May 14, 2025 • 29 mins
Chaim Gingold is a game designer and author of the book Building SimCity: How to Put the World in a Machine, which explores the simulation games created by developer Will Wright. Gingold sits down with Oz to discuss why a computer game about city planning became such a big hit in the ‘90s, the surprising legacy of SimCity, and the deeper cultural and technological significance of simulation games.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:14):
Welcome to tech Stuff. This is the story. Each week
on Wednesdays, we bring you an in depth interview with
someone who has a front row seat to the most
fascinating things happening in tech today. We're joined by Heim Gingold, writer,
game designer, and author of the book building SimCity, How
to Put the World in a Machine and SimCity is
(00:37):
just that our modern world in the form of a
computer game. SimCity was released in nineteen eighty nine, and
it laid the foundation for the type of interactive world
building games like Minecraft that's so popular today. For those
who haven't played, it's a simulation game. Essentially, you're the
mayor of a city, and to play, you decide where
(00:59):
to construct buildings, where to build infrastructure like roads and
power grids. The game opens with a menu full of
scenarios to choose from a damage San Francisco that needs
to be rebuilt after an earthquake, Tokyo left in disarray
after a monster attack. From there, you have a few
years to restore your city to its former glrry. You
(01:20):
can decide that there needs to be more fire stations
to help with disaster cleanup, all that the best thing
to do is to repair all of those octover skyscrapers.
And while it might sound boring, it was a sensation.
Here's Heimgingold.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
I mean, who would have thought that a game about
land zoning and setting tax rates? You know, I guess
building roads maybe you know, but would be a big hit.
But it was. It's in Newsweek. It was the first
time that Newsweek can ever reviewed a computer games at
very at least, it was very unusual.
Speaker 1 (01:53):
In many ways, sim City's popularity has a lot to
do with how banal the concept really is. It was
a simulation of our everyday lives and you were essentially
playing god. The creator behind sim City is a man
named Will Wright, a game designer who made a career
out of creating simulation games. Following SimCity, he designed games
(02:17):
like sim Earth, sim Ant, and The Sims, which Wright
thought of as a virtual dollhouse and a not so
subtle satire of modern consumer culture, a satire with a
lasting impression. The Sims is about to get the movie
treatment from none other than Margo Robbie, who produced and
(02:37):
starred in the hit movie based off another beloved plaything, Barbie.
Our guest today, Heigeingold is no stranger to the sim
City franchise. He was an intern for Will Wright back
when he was getting his master's in digital media design.
Then in two thousand and eight, they collaborated to create
the game's spare. But Gingill's book isn't just a history
(02:59):
of SimCity. It also explores the deep human desire to play,
the cultural history of games and why simulation is so alluring.
After reading Building sim City, I knew that I needed
to talk to Gingol on this show because his book
illuminates how the way we use technology can say a
lot about who we are and our desire to leave
(03:22):
a mark on the world. So, without further ado Heim Gingold,
Welcome to tech Stuff. Thank you. So I want to
ask you, why is twenty twenty four a good year
to write a book about a game that was released
thirty five years ago, the year I was born nineteen
eighty nine.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
Maybe it isn't.
Speaker 1 (03:45):
That, at least a certain extent, it is, Yeah, I
think that.
Speaker 2 (03:48):
Well, Look, I was interested in part and why did
this game capture so many people's imagination? Like what is
the mystique of SimCity which still persists? It's still It's
even that sim City is not a well known particularly
success full franchise at this particular moment, and not say
compared to like the sims or Minecraft or robox a Fortnite.
SimCity is still a well known game, and I think
(04:08):
that it's trying to figure out why. It was a
big part of why I wrote this book. And for me,
what I found is that a lot of it had
to do with the mystique of simulation itself and the
mystique of computing. And I think you see that not
even with like for instance, generative AI, with chatchipt, it
is a simulation of a conversation. You know, it's like
not a real agent, not a real person, whatever it is,
(04:31):
but it's a simulation of a conversation. And I think
that is fundamental to computing.
Speaker 1 (04:34):
But it feels like magic is cool in response.
Speaker 2 (04:38):
It's totally magic, and SimCity also is totally magic, and
people were in trance by that. So I think that
there's this kind of magic holding power that simulations have
over us, and I think that SimCity was an early, widespread,
influential example of the powers of stimulation totally.
Speaker 1 (04:54):
And the subtitle of the book, I guess is what
the book is called, building sim City. How to put
the world the machine, which is such a rich an
evocative phrase. What did you mean by that, like bringing
the world in the machine? I mean you just mentioned simulation.
Speaker 2 (05:08):
Yeah, I mean it's a bit of a puckish title,
the sense that there's a whole tradition of people that
are building models of the world and putting them inside
of computers or pre digital computers. And so I was
very interested in how people sought to take the complex,
messy world outside of them that was bigger than anything
that they could understand, and make it into a model,
(05:29):
a toy almost that they can play with. So the
how tunis is more like how to do this impossible thing,
like how do you take the infinite and put it
in something very finite and limited? And so I was
trying to point out the sort of the impossibility of
putting the world in the machine.
Speaker 1 (05:45):
There's the kind of hubris to it.
Speaker 2 (05:47):
Totally, totally.
Speaker 1 (05:48):
We'll speak to that because I was also curious about
the two epigrowths to the book, which one is we're
almost certainly living in a computer simulation and the other
is software is eating the world. Yeah, so the we're
living in a simulation thing is a very well known
and dominant sort of strand of silica value thought software
is eating the world. That's, of course Mark Andrewson, one
(06:08):
of the most influential venture capitalists of the last couple
of decades. That's a little harder to understand on the
face of it. What does that mean and why was
that an important epigraph to choose for the book.
Speaker 2 (06:20):
I mean, perhaps it's that there are people who, by
making simulations of the whole world or exercises, are power over.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
It is that kind of the experience of playing Same City,
because just very concretely, these are big and fascinating and
to your point, seductive ideas and worlds, But how do
they connect to a nineteenth computer game?
Speaker 2 (06:38):
When Jack brown Will write, co founder of Maxis, saw
sim City like part of the appealing silence, this power
fantasy is incredible. This is going to appeal to the
sort of like megalomaniac impulse that I think is actually common.
