: Well, Look, I was interested in part and why did
Speaker 2: this game capture so many people's imagination? Like what is
Speaker 2: the mystique of SimCity which still persists? It's still It's
Speaker 2: even that sim City is not a well known particularly
Speaker 2: success full franchise at this particular moment, and not say
Speaker 2: compared to like the sims or Minecraft or robox a Fortnite.
Speaker 2: SimCity is still a well known game, and I think
Speaker 2: that it's trying to figure out why. It was a
Speaker 2: big part of why I wrote this book. And for me,
Speaker 2: what I found is that a lot of it had
Speaker 2: to do with the mystique of simulation itself and the
Speaker 2: mystique of computing. And I think you see that not
Speaker 2: even with like for instance, generative AI, with chatchipt, it
Speaker 2: is a simulation of a conversation. You know, it's like
Speaker 2: not a real agent, not a real person, whatever it is,
Speaker 2: but it's a simulation of a conversation. And I think
Speaker 2: that is fundamental to computing.
Speaker 1: But it feels like magic is cool in response.
Speaker 2: It's totally magic, and SimCity also is totally magic, and
Speaker 2: people were in trance by that. So I think that
Speaker 2: there's this kind of magic holding power that simulations have
Speaker 2: over us, and I think that SimCity was an early, widespread,
Speaker 2: influential example of the powers of stimulation totally.
Speaker 1: And the subtitle of the book, I guess is what
Speaker 1: the book is called, building sim City. How to put
Speaker 1: the world the machine, which is such a rich an
Speaker 1: evocative phrase. What did you mean by that, like bringing
Speaker 1: the world in the machine? I mean you just mentioned simulation.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean it's a bit of a puckish title,
Speaker 2: the sense that there's a whole tradition of people that
Speaker 2: are building models of the world and putting them inside
Speaker 2: of computers or pre digital computers. And so I was
Speaker 2: very interested in how people sought to take the complex,
Speaker 2: messy world outside of them that was bigger than anything
Speaker 2: that they could understand, and make it into a model,
Speaker 2: a toy almost that they can play with. So the
Speaker 2: how tunis is more like how to do this impossible thing,
Speaker 2: like how do you take the infinite and put it
Speaker 2: in something very finite and limited? And so I was
Speaker 2: trying to point out the sort of the impossibility of
Speaker 2: putting the world in the machine.
Speaker 1: There's the kind of hubris to it.
Speaker 2: Totally, totally.
Speaker 1: We'll speak to that because I was also curious about
Speaker 1: the two epigrowths to the book, which one is we're
Speaker 1: almost certainly living in a computer simulation and the other
Speaker 1: is software is eating the world. Yeah, so the we're
Speaker 1: living in a simulation thing is a very well known
Speaker 1: and dominant sort of strand of silica value thought software
Speaker 1: is eating the world. That's, of course Mark Andrewson, one
Speaker 1: of the most influential venture capitalists of the last couple
Speaker 1: of decades. That's a little harder to understand on the
Speaker 1: face of it. What does that mean and why was
Speaker 1: that an important epigraph to choose for the book.
Speaker 2: I mean, perhaps it's that there are people who, by
Speaker 2: making simulations of the whole world or exercises, are power over.
Speaker 1: It is that kind of the experience of playing Same City,
Speaker 1: because just very concretely, these are big and fascinating and
Speaker 1: to your point, seductive ideas and worlds, But how do
Speaker 1: they connect to a nineteenth computer game?
Speaker 2: When Jack brown Will write, co founder of Maxis, saw
Speaker 2: sim City like part of the appealing silence, this power
Speaker 2: fantasy is incredible. This is going to appeal to the
Speaker 2: sort of like megalomaniac impulse that I think is actually common.
Speaker 2: I think it's fundamental, it's human. I think you see
Speaker 2: it with children and toys and model building. It is
Speaker 2: the seductive power of models.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think there's a lot of truth to that.
Speaker 1: There's something intoxicating about taking something rights for mundane like
Speaker 1: city planning and then taking control of it yourself, rather
Speaker 1: than being the subject of it, being control of it.
