Something I wrote about SimCity a few years ago still applies:
"Everyone notices the obvious built-in political bias, whatever that is. But everyone sees it from a different perspective, so nobody agrees what its real political agenda actually is. I don't think it's all that important, since SimCity's political agenda pales in comparison to the political agenda in the eye of the beholder."
-Quoted from Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games. A summary of Will Wright's talk, by Don Hopkins, at http://www.catalog.com/hopkins/simcity/WillWright. html
In the context of that essay about SimCity:
The anatomy of a simulation game:
There are several tightly coupled parts of a simulation game that must be designed closely together: the simulation model, the game play, the user interface, and the user's model.
In order for a game to be realizable, all of those different parts must be tractable. There are games that might have a great user interface, be fun to play, easy to understand, but involve processes that are currently impossible to simulate on a computer. There are also games that are possible to simulate, fun to play, easy to understand, but that don't afford a useable interface: Will has designed a great game called "Sim Thunder Storm", but he hasn't been able to think of a user interface that would make any sense.
On the user model:
The digital models running on a computer are only compilers for the mental models users construct in their heads. The actual end product of SimCity is not the shallow model of the city running in the computer. More importantly, it's the deeper model of the real world, and the intuitive understanding of complex dynamic systems, that people learn from playing it, in the context of everything else about a city that they already know. In that sense, SimCity, SimEarth, and SimAnt are quite educational, since they implant useful models in their users minds.
On the simulation model:
Many geeks have spent their time trying to reverse engineer the simulator by performing experiments to determine how it works, just for fun. This would be a great exercise for a programming class. When I first started playing SimCity, I constructed elaborate fantasies about how it was implemented, which turned out to be quite inaccurate. But the exercise of coming up with elaborate fantasies about how to simulate a city was very educational, because it's a hard problem!
The actual simulation is much less idealisticly general purpose that I would have thought, epitomizing the Nike "just do it" slogan. In SimCity classic, the representation of the city is low level and distilled down compactly enough that a small home computer can push it around. The city is represented by tiles, indexed by numbers that are literally scattered throughout the code, which is hardly general purpose or modular, but runs fast. It sacrifices expandability and modularity for speed and size, just the right trade-off for the wonderful game that it is.
Some educators have asked Maxis to make SimCity expose more about the actual simulation itself, instead of hiding its inner workings from the user. They want to see how it works and what it depends on, so it is less of a game, and more educational. But what's really going on inside is not as realistic as they would want to believe: because of its nature as a game, and the constraint that it must run on low end home computers, it tries to fool people into thinking it's doing more than it really is, by taking advantage of the knowledge and expectations people already have about how a city is supposed to work. Implication is more efficient than simulation.
People naturally attribute cause and effect relationships to events in SimCity that Will as the programmer knows are not actually related. Perhaps it is more educational for SimCity players to integrate what they already know to fill in the gaps, than letting them in on the secret of how simple and discrete it really is. As an educational game, SimCity stimulates students to learn more about the real world, without revealing the internals of its artificial simulation. The implementation details of SimCity are quite interesting for a programmer or game designer to study, but not your average high school social studies class.
Educators who want to expose the internals of SimCity to students may not realize how brittle and shallow it really is. I don't mean that as criticism of Will, SimCity, or the educators who are seeking open, realistic, general purpose simulators for use in teaching. SimCity does what it was designed to and much more, but it's not that. Their goals are noble, but the software's not there yet. Once kids master SimCity, they could learn Logo, or some high level visual programming language like KidSim, and write their own simulations and games!
Other people wanted to use SimCity for the less noble goal of teaching people what to think, instead of just teaching them to think.
Everyone notices the obvious built-in political bias, whatever that is. But everyone sees it from a different perspective, so nobody agrees what its real political agenda actually is. I don't think it's all that important, since SimCity's political agenda pales in comparison to the political agenda in the eye of the beholder.