I think it's fundamental, it's human. I think you see
it with children and toys and model building. It is
the seductive power of models.
Speaker 1 (06:57):
Yeah, I think there's a lot of truth to that.
There's something intoxicating about taking something rights for mundane like
city planning and then taking control of it yourself, rather
than being the subject of it, being control of it.
At least that's why it looked like as an observer.
As I mentioned, I was born in nineteen eighty nine,
(07:18):
so sim City was just a bit too hard for me.
But I remember watching my dad play and just playing
around with a bit myself, and I couldn't really crack it.
But then a couple of years later, the SIMS came out,
and I was immediately obsessed because here were these people
doing all the things that I had to do, eat, sleep, socialize,
(07:38):
But instead of my parents being in charge of me
doing those things, I was in charge of these characters
doing those things.
Speaker 2 (07:45):
I mean, I think there's a whole book written about
the SIMS. I did dig into the SIMS a lot.
In some sense, it's almost like the climax in the
book is the production of the SIMS. Because SIMP City
comes out in nineteen eighty nine, and then some earth
will where it falls up a Simmer nineteen ninety and
then Aunt in nineteen ninety one, and then and then
these sort of weird will write games sort of stop.
Speaker 1 (08:07):
So talk about sim end where you essentially simulate an
ant colony, and then the journey to the sims, where
you essentially simulate a family life and control the dates
to the actions of everyone in the household. How did
the sims come into existence? And why was it almost
(08:27):
a decade after sim end?
Speaker 2 (08:30):
Apparently one of the origin points is this wildfire that
spreads through Oakland, the Oakland Hills. It's devastating and siempsly
he like narrowly makes out of it, actually him and
his family, but they lose everything in the process. There
are all their worldly possessions and will hate shopping, and
of course he and his wife and daughter have to
now repopulate their house with stuff. And it's while filling
(08:53):
up their house with stuff, he's reflecting as he does.
He's thinking about what does all this stuff mean? Why
do we want it and so, And of course he's
also reading about architecture and psychology, and he starts moving
towards a model of people simulation. But also importantly he's
taking a lot of inspiration from the ants, which are
(09:13):
he points out, one of the only life forms that
survives this fire. And ants have very little internal cognitive state,
but they're very responsible for their environment, and yet as
a collective of the ants exhibit incredible intelligence. So ants
are very popular simulation subjects for artificial life and artificial
intelligence researchers at that time. Also and Will starts thinking
(09:36):
about building a model of people, also informed by this emergent,
bottom up, embodied interactionist frame. I don't think he used
those terms the time, but those are the that's the
academic terms. So he's thinking about consumerism, psychology, what is
the meaning of this stuff, architecture, thinking about this embodied
model of intelligence. But like with some City, he has
a hard time getting people to take this idea seriously.
(09:59):
Why would, as Jeff BoNT told me, why would you
make a game about a dollhouse? Because dollhouses are for girls,
and girls don't play computer games, of course, and the
SIMS is not released until forget exactly ninety nineteen thousand,
so it's like almost ten years of development.
Speaker 1 (10:16):
You're talking about Jeff Brown, who founded Maxis with Will Wright,
which was the studio behind SimCity and its spin offs.
I'd say today it's quite shocking to hear somebody's day
girls don't play games. I guess the gaming culture was
very different by it than hyper masculine totally.
Speaker 2 (10:32):
And I think the fact that SimCity appealed to not
just boys, not just men and boys, but also girls
and women is part of why the SIMS came into existence.
Because you look at the history of Maxis, access attracts
a lot of very talented women and roles of design, marketing, production,
and that sort of sets the circumstances that enable the
(10:52):
SIMS to come into existence and become what it becomes.
Speaker 1 (10:55):
Of course, you don't just write about these games. You've
also made them. You work with will write as an intern,
and I think my favorite quote from your whole book
is quote my job was to make software toys for
the world's most talented toy maker. I was in Wonker's
chocolate factory. What were these software toys?
Speaker 2 (11:15):
My job was to make prototypes. I was very good
at making bits of software like sketches in a sense,
and so I just make these sketches. When I built
models of I don't know, cultural evolution, bacteria growing in
a Putri dish, civilization spreading in the galaxy, like, it
was just all kinds of stuff that we made and
it was just really fun.
Speaker 1 (11:35):
You know. It strikes me that part of building a
game is hardcore programming that the other part is coming
up with the rules. And in these simulation games, the
rules were designed to mimic life as much as possible,
So to make them you had to be thinking pretty
expansively and philosophically and critically about how culture is formed
and how it functions. I think will Wright's first interview question,
(11:59):
get it exactually this, that's right.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
That was the interview question that he gave me over
email when I, uh what I went to work with him.
He said, yeah, here's an exercise for you to think about.
If you had to define all possible intelligent cultures, historic
and future, biological to mechanical, with less than ten parameters,
what would they be. These parameters should be high enough
to apply to any conceivable culture, yet low enough to
(12:23):
derive tangible assets our technology, cities, behavior. A couple of
candidates we've come up with are introverted extroverted. How much
is the culture's attention focused on itself first understanding the
outside world? And how static or expansionistic is it. I'd
be interested to hear your list of parameters. So he
sends that on March twenty fifth, two thousand and two,
(12:43):
and I just want to comment that it's not just
that the sort of that marvelous sense of abstraction that
Will is pointing to you here that is so beautiful.
It's also he's saying that they should be high enough
to apply any conceivable culture. So he wants this generality.
But it can't just be some thought experiment. It's got
to be conquered enough that we could derive tangible assets
for our game from it, right, Like, It's like, it's
(13:05):
got to be actionable in a way, there's a meaningful
to all player.
Speaker 1 (13:14):
We're going to take a quick break, but when we
come back, we explore the very human need to play
and just how serious games can get. From Viking burials
to World War two. Stay with us. So, I'm your
(13:38):
book is as much a history of sim City as
it is a history of gaming itself. There's one part
of your book that I couldn't resist bringing up, which
is about Vikings, who it turns out were avid gamers
in their own right. Can you talk a little bit
about that?