Speaker 1: At least that's why it looked like as an observer.
Speaker 1: As I mentioned, I was born in nineteen eighty nine,
Speaker 1: so sim City was just a bit too hard for me.
Speaker 1: But I remember watching my dad play and just playing
Speaker 1: around with a bit myself, and I couldn't really crack it.
Speaker 1: But then a couple of years later, the SIMS came out,
Speaker 1: and I was immediately obsessed because here were these people
Speaker 1: doing all the things that I had to do, eat, sleep, socialize,
Speaker 1: But instead of my parents being in charge of me
Speaker 1: doing those things, I was in charge of these characters
Speaker 1: doing those things.
Speaker 2: I mean, I think there's a whole book written about
Speaker 2: the SIMS. I did dig into the SIMS a lot.
Speaker 2: In some sense, it's almost like the climax in the
Speaker 2: book is the production of the SIMS. Because SIMP City
Speaker 2: comes out in nineteen eighty nine, and then some earth
Speaker 2: will where it falls up a Simmer nineteen ninety and
Speaker 2: then Aunt in nineteen ninety one, and then and then
Speaker 2: these sort of weird will write games sort of stop.
Speaker 1: So talk about sim end where you essentially simulate an
Speaker 1: ant colony, and then the journey to the sims, where
Speaker 1: you essentially simulate a family life and control the dates
Speaker 1: to the actions of everyone in the household. How did
Speaker 1: the sims come into existence? And why was it almost
Speaker 1: a decade after sim end?
Speaker 2: Apparently one of the origin points is this wildfire that
Speaker 2: spreads through Oakland, the Oakland Hills. It's devastating and siempsly
Speaker 2: he like narrowly makes out of it, actually him and
Speaker 2: his family, but they lose everything in the process. There
Speaker 2: are all their worldly possessions and will hate shopping, and
Speaker 2: of course he and his wife and daughter have to
Speaker 2: now repopulate their house with stuff. And it's while filling
Speaker 2: up their house with stuff, he's reflecting as he does.
Speaker 2: He's thinking about what does all this stuff mean? Why
Speaker 2: do we want it and so, And of course he's
Speaker 2: also reading about architecture and psychology, and he starts moving
Speaker 2: towards a model of people simulation. But also importantly he's
Speaker 2: taking a lot of inspiration from the ants, which are
Speaker 2: he points out, one of the only life forms that
Speaker 2: survives this fire. And ants have very little internal cognitive state,
Speaker 2: but they're very responsible for their environment, and yet as
Speaker 2: a collective of the ants exhibit incredible intelligence. So ants
Speaker 2: are very popular simulation subjects for artificial life and artificial
Speaker 2: intelligence researchers at that time. Also and Will starts thinking
Speaker 2: about building a model of people, also informed by this emergent,
Speaker 2: bottom up, embodied interactionist frame. I don't think he used
Speaker 2: those terms the time, but those are the that's the
Speaker 2: academic terms. So he's thinking about consumerism, psychology, what is
Speaker 2: the meaning of this stuff, architecture, thinking about this embodied
Speaker 2: model of intelligence. But like with some City, he has
Speaker 2: a hard time getting people to take this idea seriously.
Speaker 2: Why would, as Jeff BoNT told me, why would you
Speaker 2: make a game about a dollhouse? Because dollhouses are for girls,
Speaker 2: and girls don't play computer games, of course, and the
Speaker 2: SIMS is not released until forget exactly ninety nineteen thousand,
Speaker 2: so it's like almost ten years of development.
Speaker 1: You're talking about Jeff Brown, who founded Maxis with Will Wright,
Speaker 1: which was the studio behind SimCity and its spin offs.
Speaker 1: I'd say today it's quite shocking to hear somebody's day
Speaker 1: girls don't play games. I guess the gaming culture was
Speaker 1: very different by it than hyper masculine totally.
Speaker 2: And I think the fact that SimCity appealed to not
Speaker 2: just boys, not just men and boys, but also girls
Speaker 2: and women is part of why the SIMS came into existence.