Some muckety-muck architecture magazine was interviewing Will Wright about SimCity, and they asked him a question something like "which ontological urban paridigm most influenced your design of the simulator, the Exo-Hamiltonian Pattern Language Movement, or the Intra-Urban Deconstructionist Sub-Culture Hypothesis?" He replied, "I just kind of optimized for game play."
Then there was the oil company who wanted "Sim Refinery", so you could use it to lay out oil tanker ports and petrolium storage and piping systems, because they thought that it would give their employees useful experience in toxic waste disaster management, in the same way SimCity gives kids useful experience in being the mayor of a city. They didn't realize that the real lessons of SimCity are much more subtle than teaching people how to be good mayors. But the oil company hoped they could use it to teach any other lessons on their agenda just by plugging in a new set of graphics, a few rules, and a bunch of disasters.
And there was the X-Terminal vendor who wanted to adapt the simulator in SimCity into a game called "Sim MIS", that they would distribute for free to Managers of Information Systems, whose job it is to decide what hardware to buy! The idea was that the poor overworked MIS would have fun playing this game in which they could build networks with PCs, X-Terminals, and servers (instead of roads with residential, commercial, and industrial buildings), that had disasters like "viruses" infecting the network of PC's, and "upgrades" forcing you to reinstall Windows on every PC, and business charts that would graphically highlight the high maintanence cost of PCs versus X-Terminals. Their idea was to use a fun game to subtly influence people into buying their product, by making them lose if they didn't. Unlike the oil company, they certainly realized the potential to exploit the indirect ways in which a game like SimCity can influence the user's mind, but they had no grip on the concept of subtlety or game design.
Re:The worst job in the world is Slowlaris sysadmi
on
New Machines From Sun
·
· Score: 1
Sloraris only kicks ass if you administer it right, and in order to do that, you need to have proper equipment. That's why I recommend the Pink Board, a system administration device that no Slowlaris sysadmin should be without. It will clean out your caches and keep your data moving regularly, with the throughput and capacity to handle even the most extreme bandwidth requirements.
You accidentally overunderstood me. What I said was a JOKE!!!
Stallard Richman, indeed.
It was a parody of RMS's classic "Why you should not use TCL" diatribe.
-Don
Re:The worst job in the world is Slowlaris sysadmi
on
New Machines From Sun
·
· Score: 1
Wrong. I worked for Sun during the summer of '87 and from Jul '90 to Oct '91, but I left the company because Slowlaris sucked so bad, and it was humiliating to work for a company that asked me to lie to its customers, when all the customers could see through the lies (except you, appearently).
-Don
The worst job in the world is Slowlaris sysadmin
on
New Machines From Sun
·
· Score: 1
Who would ever buy one of those pieces of crap from Sun? Doesn't everybody know that administering Slowlaris is
The Worst Job in the World??!
If you're really so autointoxicated that you'd consider buying Sun equipment, it would be much more cost effective in the long run to get a PinkBoard instead.
Absolutely not. First of all, they're not called "PDP-10"'s, they're called "DEC-10"'s. Second of all, a "PDP-11" is a TOTALLY different kind of machine than a "DEC-10", which is definitely a 36 bit mainframe.
-Don
Re:How does a PDP-10 looks like?
on
PDP-10 Revival
·
· Score: 2
Chris Torek hacked ^T into the 4.1 BSD kernel (the tty device driver) at the University of Maryland, some time in the early 80's, so it would display the system load and uptime whenever you typed ^T.
There was a problem with his first implementation: You could holding down the repeat key to send lots of ^T's really fast, and watch the load go way up as you overwhelmed the system. So he added a one second timer throttle.
Donald Norman left Apple a long time ago to work for Sun (which I though was hillarious because Sun has the worst user interfaces around, and doesn't give a shit about usability, so he certainly had his work cut out for him). Last I heard he left Sun and is now working with Jacob Neilson.