Speaker 2 (13:51):
Yeah, so, right, Vikings, we think of that. There's these
you know, I in my imagination, perhaps the cinematic imagination,
is bloodthirsty warriors, which perhaps they were bold warriors, but
they also really loved board games, apparently, and they were
buried with them. And these elite burials, they had people
in their boats with their music instruments and weapons and
(14:13):
their playing pieces for their games. The Anthropolis don't really
know why they're there, but they speculate that they indicate
ability to fight, the ability to think strategically, that these
represent values that Vikings treasured in their warrior life also
their playing life.
Speaker 1 (14:29):
I think one of the themes of your book is
that games are a serious matter. I mean, the Vikings
obviously thought so enough to be buried with their board games,
and the sim franchise was in part to teach us
more about how the modern world worked. But more recently,
gaming was the backbone of another very serious matter. Last
year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to a team that
(14:51):
developed an AI program that predicts the structure of proteins
called Alpha Fold, and Alpha Fold was based off another
program called Alpha Go, which had a very different objective,
which was to beat the game Go, which is a
kind of Asian game with some similarities to chess. And
it's just part for me to get over how this
Nobel Prize winning AI program that's kind of you know,
(15:14):
doing the impossible, building new types of protein that could
help us fight, you know, diseases in the future. Entire
new ways is based off a program that was developed
to beat a game. And so I want to ask you,
is this kind of a one off connection or is
there a deeper connection here between advances in computing and
(15:34):
playing games.
Speaker 2 (15:36):
So you look at the history of computing, it is
sort of games and the history of computing are inseparable,
and chess figures probably a history of artificial intelligence. Games
I've all started to do. And then Demissabas, the co
founder of DeepMind, who was one of the co winners
of the Nobel Prize. He started his career as a
game developer, worked for Peter Model and another very well
known game game creator who had one game, I believe
(15:59):
where you play a golden age Hollywood studio boss and
you have to like manage your stable of talent. So
Demostovas works for Peter Malnu and then the his own
game thing for a while, and then at some point
he leaves games and goes back to do a PhD.
And he starts going on this path that leads him
to doing this work with machine learning and heural networks
(16:22):
from from there and then but then at deep Mind
deep minds early some of its early breakthrough work was
in making artificial intelligences that could play Atari twenty six
hundred games. And part of the reason that this works
is that games are so important to AI more generally,
is that games provide these very constrained environments with clear
(16:43):
winning and losing conditions. So that's like, that's perfect for
an artificial intelligence to work. I mean games, life is complex,
it's messy, there is no clear winning and losing, but
a game provide gives you this illusion or this it
creates this this little fictional make believe spaces where you
can have clear agency, clear outcomes, clear moves, clear rules.
(17:06):
So it's perfect for computing.
Speaker 1 (17:08):
I think going back to sim City specifically in this
moment in the late eighties early nineties, did sim City
contribute to the development of computing? Did it popularize it?
What is sim City's role in this incredibly rich history
of the interaction between games and developments and computing.
Speaker 2 (17:25):
Well, that was one of the things that I really
got lost in writing this book was looking at the
looking at how simp City sort of starts interactslect just
with popular culture, and Nintendo's Shigaro Miomoto comes out. He
sets in motion the licensing of SimCity so that they
can put it on the Nintendo right away. But at
the same time, Access is also making deals with enterprise
(17:49):
firms like Chevron to create things like some refinery. And
then there's the Santa Fe Institute, which is a recently
founded research institution that's all about complexity, science and emergence,
and they established a rich set of connections with will
Right and Maxis as well. So Maxis sort of traffics
between these different computing worlds. I think that was also
part of the magic and the mystique of some City
(18:09):
is how it brought these esoteric subjects that people knew
about into some into like this toy, this toy forum
that can come home.
Speaker 1 (18:19):
So Maxus introduced to popularize the notion of simulation as
something which everyone could kind of understand and literally play with.
They weren't the company who then, you know, developed the
enormous commercial opportunity of simulation. But fast forward into today,
you know, what role does simulation play in all of
(18:41):
our lives? Versus the nineties. I mean, how how ubiquity
is computer simulation in terms of our everyday lives.
Speaker 2 (18:48):
I think simulation is everywhere. I think even at the
time people were playing Nintendo games, they were playing with simulations.
I think sim City just sort of made it overt
in a sense. This is a simulation and playing with
a model of a city people witness. I think about there.
I argue that all of computing is in effect a
kind of simulation. I think that's basically what Alan Turing
(19:09):
how he has it.
Speaker 1 (19:10):
Are you putting the world in the machine?
Speaker 2 (19:12):
Are you putting the world in the machine? I mean
you look at the idea of a turning machine, which
is fundational in the computer science and computing. It's all
about how one machine can pretend to be another kind
of machine. So that this very mathematical idea has very
sort of he has a very clear narrative and philosophical resonances.
It's there from the very outset, and I think that
(19:33):
that's what software is. Software is a way to tell
a machine how to pretend to be another kind of machine.
That's why you can download an app on your smartphone,
and now your smartphone does something new. It can pretend
to be some other thing now, whether it's a video
player or messaging app or a particular game.
Speaker 1 (19:51):
And in terms of the history of simulation, the book
suggests that basically the end of World War two was
when and of the possibilities and the reality of simulation
became a thing. Is that right?
Speaker 2 (20:06):
Modern digital computing really is born in a sense in
the wake of World War two, or sort of during
and after World War Two. The reason the military had
a lot of computing hardware, not just like modern computers,
was to calculate the trajectory of bullets so that they
can make these artillery firing tables that you needed for
any new munitions you were going to deploy in the field.
(20:26):
So the gunners would look up at these tables like, oh,
I want to aim at this target. I need to
look what is what I need to dial in. That
requires a lot of simulation to simulate these shells. So
and these were often done by hand, you know, there
were these often women, these calculating girls. And at some
point the digital computers became faster that they can compute
the trajectory of the shell faster than that actual shell
(20:46):
could travel. Like that is the moment when simulations sort
of become something new, really new, where the computer can
simulate faster than real time, in this case just a
single bullet shell, and that being you know, nowadays, of
course you can simulate a gagiliar of these things, you know,
at a plank of an eye.
Speaker 1 (21:02):
There's this sort of theme in the book which also
has to do with the birth of sim City, which
is all of these technologies that were developed as military
technologies then in fact became sort of city management and
behavior economics technologies, which then showed up represents in sim
City in the nineties. Can you kind of shot that frogransion.