Speaker 2: Because you look at the history of Maxis, access attracts
Speaker 2: a lot of very talented women and roles of design, marketing, production,
Speaker 2: and that sort of sets the circumstances that enable the
Speaker 2: SIMS to come into existence and become what it becomes.
Speaker 1: Of course, you don't just write about these games. You've
Speaker 1: also made them. You work with will write as an intern,
Speaker 1: and I think my favorite quote from your whole book
Speaker 1: is quote my job was to make software toys for
Speaker 1: the world's most talented toy maker. I was in Wonker's
Speaker 1: chocolate factory. What were these software toys?
Speaker 2: My job was to make prototypes. I was very good
Speaker 2: at making bits of software like sketches in a sense,
Speaker 2: and so I just make these sketches. When I built
Speaker 2: models of I don't know, cultural evolution, bacteria growing in
Speaker 2: a Putri dish, civilization spreading in the galaxy, like, it
Speaker 2: was just all kinds of stuff that we made and
Speaker 2: it was just really fun.
Speaker 1: You know. It strikes me that part of building a
Speaker 1: game is hardcore programming that the other part is coming
Speaker 1: up with the rules. And in these simulation games, the
Speaker 1: rules were designed to mimic life as much as possible,
Speaker 1: So to make them you had to be thinking pretty
Speaker 1: expansively and philosophically and critically about how culture is formed
Speaker 1: and how it functions. I think will Wright's first interview question,
Speaker 1: get it exactually this, that's right.
Speaker 2: That was the interview question that he gave me over
Speaker 2: email when I, uh what I went to work with him.
Speaker 2: He said, yeah, here's an exercise for you to think about.
Speaker 2: If you had to define all possible intelligent cultures, historic
Speaker 2: and future, biological to mechanical, with less than ten parameters,
Speaker 2: what would they be. These parameters should be high enough
Speaker 2: to apply to any conceivable culture, yet low enough to
Speaker 2: derive tangible assets our technology, cities, behavior. A couple of
Speaker 2: candidates we've come up with are introverted extroverted. How much
Speaker 2: is the culture's attention focused on itself first understanding the
Speaker 2: outside world? And how static or expansionistic is it. I'd
Speaker 2: be interested to hear your list of parameters. So he
Speaker 2: sends that on March twenty fifth, two thousand and two,
Speaker 2: and I just want to comment that it's not just
Speaker 2: that the sort of that marvelous sense of abstraction that
Speaker 2: Will is pointing to you here that is so beautiful.
Speaker 2: It's also he's saying that they should be high enough
Speaker 2: to apply any conceivable culture. So he wants this generality.
Speaker 2: But it can't just be some thought experiment. It's got
Speaker 2: to be conquered enough that we could derive tangible assets
Speaker 2: for our game from it, right, Like, It's like, it's
Speaker 2: got to be actionable in a way, there's a meaningful
Speaker 2: to all player.
Speaker 1: We're going to take a quick break, but when we
Speaker 1: come back, we explore the very human need to play
Speaker 1: and just how serious games can get. From Viking burials
Speaker 1: to World War two. Stay with us. So, I'm your
Speaker 1: book is as much a history of sim City as
Speaker 1: it is a history of gaming itself. There's one part
Speaker 1: of your book that I couldn't resist bringing up, which
Speaker 1: is about Vikings, who it turns out were avid gamers
Speaker 1: in their own right. Can you talk a little bit
Speaker 1: about that?
Speaker 2: Yeah, so, right, Vikings, we think of that. There's these
Speaker 2: you know, I in my imagination, perhaps the cinematic imagination,
Speaker 2: is bloodthirsty warriors, which perhaps they were bold warriors, but
Speaker 2: they also really loved board games, apparently, and they were
Speaker 2: buried with them. And these elite burials, they had people
Speaker 2: in their boats with their music instruments and weapons and
Speaker 2: their playing pieces for their games. The Anthropolis don't really
Speaker 2: know why they're there, but they speculate that they indicate
Speaker 2: ability to fight, the ability to think strategically, that these
Speaker 2: represent values that Vikings treasured in their warrior life also
Speaker 2: their playing life.