-Don
PDP-11 != DECSYSTEM 10, but TOAD-1 does.
on
PDP-10 Revival
·
· Score: 2
A PDP-11 is NOTHING like a DEC-10. They're not even really called PDP-10's: the real name is DECSYSTEM 10. Sheez.
I just used an XKL TOAD-1 a few seconds ago (but it's been a while since I last logged in, but notice how long it's been up):
telnet xkleten.paulallen.com
Trying 204.202.80.66...
Connected to xkleten.paulallen.com (204.202.80.66).
Escape character is '^]'.
XKLeTen - Tops20 for the Wired World, TOPS-20 Monitor 7(102400)-1
@finger
User Personal name Job Subsys Idle TTY Console location
??? 9 FINGER 25
Internet: [216.218.252.130]
@login a2deh
Job 9 on TTY25 17-Jan-2001 2:51PM
Previous LOGIN: 11-Dec-1998 4:30PM
You have mail from Mailer at 14-Dec-1998 5:04PM
XKLeTen@ finger
User Personal name Job Subsys Idle TTY Console location
A2DEH 9 FINGER 25 Internet: [216.218.252.130]
XKLeTen@ sysTAT
Wed 17-Jan-2001 14:55:23 Up 931:34:02
1+6 Jobs Load av 0.01 0.02 0.01
Job Line Program User Origin
9* 25 SYSTAT A2DEH (216.218.252.130)
Paul Allen and Bill Gates used to hack on DEC-10's, so Paul Allen has set up a nice TOAD-1 for old times sake.
Here's some more info on the
TOAD-1:
configuration and
physical specs.
The most important piece of code of the Free Software movement originated on the PDP-10: Emacs.
GCC came about later as a means to compile Emacs (once it was rewritten in C instead of Teco).
CGG wasn't intended to become so popular, or even to be used by human beings -- it just kind of got out of control.
If you don't believe me, here's what Stallard Richman himself has to say:
No-one thinks only Microsoft lackeys hate Unix, except for inexperienced newbie B1FF3R5 who've never used anything but Linux, so they don't have anything to compare it with.
You shouldn't be using Linux if you don't know what sucks about it. The same goes for Windows or any other operating system.
"If you're not playing with 36 bits, you're not playing with a full DEC!"
-Doug Humphrey (aka DIGEX), pissing off the Vax weenies at DECUS
-Don
How about MORE FUN instead of faster graphics?
on
First Looks At XBox
·
· Score: 1
How could Michael Abrash and John Carmack ever seperate themselves from the pack? They ARE the pack.
PC graphics have gotten thousands of times faster in the past years, but hardly as much more fun. We don't need any more graphics acceleration, we need FUN ACCELERATION. But don't look to Michale Abrash and John Carmack for that: they're stuck in a dead end rut, a tedious hell of their own creation, and have never demonstrated a drop of talent for creative game design.
Well why don't you ask your sysadmin wife to sell the car and the house and all your stocks and retirement accounts and empty out the nest egg you've been saving for breeding, and have a vasectomy so you won't accidentally conceive any expensive babies that will detract from your game playing time, and send all that money to Loki, so they can pay their programmers to work only on gpl games, and pay the exorbitant source code licensing fees to computer game companies that invested millions of dollars in developing those games, so their stockholders don't sue them.
Habitat from LucasFilms (around 1985) was one of the first widely used graphical multi player networked games. It ran on the C64 connected to a server by modem. They've published several classic papers about it. Here's another great paper written by one of the authors of Habitat, Chip Morningstar: How To Deconstruct Almost Anything.
Farmer, 1993:
Farmer, F. R. (1993). Habitat Citizenry. In Loeffler, C. E., (ed.), Virtual Reality: A Survey of Technology and Culture. Van Nostrand Rheingold.
Zork was directly responsible for getting me interested in using the arpanet, around 1980 or so.
On MIT-DM, the DEC-10 running a strange version of ITS where Zork was developed, only two people were allowed to play Zork at once. So all the other people would hang around watching them for clues (using a program called:OS that let you spy on the output of somebody else's login session), chit-chatting by sending messages and email, and fooling around with emacs at 300 baud.