Speaker 2 (21:22):
Yeah. I mean it's almost like a cliche of the
history of technology that technologies developed for war purposes, for
military purposes, then becomes something else that becomes commonplace. And
that's definitely the case with computing and simulation. And I
think that one of the things that you know, we
can trace that. But one of the things I wanted
to do in this book was recognized that, but then
(21:44):
also point it the consistent sort of how play in
games is also one of these recurrent themes in these
evolition of these technologies, and in fact, for me that
turned towards some city, and modern graphical computing really comes
through this recent in the nineteen sixties wanted to take
this technology that has these strong military bureaucratic connotations and
(22:08):
bringing it to children, and they say, here is a
transformative technology. We should get kids to use this, and
we should get liberal arts students to use this and
see what they can do. So all these threads come together,
and so to the city management. The MIT historian Jennifer
Late has a lot of excellent work on the history
(22:28):
of women in computing and cities, and she talks about
how in the nineteen sixties there was a lot of
urban unrest in the United States, and there's wats riots,
there's a lot of the United States, a lot of
civil civil conflicts, and as part of the part of
the response to that was to bring in a lot
(22:48):
of Cold War academics to sort of study the problems
of cities, and so at mitj Forrester does work that's
very important to some city and his response to these
urban crises is to develop simulations of cities. The fact
you look at the history of wargaming and you know
the mid the mid twentieth century, during the Cold War,
(23:12):
the US military got really into these like live action
role playing game to the sense when they would like
role playing these wargaming scenarios, and people found these experiences
to be incredibly seductive, very compelling, just like so memorable.
And actually it's HG. Wells, the science fiction author who
has this book called Little Wars. It's like from the
(23:33):
early nineteen hundreds. It's about him adapting German wargaming for
military purposes as like a activity at home with little
toy soldiers, and he makes this incredible game design and
that's what leads to the whole miniature wargaming you know
of the twentieth century and dungeons and dragons. It's like
all of the stuff can be traced back to HG.
Speaker 1 (23:53):
Wells. Just as we're closing, there was a review of
your book in the Los Angeles Review of Books and
kind of provoke with comparison and the second half of
the piece between SimCity and this sort of new yet
to be built city in Solano County, California, where various
tech billionaires have bought fifty two thousand acres of land,
(24:14):
sometimes paying five times more than market price, with this
vision of creating a new city for four hundred thousand
people in this quote unquote virgin Land, and somebody on
Reddit evidently accused these moguls of wanting to play SimCity IRL,
which was amusing. But I mean, talk a little bit
about Solano and what you thought of the comparison in
(24:36):
that review.
Speaker 2 (24:37):
So my understanding is that there are a lot of
very powerful Silicon Valley personnalities with a lot of deep pockets,
who are very frustrated with the Pacific problems that exist
in the day area. Like a lot of parts of
the country. Actually, the cost of housing is incredibly unaffordable.
It puts pressure at all level everywhere, and they're frustrated
(24:59):
with the civic process, and so they have this vision
of building a new city with driven by, as Slain
points out, very new urbanist good ideas about walkable cities. Yes,
they have a lot. They're very well intentioned, I think,
but at the same time, there's a kind of hubrius
to this to sort of go and buy up this
supposedly virgin Land and just PLoP down a new city.
(25:22):
In that sense, it is like simsy. It is like
the weird world does not work like SimCity. I think
maybe that's the point, and SimCity gives you this sort
of present all your like a not just a city planner,
you're kind of a god. Right you can you don't
have to contend, you don't have to run for election,
you don't have to deal with different constituencies that want
(25:42):
different things, which is actually the meat of civic life.
And I think that's the connection here, is that the
really the real life is really not like that. But
if you are really frustrated and really powerful, you can
try to do it. But I think that that effort
has run into local opposition. And that's that's one of
the reasons that I compare to Dora and Gary Nelson
(26:02):
city building education work where it can also was response
to the civil rights unrest in nineteen sixties, that where
she had kids in classrooms build and role playing model cities,
and there it's all about the kids voicing their desires
and what they want and don't want, and hashing out
there with each other, you know, coming to some kind
of agreement. That's really what civic life should be like
(26:24):
in a democracy.
Speaker 1 (26:26):
That's very interesting. It comes back to those two epigraphs,
isn't it in the sense of sulfur etin the world
and we're probably living the computer simulation and maybe more
of a hope than an analysis on the part of
some of these guys.
Speaker 2 (26:36):
Software trying to eat the world. I think that's that's
very apt.
Speaker 1 (26:41):
So my very very last question is actually more of
a confession, which is I totally I was obsessed with
the SIMS. But what I didn't tell you was the
way I like to play it was by using cheap
COULDE have unlimited resources to build these lacial ms for
the Sims to be endlessly happy in which I know
is a sacrilegious way of playing the game, But of
course the ten eleven, twelve year old, it's one of
(27:02):
those moments where you know you're on the customer adolessons
and your agency is less than your desire. How does
the way we play reflect on us?
Speaker 2 (27:11):
I mean that is something that has fascinated play scholars.
Brian Son Smith one of the most influential play scholars
in the twentieth century. He does a cross cultural comparison
of games. Which societies play which games, and so certain
societies I think perhaps I forget the details, but maybe
agrarian ones or more drawn to games of luck and
(27:32):
sort of modern Western industrial societies tend to be more
interested in games of strategy and skill. But I just
find in my own personal life, I tend to find
that people that are more interested in gambling tend to
be business people. I don't know if this is this
is purely anecdotal, but I'm always fascinated when I meet
people say like, what do you like to play? How
do you play? I feel like I've learned a lot
about somebody by playing.
Speaker 1 (27:54):
With them him. Thanks so much for being with me today.
Speaker 2 (28:03):
This is really fun. Thank you.
Speaker 1 (28:28):
For tech Stuff. I'm os Voloshin. This episode was produced
by Eliza Dennis, Victoria Dominguez, and Lizzie Jacobs. He was
executive produced by Me, Karen Price and Kate Osborne for
Kaleidoscope and Katrina Norvel for iHeart Podcasts. Jack Insley mixed
this episode and Kyle Murdoch wrote our theme song. Join
us on Friday for the weekend tech Karen and I
(28:51):
will run through the tech headlines you may have missed.