Speaker 1: I think one of the themes of your book is
Speaker 1: that games are a serious matter. I mean, the Vikings
Speaker 1: obviously thought so enough to be buried with their board games,
Speaker 1: and the sim franchise was in part to teach us
Speaker 1: more about how the modern world worked. But more recently,
Speaker 1: gaming was the backbone of another very serious matter. Last
Speaker 1: year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to a team that
Speaker 1: developed an AI program that predicts the structure of proteins
Speaker 1: called Alpha Fold, and Alpha Fold was based off another
Speaker 1: program called Alpha Go, which had a very different objective,
Speaker 1: which was to beat the game Go, which is a
Speaker 1: kind of Asian game with some similarities to chess. And
Speaker 1: it's just part for me to get over how this
Speaker 1: Nobel Prize winning AI program that's kind of you know,
Speaker 1: doing the impossible, building new types of protein that could
Speaker 1: help us fight, you know, diseases in the future. Entire
Speaker 1: new ways is based off a program that was developed
Speaker 1: to beat a game. And so I want to ask you,
Speaker 1: is this kind of a one off connection or is
Speaker 1: there a deeper connection here between advances in computing and
Speaker 1: playing games.
Speaker 2: So you look at the history of computing, it is
Speaker 2: sort of games and the history of computing are inseparable,
Speaker 2: and chess figures probably a history of artificial intelligence. Games
Speaker 2: I've all started to do. And then Demissabas, the co
Speaker 2: founder of DeepMind, who was one of the co winners
Speaker 2: of the Nobel Prize. He started his career as a
Speaker 2: game developer, worked for Peter Model and another very well
Speaker 2: known game game creator who had one game, I believe
Speaker 2: where you play a golden age Hollywood studio boss and
Speaker 2: you have to like manage your stable of talent. So
Speaker 2: Demostovas works for Peter Malnu and then the his own
Speaker 2: game thing for a while, and then at some point
Speaker 2: he leaves games and goes back to do a PhD.
Speaker 2: And he starts going on this path that leads him
Speaker 2: to doing this work with machine learning and heural networks
Speaker 2: from from there and then but then at deep Mind
Speaker 2: deep minds early some of its early breakthrough work was
Speaker 2: in making artificial intelligences that could play Atari twenty six
Speaker 2: hundred games. And part of the reason that this works
Speaker 2: is that games are so important to AI more generally,
Speaker 2: is that games provide these very constrained environments with clear
Speaker 2: winning and losing conditions. So that's like, that's perfect for
Speaker 2: an artificial intelligence to work. I mean games, life is complex,
Speaker 2: it's messy, there is no clear winning and losing, but
Speaker 2: a game provide gives you this illusion or this it
Speaker 2: creates this this little fictional make believe spaces where you
Speaker 2: can have clear agency, clear outcomes, clear moves, clear rules.
Speaker 2: So it's perfect for computing.
Speaker 1: I think going back to sim City specifically in this
Speaker 1: moment in the late eighties early nineties, did sim City
Speaker 1: contribute to the development of computing? Did it popularize it?
Speaker 1: What is sim City's role in this incredibly rich history
Speaker 1: of the interaction between games and developments and computing.
Speaker 2: Well, that was one of the things that I really
Speaker 2: got lost in writing this book was looking at the
Speaker 2: looking at how simp City sort of starts interactslect just
Speaker 2: with popular culture, and Nintendo's Shigaro Miomoto comes out. He
Speaker 2: sets in motion the licensing of SimCity so that they
Speaker 2: can put it on the Nintendo right away. But at
Speaker 2: the same time, Access is also making deals with enterprise
Speaker 2: firms like Chevron to create things like some refinery. And
Speaker 2: then there's the Santa Fe Institute, which is a recently
Speaker 2: founded research institution that's all about complexity, science and emergence,
Speaker 2: and they established a rich set of connections with will
Speaker 2: Right and Maxis as well. So Maxis sort of traffics
Speaker 2: between these different computing worlds. I think that was also
Speaker 2: part of the magic and the mystique of some City
Speaker 2: is how it brought these esoteric subjects that people knew
Speaker 2: about into some into like this toy, this toy forum
Speaker 2: that can come home.
