Imitation of Life
Legendary video game programmer Sid Meier created a game called Civilization (apparently, the best selling video game series of all time) to which I was hopelessly addicted. The basic premise is that the game begins in the year 4000, B.C. and you the player control the first and only village of one of the major civilizations (Persians, Chinese, Babylonians, but also Sioux, Americans?, Zulus -- it's very multi-multi), which you must then grow into a major empire. The game can be won by blowing everyone else up, but you can also win by getting enough technology to develop space travel or by becoming economically dominant.
The reason the game is so fun to play is because it changes completely every time you play it, and it also has a bizarre tendency to replicate actual historical and contemporary socio-political situations. The amazing thing is that it does this not because the programmers inserted a chunk of code that enacts a script for the Cuban missile crisis, but because the rules that govern gameplay are so well-modeled on real-life economic and political theories that the game becames a crudely accurate world history simulator.
See, Sid Meier hit on an idea that has always captivated me, which is that most complex systems are the result of much simpler rules sets that, once understood, can help to account for things that appear to be random or impossibly complicated. It's the reason that I first majored in physics (an early physics TA once told me that the reason that he switched from pre-med to physics was because pot had destroyed his short-term memory and with physics you can derive almost everything from a few equations instead of having to memorize page after page of names and rules) and then philosophy at school, and it's the reason that I'm so fascinated with neuroscience, and it has a profound effect on the way I see the world and how I behave in it. For example, if I go on a diet I want a couple of simple rules that I can follow (like "don't eat two of everything") rather than trying to deal with figuring out which things have carbs or how many "points" my meal might consist of.
The reason I bring all this up on my blog is because it occurs to me that if I take a piece of terrain, follow the basic rules of architectural design and pay attention to the laws of physics, the construction of my virtual city might bring up some intriguingly real-life situations. In the near term, I know that I'm going to be tempted to make some non-descript, standardized houses and commercial spaces to begin to fill out the city. While I don't have to worry about actual monetary cost, my design time is limited and therefore valuable, and I just don't think that I'll be able to hold myself back from making some generic looking neighborhood before long, just so I can have something that looks like a city instead of a portfolio of eccentricly amateur office towers.
Down the road, though, I can imagine more interesting results. I've already had people suggest design changes in the comments section, so it seems inevitable that I'll end up working on some commissions (for free, of course) for my readers, and I'm sure that people will prefer for their home to be on a particularly nice piece of property or in the most interesting neighborhood around, which seems like it could create some kind of real estate market. Similarly, it seems like there will come a time when I've built a first draft of Babble/On and I'll want to go back and revise it a bit by eliminating some of my clumsy early attempts at design and replacing them with new ideas, probably because they'll be occupying some of the best spots in the city center. Will I want to just destroy the old buildings, or will I have gotten used to the neighborhood looking a certain way? Will my readers have an opinion about saving some of the old buildings? It seems like this might result in something like a historical preservation society of a sort.
Of course, all of this depends on maintaining a readership and actually getting a whole city designed, which means I should get cracking on that cheese building tomorrow and get some new pictures up.
The reason the game is so fun to play is because it changes completely every time you play it, and it also has a bizarre tendency to replicate actual historical and contemporary socio-political situations. The amazing thing is that it does this not because the programmers inserted a chunk of code that enacts a script for the Cuban missile crisis, but because the rules that govern gameplay are so well-modeled on real-life economic and political theories that the game becames a crudely accurate world history simulator.
See, Sid Meier hit on an idea that has always captivated me, which is that most complex systems are the result of much simpler rules sets that, once understood, can help to account for things that appear to be random or impossibly complicated. It's the reason that I first majored in physics (an early physics TA once told me that the reason that he switched from pre-med to physics was because pot had destroyed his short-term memory and with physics you can derive almost everything from a few equations instead of having to memorize page after page of names and rules) and then philosophy at school, and it's the reason that I'm so fascinated with neuroscience, and it has a profound effect on the way I see the world and how I behave in it. For example, if I go on a diet I want a couple of simple rules that I can follow (like "don't eat two of everything") rather than trying to deal with figuring out which things have carbs or how many "points" my meal might consist of.
The reason I bring all this up on my blog is because it occurs to me that if I take a piece of terrain, follow the basic rules of architectural design and pay attention to the laws of physics, the construction of my virtual city might bring up some intriguingly real-life situations. In the near term, I know that I'm going to be tempted to make some non-descript, standardized houses and commercial spaces to begin to fill out the city. While I don't have to worry about actual monetary cost, my design time is limited and therefore valuable, and I just don't think that I'll be able to hold myself back from making some generic looking neighborhood before long, just so I can have something that looks like a city instead of a portfolio of eccentricly amateur office towers.
Down the road, though, I can imagine more interesting results. I've already had people suggest design changes in the comments section, so it seems inevitable that I'll end up working on some commissions (for free, of course) for my readers, and I'm sure that people will prefer for their home to be on a particularly nice piece of property or in the most interesting neighborhood around, which seems like it could create some kind of real estate market. Similarly, it seems like there will come a time when I've built a first draft of Babble/On and I'll want to go back and revise it a bit by eliminating some of my clumsy early attempts at design and replacing them with new ideas, probably because they'll be occupying some of the best spots in the city center. Will I want to just destroy the old buildings, or will I have gotten used to the neighborhood looking a certain way? Will my readers have an opinion about saving some of the old buildings? It seems like this might result in something like a historical preservation society of a sort.
Of course, all of this depends on maintaining a readership and actually getting a whole city designed, which means I should get cracking on that cheese building tomorrow and get some new pictures up.
posted by Arazu at
11:36 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home