Please rate, review, and reach out to us at tech
Stuff podcast at gmail dot com. We can't wait to
hear from you.
Welcome to tech Stuff. This is the story. Each week
on Wednesdays, we bring you an in depth interview with
someone who has a front row seat to the most
fascinating things happening in tech today. We're joined by Heim Gingold, writer,
game designer, and author of the book building SimCity, How
to Put the World in a Machine and SimCity is
(00:37):
just that our modern world in the form of a
computer game. SimCity was released in nineteen eighty nine, and
it laid the foundation for the type of interactive world
building games like Minecraft that's so popular today. For those
who haven't played, it's a simulation game. Essentially, you're the
mayor of a city, and to play, you decide where
(00:59):
to construct buildings, where to build infrastructure like roads and
power grids. The game opens with a menu full of
scenarios to choose from a damage San Francisco that needs
to be rebuilt after an earthquake, Tokyo left in disarray
after a monster attack. From there, you have a few
years to restore your city to its former glrry. You
(01:20):
can decide that there needs to be more fire stations
to help with disaster cleanup, all that the best thing
to do is to repair all of those octover skyscrapers.
And while it might sound boring, it was a sensation.
Here's Heimgingold.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
I mean, who would have thought that a game about
land zoning and setting tax rates? You know, I guess
building roads maybe you know, but would be a big hit.
But it was. It's in Newsweek. It was the first
time that Newsweek can ever reviewed a computer games at
very at least, it was very unusual.
Speaker 1 (01:53):
In many ways, sim City's popularity has a lot to
do with how banal the concept really is. It was
a simulation of our everyday lives and you were essentially
playing god. The creator behind sim City is a man
named Will Wright, a game designer who made a career
out of creating simulation games. Following SimCity, he designed games
(02:17):
like sim Earth, sim Ant, and The Sims, which Wright
thought of as a virtual dollhouse and a not so
subtle satire of modern consumer culture, a satire with a
lasting impression. The Sims is about to get the movie
treatment from none other than Margo Robbie, who produced and
(02:37):
starred in the hit movie based off another beloved plaything, Barbie.
Our guest today, Heigeingold is no stranger to the sim
City franchise. He was an intern for Will Wright back
when he was getting his master's in digital media design.
Then in two thousand and eight, they collaborated to create
the game's spare. But Gingill's book isn't just a history
(02:59):
of SimCity. It also explores the deep human desire to play,
the cultural history of games and why simulation is so alluring.
After reading Building sim City, I knew that I needed
to talk to Gingol on this show because his book
illuminates how the way we use technology can say a
lot about who we are and our desire to leave
(03:22):
a mark on the world. So, without further ado Heim Gingold,
Welcome to tech Stuff. Thank you. So I want to
ask you, why is twenty twenty four a good year
to write a book about a game that was released
thirty five years ago, the year I was born nineteen
eighty nine.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
Maybe it isn't.
Speaker 1 (03:45):
That, at least a certain extent, it is, Yeah, I
think that.
Speaker 2 (03:48):
Well, Look, I was interested in part and why did
this game capture so many people's imagination? Like what is
the mystique of SimCity which still persists? It's still It's
even that sim City is not a well known particularly
success full franchise at this particular moment, and not say
compared to like the sims or Minecraft or robox a Fortnite.
SimCity is still a well known game, and I think
(04:08):
that it's trying to figure out why. It was a
big part of why I wrote this book. And for me,
what I found is that a lot of it had
to do with the mystique of simulation itself and the
mystique of computing. And I think you see that not
even with like for instance, generative AI, with chatchipt, it
is a simulation of a conversation. You know, it's like
not a real agent, not a real person, whatever it is,
(04:31):
but it's a simulation of a conversation. And I think
that is fundamental to computing.
Speaker 1 (04:34):
But it feels like magic is cool in response.
Speaker 2 (04:38):
It's totally magic, and SimCity also is totally magic, and
people were in trance by that. So I think that
there's this kind of magic holding power that simulations have
over us, and I think that SimCity was an early, widespread,
influential example of the powers of stimulation totally.
Speaker 1 (04:54):
And the subtitle of the book, I guess is what
the book is called, building sim City. How to put
the world the machine, which is such a rich an
evocative phrase. What did you mean by that, like bringing
the world in the machine? I mean you just mentioned simulation.
Speaker 2 (05:08):
Yeah, I mean it's a bit of a puckish title,
the sense that there's a whole tradition of people that
are building models of the world and putting them inside
of computers or pre digital computers. And so I was
very interested in how people sought to take the complex,
messy world outside of them that was bigger than anything
that they could understand, and make it into a model,
(05:29):
a toy almost that they can play with. So the
how tunis is more like how to do this impossible thing,
like how do you take the infinite and put it
in something very finite and limited? And so I was
trying to point out the sort of the impossibility of
putting the world in the machine.
Speaker 1 (05:45):
There's the kind of hubris to it.
Speaker 2 (05:47):
Totally, totally.
Speaker 1 (05:48):
We'll speak to that because I was also curious about
the two epigrowths to the book, which one is we're
almost certainly living in a computer simulation and the other
is software is eating the world. Yeah, so the we're
living in a simulation thing is a very well known
and dominant sort of strand of silica value thought software
is eating the world. That's, of course Mark Andrewson, one
(06:08):
of the most influential venture capitalists of the last couple
of decades. That's a little harder to understand on the
face of it. What does that mean and why was
that an important epigraph to choose for the book.
Speaker 2 (06:20):
I mean, perhaps it's that there are people who, by
making simulations of the whole world or exercises, are power over.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
It is that kind of the experience of playing Same City,
because just very concretely, these are big and fascinating and
to your point, seductive ideas and worlds, But how do
they connect to a nineteenth computer game?
Speaker 2 (06:38):
When Jack brown Will write, co founder of Maxis, saw
sim City like part of the appealing silence, this power
fantasy is incredible. This is going to appeal to the
sort of like megalomaniac impulse that I think is actually common.
I think it's fundamental, it's human. I think you see
it with children and toys and model building. It is
the seductive power of models.
Speaker 1 (06:57):
Yeah, I think there's a lot of truth to that.