Speaker 1: So Maxus introduced to popularize the notion of simulation as
Speaker 1: something which everyone could kind of understand and literally play with.
Speaker 1: They weren't the company who then, you know, developed the
Speaker 1: enormous commercial opportunity of simulation. But fast forward into today,
Speaker 1: you know, what role does simulation play in all of
Speaker 1: our lives? Versus the nineties. I mean, how how ubiquity
Speaker 1: is computer simulation in terms of our everyday lives.
Speaker 2: I think simulation is everywhere. I think even at the
Speaker 2: time people were playing Nintendo games, they were playing with simulations.
Speaker 2: I think sim City just sort of made it overt
Speaker 2: in a sense. This is a simulation and playing with
Speaker 2: a model of a city people witness. I think about there.
Speaker 2: I argue that all of computing is in effect a
Speaker 2: kind of simulation. I think that's basically what Alan Turing
Speaker 2: how he has it.
Speaker 1: Are you putting the world in the machine?
Speaker 2: Are you putting the world in the machine? I mean
Speaker 2: you look at the idea of a turning machine, which
Speaker 2: is fundational in the computer science and computing. It's all
Speaker 2: about how one machine can pretend to be another kind
Speaker 2: of machine. So that this very mathematical idea has very
Speaker 2: sort of he has a very clear narrative and philosophical resonances.
Speaker 2: It's there from the very outset, and I think that
Speaker 2: that's what software is. Software is a way to tell
Speaker 2: a machine how to pretend to be another kind of machine.
Speaker 2: That's why you can download an app on your smartphone,
Speaker 2: and now your smartphone does something new. It can pretend
Speaker 2: to be some other thing now, whether it's a video
Speaker 2: player or messaging app or a particular game.
Speaker 1: And in terms of the history of simulation, the book
Speaker 1: suggests that basically the end of World War two was
Speaker 1: when and of the possibilities and the reality of simulation
Speaker 1: became a thing. Is that right?
Speaker 2: Modern digital computing really is born in a sense in
Speaker 2: the wake of World War two, or sort of during
Speaker 2: and after World War Two. The reason the military had
Speaker 2: a lot of computing hardware, not just like modern computers,
Speaker 2: was to calculate the trajectory of bullets so that they
Speaker 2: can make these artillery firing tables that you needed for
Speaker 2: any new munitions you were going to deploy in the field.
Speaker 2: So the gunners would look up at these tables like, oh,
Speaker 2: I want to aim at this target. I need to
Speaker 2: look what is what I need to dial in. That
Speaker 2: requires a lot of simulation to simulate these shells. So
Speaker 2: and these were often done by hand, you know, there
Speaker 2: were these often women, these calculating girls. And at some
Speaker 2: point the digital computers became faster that they can compute
Speaker 2: the trajectory of the shell faster than that actual shell
Speaker 2: could travel. Like that is the moment when simulations sort
Speaker 2: of become something new, really new, where the computer can
Speaker 2: simulate faster than real time, in this case just a
Speaker 2: single bullet shell, and that being you know, nowadays, of
Speaker 2: course you can simulate a gagiliar of these things, you know,
Speaker 2: at a plank of an eye.