MIT-DM was basically the first chat server / online game lobby / waiting room for a bunch of kids across the country awaiting their turn to play Zork.
The exciting adventure you had to get through in order to play Zork was dialing up an arpanet tip (which didn't have passwords yet), typing "@L 70" to connect to MIT-DM (which was #70 of the vast 256 possible addresses), deciding on a unique user name (since RMS was disabled -- err, differently challenged), applying for a tourist account, and making up a hokey reason why the MIT AI Lab should let you use their computer for free during off hours, other than simply "playing Zork". I think the phrase I used was "Programming MDL for algebraic and calculus applications." (I didn't know what it meant at the time, but somebody told me that would work, and it did!) Don't tell anyone on USER-ACCOUNTS that I lied, but at least I wasn't abusive.
Nowdays when everybody's wearing java nipple rings with more computing power than went into launching Skylab, the idea of MIT giving away free accounts for kids to play Zork doesn't seem like a big thing, but it sure meant a lot back then. Thanks!
Did they ever fix the "give axe to troll" bug in the Infocom version? He ate anything you have him, without checking if he was holding it himself. So he'd gobble down his own axe he was wielding at you, then cower whimpering in the corner waiting for you to kill him. Worse yet, you could say "give troll to troll" and he'd eat himself, and disappear in a puff of logic, without clearing the room's troll flag. So if you try to leave the room through the exit he was once blocking, he would appearantly suddenly reappear to block your way, then disappear again, so you couldn't ever kill him!
How much would you pay for a game that ran faster on Linux than on any other platform?
Is a box and a CD important to you, or would you be happy to download it and unlock it by buying a license online with a credit card?
-Don
This isn't a hypothetical question -- I'm really interested in hearing what people think.
Slashdot Mirror
Symantic just copied the idea then patented it.
-Don
http://www.scottkim.com
-Don
-Don
"Everyone notices the obvious built-in political bias, whatever that is. But everyone sees it from a different perspective, so nobody agrees what its real political agenda actually is. I don't think it's all that important, since SimCity's political agenda pales in comparison to the political agenda in the eye of the beholder."
-Quoted from Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games. A summary of Will Wright's talk, by Don Hopkins, at http://www.catalog.com/hopkins/simcity/WillWright. html
In the context of that essay about SimCity:
The anatomy of a simulation game:
There are several tightly coupled parts of a simulation game that must be designed closely together: the simulation model, the game play, the user interface, and the user's model.
In order for a game to be realizable, all of those different parts must be tractable. There are games that might have a great user interface, be fun to play, easy to understand, but involve processes that are currently impossible to simulate on a computer. There are also games that are possible to simulate, fun to play, easy to understand, but that don't afford a useable interface: Will has designed a great game called "Sim Thunder Storm", but he hasn't been able to think of a user interface that would make any sense.
On the user model:
The digital models running on a computer are only compilers for the mental models users construct in their heads. The actual end product of SimCity is not the shallow model of the city running in the computer. More importantly, it's the deeper model of the real world, and the intuitive understanding of complex dynamic systems, that people learn from playing it, in the context of everything else about a city that they already know. In that sense, SimCity, SimEarth, and SimAnt are quite educational, since they implant useful models in their users minds.
On the simulation model:
Many geeks have spent their time trying to reverse engineer the simulator by performing experiments to determine how it works, just for fun. This would be a great exercise for a programming class. When I first started playing SimCity, I constructed elaborate fantasies about how it was implemented, which turned out to be quite inaccurate. But the exercise of coming up with elaborate fantasies about how to simulate a city was very educational, because it's a hard problem!
The actual simulation is much less idealisticly general purpose that I would have thought, epitomizing the Nike "just do it" slogan. In SimCity classic, the representation of the city is low level and distilled down compactly enough that a small home computer can push it around. The city is represented by tiles, indexed by numbers that are literally scattered throughout the code, which is hardly general purpose or modular, but runs fast. It sacrifices expandability and modularity for speed and size, just the right trade-off for the wonderful game that it is.