There's something intoxicating about taking something rights for mundane like
city planning and then taking control of it yourself, rather
than being the subject of it, being control of it.
At least that's why it looked like as an observer.
As I mentioned, I was born in nineteen eighty nine,
(07:18):
so sim City was just a bit too hard for me.
But I remember watching my dad play and just playing
around with a bit myself, and I couldn't really crack it.
But then a couple of years later, the SIMS came out,
and I was immediately obsessed because here were these people
doing all the things that I had to do, eat, sleep, socialize,
(07:38):
But instead of my parents being in charge of me
doing those things, I was in charge of these characters
doing those things.
Speaker 2 (07:45):
I mean, I think there's a whole book written about
the SIMS. I did dig into the SIMS a lot.
In some sense, it's almost like the climax in the
book is the production of the SIMS. Because SIMP City
comes out in nineteen eighty nine, and then some earth
will where it falls up a Simmer nineteen ninety and
then Aunt in nineteen ninety one, and then and then
these sort of weird will write games sort of stop.
Speaker 1 (08:07):
So talk about sim end where you essentially simulate an
ant colony, and then the journey to the sims, where
you essentially simulate a family life and control the dates
to the actions of everyone in the household. How did
the sims come into existence? And why was it almost
(08:27):
a decade after sim end?
Speaker 2 (08:30):
Apparently one of the origin points is this wildfire that
spreads through Oakland, the Oakland Hills. It's devastating and siempsly
he like narrowly makes out of it, actually him and
his family, but they lose everything in the process. There
are all their worldly possessions and will hate shopping, and
of course he and his wife and daughter have to
now repopulate their house with stuff. And it's while filling
(08:53):
up their house with stuff, he's reflecting as he does.
He's thinking about what does all this stuff mean? Why
do we want it and so, And of course he's
also reading about architecture and psychology, and he starts moving
towards a model of people simulation. But also importantly he's
taking a lot of inspiration from the ants, which are
(09:13):
he points out, one of the only life forms that
survives this fire. And ants have very little internal cognitive state,
but they're very responsible for their environment, and yet as
a collective of the ants exhibit incredible intelligence. So ants
are very popular simulation subjects for artificial life and artificial
intelligence researchers at that time. Also and Will starts thinking
(09:36):
about building a model of people, also informed by this emergent,
bottom up, embodied interactionist frame. I don't think he used
those terms the time, but those are the that's the
academic terms. So he's thinking about consumerism, psychology, what is
the meaning of this stuff, architecture, thinking about this embodied
model of intelligence. But like with some City, he has
a hard time getting people to take this idea seriously.
(09:59):
Why would, as Jeff BoNT told me, why would you
make a game about a dollhouse? Because dollhouses are for girls,
and girls don't play computer games, of course, and the
SIMS is not released until forget exactly ninety nineteen thousand,
so it's like almost ten years of development.
Speaker 1 (10:16):
You're talking about Jeff Brown, who founded Maxis with Will Wright,
which was the studio behind SimCity and its spin offs.
I'd say today it's quite shocking to hear somebody's day
girls don't play games. I guess the gaming culture was
very different by it than hyper masculine totally.
Speaker 2 (10:32):
And I think the fact that SimCity appealed to not
just boys, not just men and boys, but also girls
and women is part of why the SIMS came into existence.
Because you look at the history of Maxis, access attracts
a lot of very talented women and roles of design, marketing, production,
and that sort of sets the circumstances that enable the
(10:52):
SIMS to come into existence and become what it becomes.
Speaker 1 (10:55):
Of course, you don't just write about these games. You've
also made them. You work with will write as an intern,
and I think my favorite quote from your whole book
is quote my job was to make software toys for
the world's most talented toy maker. I was in Wonker's
chocolate factory. What were these software toys?
Speaker 2 (11:15):
My job was to make prototypes. I was very good
at making bits of software like sketches in a sense,
and so I just make these sketches. When I built
models of I don't know, cultural evolution, bacteria growing in
a Putri dish, civilization spreading in the galaxy, like, it
was just all kinds of stuff that we made and
it was just really fun.
Speaker 1 (11:35):
You know. It strikes me that part of building a
game is hardcore programming that the other part is coming
up with the rules. And in these simulation games, the
rules were designed to mimic life as much as possible,
So to make them you had to be thinking pretty
expansively and philosophically and critically about how culture is formed
and how it functions. I think will Wright's first interview question,
(11:59):
get it exactually this, that's right.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
That was the interview question that he gave me over
email when I, uh what I went to work with him.
He said, yeah, here's an exercise for you to think about.
If you had to define all possible intelligent cultures, historic
and future, biological to mechanical, with less than ten parameters,
what would they be. These parameters should be high enough
to apply to any conceivable culture, yet low enough to
(12:23):
derive tangible assets our technology, cities, behavior. A couple of
candidates we've come up with are introverted extroverted. How much
is the culture's attention focused on itself first understanding the
outside world? And how static or expansionistic is it. I'd
be interested to hear your list of parameters. So he
sends that on March twenty fifth, two thousand and two,
(12:43):
and I just want to comment that it's not just
that the sort of that marvelous sense of abstraction that
Will is pointing to you here that is so beautiful.
It's also he's saying that they should be high enough
to apply any conceivable culture. So he wants this generality.
But it can't just be some thought experiment. It's got
to be conquered enough that we could derive tangible assets
for our game from it, right, Like, It's like, it's
(13:05):
got to be actionable in a way, there's a meaningful
to all player.
Speaker 1 (13:14):
We're going to take a quick break, but when we
come back, we explore the very human need to play
and just how serious games can get. From Viking burials
to World War two. Stay with us. So, I'm your
(13:38):
book is as much a history of sim City as
it is a history of gaming itself. There's one part
of your book that I couldn't resist bringing up, which
is about Vikings, who it turns out were avid gamers
in their own right. Can you talk a little bit
about that?
Speaker 2 (13:51):
Yeah, so, right, Vikings, we think of that. There's these
you know, I in my imagination, perhaps the cinematic imagination,
is bloodthirsty warriors, which perhaps they were bold warriors, but
they also really loved board games, apparently, and they were
buried with them. And these elite burials, they had people
in their boats with their music instruments and weapons and
(14:13):
their playing pieces for their games. The Anthropolis don't really
know why they're there, but they speculate that they indicate
ability to fight, the ability to think strategically, that these
represent values that Vikings treasured in their warrior life also
their playing life.