Speaker 1: There's this sort of theme in the book which also
Speaker 1: has to do with the birth of sim City, which
Speaker 1: is all of these technologies that were developed as military
Speaker 1: technologies then in fact became sort of city management and
Speaker 1: behavior economics technologies, which then showed up represents in sim
Speaker 1: City in the nineties. Can you kind of shot that frogransion.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean it's almost like a cliche of the
Speaker 2: history of technology that technologies developed for war purposes, for
Speaker 2: military purposes, then becomes something else that becomes commonplace. And
Speaker 2: that's definitely the case with computing and simulation. And I
Speaker 2: think that one of the things that you know, we
Speaker 2: can trace that. But one of the things I wanted
Speaker 2: to do in this book was recognized that, but then
Speaker 2: also point it the consistent sort of how play in
Speaker 2: games is also one of these recurrent themes in these
Speaker 2: evolition of these technologies, and in fact, for me that
Speaker 2: turned towards some city, and modern graphical computing really comes
Speaker 2: through this recent in the nineteen sixties wanted to take
Speaker 2: this technology that has these strong military bureaucratic connotations and
Speaker 2: bringing it to children, and they say, here is a
Speaker 2: transformative technology. We should get kids to use this, and
Speaker 2: we should get liberal arts students to use this and
Speaker 2: see what they can do. So all these threads come together,
Speaker 2: and so to the city management. The MIT historian Jennifer
Speaker 2: Late has a lot of excellent work on the history
Speaker 2: of women in computing and cities, and she talks about
Speaker 2: how in the nineteen sixties there was a lot of
Speaker 2: urban unrest in the United States, and there's wats riots,
Speaker 2: there's a lot of the United States, a lot of
Speaker 2: civil civil conflicts, and as part of the part of
Speaker 2: the response to that was to bring in a lot
Speaker 2: of Cold War academics to sort of study the problems
Speaker 2: of cities, and so at mitj Forrester does work that's
Speaker 2: very important to some city and his response to these
Speaker 2: urban crises is to develop simulations of cities. The fact
Speaker 2: you look at the history of wargaming and you know
Speaker 2: the mid the mid twentieth century, during the Cold War,
Speaker 2: the US military got really into these like live action
Speaker 2: role playing game to the sense when they would like
Speaker 2: role playing these wargaming scenarios, and people found these experiences
Speaker 2: to be incredibly seductive, very compelling, just like so memorable.
Speaker 2: And actually it's HG. Wells, the science fiction author who
Speaker 2: has this book called Little Wars. It's like from the
Speaker 2: early nineteen hundreds. It's about him adapting German wargaming for
Speaker 2: military purposes as like a activity at home with little
Speaker 2: toy soldiers, and he makes this incredible game design and
Speaker 2: that's what leads to the whole miniature wargaming you know
Speaker 2: of the twentieth century and dungeons and dragons. It's like
Speaker 2: all of the stuff can be traced back to HG.
Speaker 1: Wells. Just as we're closing, there was a review of
Speaker 1: your book in the Los Angeles Review of Books and
Speaker 1: kind of provoke with comparison and the second half of
Speaker 1: the piece between SimCity and this sort of new yet
Speaker 1: to be built city in Solano County, California, where various
Speaker 1: tech billionaires have bought fifty two thousand acres of land,
Speaker 1: sometimes paying five times more than market price, with this
Speaker 1: vision of creating a new city for four hundred thousand
Speaker 1: people in this quote unquote virgin Land, and somebody on
Speaker 1: Reddit evidently accused these moguls of wanting to play SimCity IRL,
Speaker 1: which was amusing. But I mean, talk a little bit
Speaker 1: about Solano and what you thought of the comparison in
Speaker 1: that review.
Speaker 2: So my understanding is that there are a lot of
Speaker 2: very powerful Silicon Valley personnalities with a lot of deep pockets,
Speaker 2: who are very frustrated with the Pacific problems that exist
Speaker 2: in the day area. Like a lot of parts of
Speaker 2: the country. Actually, the cost of housing is incredibly unaffordable.
Speaker 2: It puts pressure at all level everywhere, and they're frustrated
Speaker 2: with the civic process, and so they have this vision
Speaker 2: of building a new city with driven by, as Slain
Speaker 2: points out, very new urbanist good ideas about walkable cities. Yes,
Speaker 2: they have a lot. They're very well intentioned, I think,
Speaker 2: but at the same time, there's a kind of hubrius
Speaker 2: to this to sort of go and buy up this
Speaker 2: supposedly virgin Land and just PLoP down a new city.
Speaker 2: In that sense, it is like simsy. It is like
Speaker 2: the weird world does not work like SimCity. I think
Speaker 2: maybe that's the point, and SimCity gives you this sort
Speaker 2: of present all your like a not just a city planner,
Speaker 2: you're kind of a god. Right you can you don't
Speaker 2: have to contend, you don't have to run for election,
Speaker 2: you don't have to deal with different constituencies that want
Speaker 2: different things, which is actually the meat of civic life.
Speaker 2: And I think that's the connection here, is that the
Speaker 2: really the real life is really not like that. But
Speaker 2: if you are really frustrated and really powerful, you can
Speaker 2: try to do it. But I think that that effort
Speaker 2: has run into local opposition. And that's that's one of
Speaker 2: the reasons that I compare to Dora and Gary Nelson
Speaker 2: city building education work where it can also was response
Speaker 2: to the civil rights unrest in nineteen sixties, that where
Speaker 2: she had kids in classrooms build and role playing model cities,
Speaker 2: and there it's all about the kids voicing their desires
Speaker 2: and what they want and don't want, and hashing out
Speaker 2: there with each other, you know, coming to some kind
Speaker 2: of agreement. That's really what civic life should be like
Speaker 2: in a democracy.
Speaker 1: That's very interesting. It comes back to those two epigraphs,
Speaker 1: isn't it in the sense of sulfur etin the world
Speaker 1: and we're probably living the computer simulation and maybe more
Speaker 1: of a hope than an analysis on the part of
Speaker 1: some of these guys.
Speaker 2: Software trying to eat the world. I think that's that's
Speaker 2: very apt.
Speaker 1: So my very very last question is actually more of
Speaker 1: a confession, which is I totally I was obsessed with
Speaker 1: the SIMS. But what I didn't tell you was the
Speaker 1: way I like to play it was by using cheap
Speaker 1: COULDE have unlimited resources to build these lacial ms for
Speaker 1: the Sims to be endlessly happy in which I know
Speaker 1: is a sacrilegious way of playing the game, But of
Speaker 1: course the ten eleven, twelve year old, it's one of
Speaker 1: those moments where you know you're on the customer adolessons
Speaker 1: and your agency is less than your desire. How does
Speaker 1: the way we play reflect on us?
Speaker 2: I mean that is something that has fascinated play scholars.
Speaker 2: Brian Son Smith one of the most influential play scholars
Speaker 2: in the twentieth century. He does a cross cultural comparison
Speaker 2: of games. Which societies play which games, and so certain
Speaker 2: societies I think perhaps I forget the details, but maybe
Speaker 2: agrarian ones or more drawn to games of luck and
Speaker 2: sort of modern Western industrial societies tend to be more
Speaker 2: interested in games of strategy and skill. But I just
Speaker 2: find in my own personal life, I tend to find
Speaker 2: that people that are more interested in gambling tend to
Speaker 2: be business people. I don't know if this is this
Speaker 2: is purely anecdotal, but I'm always fascinated when I meet
Speaker 2: people say like, what do you like to play? How
Speaker 2: do you play? I feel like I've learned a lot
Speaker 2: about somebody by playing.
Speaker 1: With them him. Thanks so much for being with me today.
Speaker 2: This is really fun. Thank you.
Speaker 1: For tech Stuff. I'm os Voloshin. This episode was produced
Speaker 1: by Eliza Dennis, Victoria Dominguez, and Lizzie Jacobs. He was
Speaker 1: executive produced by Me, Karen Price and Kate Osborne for
Speaker 1: Kaleidoscope and Katrina Norvel for iHeart Podcasts. Jack Insley mixed
Speaker 1: this episode and Kyle Murdoch wrote our theme song. Join
Speaker 1: us on Friday for the weekend tech Karen and I
Speaker 1: will run through the tech headlines you may have missed.
Speaker 1: Please rate, review, and reach out to us at tech
Speaker 1: Stuff podcast at gmail dot com. We can't wait to
Speaker 1: hear from you.