Speaker 1 (14:29):
I think one of the themes of your book is
that games are a serious matter. I mean, the Vikings
obviously thought so enough to be buried with their board games,
and the sim franchise was in part to teach us
more about how the modern world worked. But more recently,
gaming was the backbone of another very serious matter. Last
year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to a team that
(14:51):
developed an AI program that predicts the structure of proteins
called Alpha Fold, and Alpha Fold was based off another
program called Alpha Go, which had a very different objective,
which was to beat the game Go, which is a
kind of Asian game with some similarities to chess. And
it's just part for me to get over how this
Nobel Prize winning AI program that's kind of you know,
(15:14):
doing the impossible, building new types of protein that could
help us fight, you know, diseases in the future. Entire
new ways is based off a program that was developed
to beat a game. And so I want to ask you,
is this kind of a one off connection or is
there a deeper connection here between advances in computing and
(15:34):
playing games.
Speaker 2 (15:36):
So you look at the history of computing, it is
sort of games and the history of computing are inseparable,
and chess figures probably a history of artificial intelligence. Games
I've all started to do. And then Demissabas, the co
founder of DeepMind, who was one of the co winners
of the Nobel Prize. He started his career as a
game developer, worked for Peter Model and another very well
known game game creator who had one game, I believe
(15:59):
where you play a golden age Hollywood studio boss and
you have to like manage your stable of talent. So
Demostovas works for Peter Malnu and then the his own
game thing for a while, and then at some point
he leaves games and goes back to do a PhD.
And he starts going on this path that leads him
to doing this work with machine learning and heural networks
(16:22):
from from there and then but then at deep Mind
deep minds early some of its early breakthrough work was
in making artificial intelligences that could play Atari twenty six
hundred games. And part of the reason that this works
is that games are so important to AI more generally,
is that games provide these very constrained environments with clear
(16:43):
winning and losing conditions. So that's like, that's perfect for
an artificial intelligence to work. I mean games, life is complex,
it's messy, there is no clear winning and losing, but
a game provide gives you this illusion or this it
creates this this little fictional make believe spaces where you
can have clear agency, clear outcomes, clear moves, clear rules.
(17:06):
So it's perfect for computing.
Speaker 1 (17:08):
I think going back to sim City specifically in this
moment in the late eighties early nineties, did sim City
contribute to the development of computing? Did it popularize it?
What is sim City's role in this incredibly rich history
of the interaction between games and developments and computing.
Speaker 2 (17:25):
Well, that was one of the things that I really
got lost in writing this book was looking at the
looking at how simp City sort of starts interactslect just
with popular culture, and Nintendo's Shigaro Miomoto comes out. He
sets in motion the licensing of SimCity so that they
can put it on the Nintendo right away. But at
the same time, Access is also making deals with enterprise
(17:49):
firms like Chevron to create things like some refinery. And
then there's the Santa Fe Institute, which is a recently
founded research institution that's all about complexity, science and emergence,
and they established a rich set of connections with will
Right and Maxis as well. So Maxis sort of traffics
between these different computing worlds. I think that was also
part of the magic and the mystique of some City
(18:09):
is how it brought these esoteric subjects that people knew
about into some into like this toy, this toy forum
that can come home.
Speaker 1 (18:19):
So Maxus introduced to popularize the notion of simulation as
something which everyone could kind of understand and literally play with.
They weren't the company who then, you know, developed the
enormous commercial opportunity of simulation. But fast forward into today,
you know, what role does simulation play in all of
(18:41):
our lives? Versus the nineties. I mean, how how ubiquity
is computer simulation in terms of our everyday lives.
Speaker 2 (18:48):
I think simulation is everywhere. I think even at the
time people were playing Nintendo games, they were playing with simulations.
I think sim City just sort of made it overt
in a sense. This is a simulation and playing with
a model of a city people witness. I think about there.
I argue that all of computing is in effect a
kind of simulation. I think that's basically what Alan Turing
(19:09):
how he has it.
Speaker 1 (19:10):
Are you putting the world in the machine?
Speaker 2 (19:12):
Are you putting the world in the machine? I mean
you look at the idea of a turning machine, which
is fundational in the computer science and computing. It's all
about how one machine can pretend to be another kind
of machine. So that this very mathematical idea has very
sort of he has a very clear narrative and philosophical resonances.
It's there from the very outset, and I think that
(19:33):
that's what software is. Software is a way to tell
a machine how to pretend to be another kind of machine.
That's why you can download an app on your smartphone,
and now your smartphone does something new. It can pretend
to be some other thing now, whether it's a video
player or messaging app or a particular game.
Speaker 1 (19:51):
And in terms of the history of simulation, the book
suggests that basically the end of World War two was
when and of the possibilities and the reality of simulation
became a thing. Is that right?
Speaker 2 (20:06):
Modern digital computing really is born in a sense in
the wake of World War two, or sort of during
and after World War Two. The reason the military had
a lot of computing hardware, not just like modern computers,
was to calculate the trajectory of bullets so that they
can make these artillery firing tables that you needed for
any new munitions you were going to deploy in the field.
(20:26):
So the gunners would look up at these tables like, oh,
I want to aim at this target. I need to
look what is what I need to dial in. That
requires a lot of simulation to simulate these shells. So
and these were often done by hand, you know, there
were these often women, these calculating girls. And at some
point the digital computers became faster that they can compute
the trajectory of the shell faster than that actual shell
(20:46):
could travel. Like that is the moment when simulations sort
of become something new, really new, where the computer can
simulate faster than real time, in this case just a
single bullet shell, and that being you know, nowadays, of
course you can simulate a gagiliar of these things, you know,
at a plank of an eye.
Speaker 1 (21:02):
There's this sort of theme in the book which also
has to do with the birth of sim City, which
is all of these technologies that were developed as military
technologies then in fact became sort of city management and
behavior economics technologies, which then showed up represents in sim
City in the nineties. Can you kind of shot that frogransion.
Speaker 2 (21:22):
Yeah. I mean it's almost like a cliche of the
history of technology that technologies developed for war purposes, for
military purposes, then becomes something else that becomes commonplace. And
that's definitely the case with computing and simulation. And I
think that one of the things that you know, we
can trace that. But one of the things I wanted
to do in this book was recognized that, but then
(21:44):
also point it the consistent sort of how play in
games is also one of these recurrent themes in these
evolition of these technologies, and in fact, for me that
turned towards some city, and modern graphical computing really comes
through this recent in the nineteen sixties wanted to take
this technology that has these strong military bureaucratic connotations and
(22:08):
bringing it to children, and they say, here is a
transformative technology. We should get kids to use this, and
we should get liberal arts students to use this and
see what they can do. So all these threads come together,
and so to the city management. The MIT historian Jennifer
Late has a lot of excellent work on the history
(22:28):
of women in computing and cities, and she talks about
how in the nineteen sixties there was a lot of
urban unrest in the United States, and there's wats riots,
there's a lot of the United States, a lot of
civil civil conflicts, and as part of the part of
the response to that was to bring in a lot
(22:48):
of Cold War academics to sort of study the problems
of cities, and so at mitj Forrester does work that's
very important to some city and his response to these
urban crises is to develop simulations of cities. The fact
you look at the history of wargaming and you know
the mid the mid twentieth century, during the Cold War,
(23:12):
the US military got really into these like live action
role playing game to the sense when they would like
role playing these wargaming scenarios, and people found these experiences
to be incredibly seductive, very compelling, just like so memorable.
And actually it's HG. Wells, the science fiction author who
has this book called Little Wars. It's like from the
(23:33):
early nineteen hundreds. It's about him adapting German wargaming for
military purposes as like a activity at home with little
toy soldiers, and he makes this incredible game design and
that's what leads to the whole miniature wargaming you know
of the twentieth century and dungeons and dragons. It's like
all of the stuff can be traced back to HG.
Speaker 1 (23:53):
Wells. Just as we're closing, there was a review of
your book in the Los Angeles Review of Books and
kind of provoke with comparison and the second half of
the piece between SimCity and this sort of new yet
to be built city in Solano County, California, where various
tech billionaires have bought fifty two thousand acres of land,
(24:14):
sometimes paying five times more than market price, with this
vision of creating a new city for four hundred thousand
people in this quote unquote virgin Land, and somebody on
Reddit evidently accused these moguls of wanting to play SimCity IRL,
which was amusing. But I mean, talk a little bit
about Solano and what you thought of the comparison in
(24:36):
that review.
Speaker 2 (24:37):
So my understanding is that there are a lot of
very powerful Silicon Valley personnalities with a lot of deep pockets,
who are very frustrated with the Pacific problems that exist
in the day area. Like a lot of parts of
the country. Actually, the cost of housing is incredibly unaffordable.
It puts pressure at all level everywhere, and they're frustrated
(24:59):
with the civic process, and so they have this vision
of building a new city with driven by, as Slain
points out, very new urbanist good ideas about walkable cities. Yes,
they have a lot. They're very well intentioned, I think,
but at the same time, there's a kind of hubrius
to this to sort of go and buy up this
supposedly virgin Land and just PLoP down a new city.
(25:22):
In that sense, it is like simsy. It is like
the weird world does not work like SimCity. I think
maybe that's the point, and SimCity gives you this sort
of present all your like a not just a city planner,
you're kind of a god. Right you can you don't
have to contend, you don't have to run for election,
you don't have to deal with different constituencies that want
(25:42):
different things, which is actually the meat of civic life.
And I think that's the connection here, is that the
really the real life is really not like that. But
if you are really frustrated and really powerful, you can
try to do it. But I think that that effort
has run into local opposition. And that's that's one of
the reasons that I compare to Dora and Gary Nelson
(26:02):
city building education work where it can also was response
to the civil rights unrest in nineteen sixties, that where
she had kids in classrooms build and role playing model cities,
and there it's all about the kids voicing their desires
and what they want and don't want, and hashing out
there with each other, you know, coming to some kind
of agreement. That's really what civic life should be like
(26:24):
in a democracy.
Speaker 1 (26:26):
That's very interesting. It comes back to those two epigraphs,
isn't it in the sense of sulfur etin the world
and we're probably living the computer simulation and maybe more
of a hope than an analysis on the part of
some of these guys.
Speaker 2 (26:36):
Software trying to eat the world. I think that's that's
very apt.
Speaker 1 (26:41):
So my very very last question is actually more of
a confession, which is I totally I was obsessed with
the SIMS. But what I didn't tell you was the
way I like to play it was by using cheap
COULDE have unlimited resources to build these lacial ms for
the Sims to be endlessly happy in which I know
is a sacrilegious way of playing the game, But of
course the ten eleven, twelve year old, it's one of
(27:02):
those moments where you know you're on the customer adolessons
and your agency is less than your desire. How does
the way we play reflect on us?
Speaker 2 (27:11):
I mean that is something that has fascinated play scholars.
Brian Son Smith one of the most influential play scholars
in the twentieth century. He does a cross cultural comparison
of games. Which societies play which games, and so certain
societies I think perhaps I forget the details, but maybe
agrarian ones or more drawn to games of luck and
(27:32):
sort of modern Western industrial societies tend to be more
interested in games of strategy and skill. But I just
find in my own personal life, I tend to find
that people that are more interested in gambling tend to
be business people. I don't know if this is this
is purely anecdotal, but I'm always fascinated when I meet
people say like, what do you like to play? How
do you play? I feel like I've learned a lot
about somebody by playing.
Speaker 1 (27:54):
With them him. Thanks so much for being with me today.
Speaker 2 (28:03):
This is really fun. Thank you.
Speaker 1 (28:28):
For tech Stuff. I'm os Voloshin. This episode was produced
by Eliza Dennis, Victoria Dominguez, and Lizzie Jacobs. He was
executive produced by Me, Karen Price and Kate Osborne for
Kaleidoscope and Katrina Norvel for iHeart Podcasts. Jack Insley mixed
this episode and Kyle Murdoch wrote our theme song. Join
us on Friday for the weekend tech Karen and I
(28:51):
will run through the tech headlines you may have missed.
Please rate, review, and reach out to us at tech
Stuff podcast at gmail dot com. We can't wait to
hear from you.
TechStuff News
Hosts And Creators
Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
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