Some educators have asked Maxis to make SimCity expose more about the actual simulation itself, instead of hiding its inner workings from the user. They want to see how it works and what it depends on, so it is less of a game, and more educational. But what's really going on inside is not as realistic as they would want to believe: because of its nature as a game, and the constraint that it must run on low end home computers, it tries to fool people into thinking it's doing more than it really is, by taking advantage of the knowledge and expectations people already have about how a city is supposed to work. Implication is more efficient than simulation.
People naturally attribute cause and effect relationships to events in SimCity that Will as the programmer knows are not actually related. Perhaps it is more educational for SimCity players to integrate what they already know to fill in the gaps, than letting them in on the secret of how simple and discrete it really is. As an educational game, SimCity stimulates students to learn more about the real world, without revealing the internals of its artificial simulation. The implementation details of SimCity are quite interesting for a programmer or game designer to study, but not your average high school social studies class.
Educators who want to expose the internals of SimCity to students may not realize how brittle and shallow it really is. I don't mean that as criticism of Will, SimCity, or the educators who are seeking open, realistic, general purpose simulators for use in teaching. SimCity does what it was designed to and much more, but it's not that. Their goals are noble, but the software's not there yet. Once kids master SimCity, they could learn Logo, or some high level visual programming language like KidSim, and write their own simulations and games!
Other people wanted to use SimCity for the less noble goal of teaching people what to think, instead of just teaching them to think.
Everyone notices the obvious built-in political bias, whatever that is. But everyone sees it from a different perspective, so nobody agrees what its real political agenda actually is. I don't think it's all that important, since SimCity's political agenda pales in comparison to the political agenda in the eye of the beholder.
Some muckety-muck architecture magazine was interviewing Will Wright about SimCity, and they asked him a question something like "which ontological urban paridigm most influenced your design of the simulator, the Exo-Hamiltonian Pattern Language Movement, or the Intra-Urban Deconstructionist Sub-Culture Hypothesis?" He replied, "I just kind of optimized for game play."
Then there was the oil company who wanted "Sim Refinery", so you could use it to lay out oil tanker ports and petrolium storage and piping systems, because they thought that it would give their employees useful experience in toxic waste disaster management, in the same way SimCity gives kids useful experience in being the mayor of a city. They didn't realize that the real lessons of SimCity are much more subtle than teaching people how to be good mayors. But the oil company hoped they could use it to teach any other lessons on their agenda just by plugging in a new set of graphics, a few rules, and a bunch of disasters.
And there was the X-Terminal vendor who wanted to adapt the simulator in SimCity into a game called "Sim MIS", that they would distribute for free to Managers of Information Systems, whose job it is to decide what hardware to buy! The idea was that the poor overworked MIS would have fun playing this game in which they could build networks with PCs, X-Terminals, and servers (instead of roads with residential, commercial, and industrial buildings), that had disasters like "viruses" infecting the network of PC's, and "upgrades" forcing you to reinstall Windows on every PC, and business charts that would graphically highlight the high maintanence cost of PCs versus X-Terminals. Their idea was to use a fun game to subtly influence people into buying their product, by making them lose if they didn't. Unlike the oil company, they certainly realized the potential to exploit the indirect ways in which a game like SimCity can influence the user's mind, but they had no grip on the concept of subtlety or game design.
Continued in context at:. html]
http://www.catalog.com/hopkins/simcity/WillWright
-Don
Stallard Richman, indeed.
It was a parody of RMS's classic "Why you should not use TCL" diatribe.
-Don
-Don
If you're really so autointoxicated that you'd consider buying Sun equipment, it would be much more cost effective in the long run to get a PinkBoard instead.
"You will be surprised at what comes out of you."
-Don
-Don
http://www.catalog.com/hopkins/images/mc-console.
A CADR Lisp Machine spews its guts, on the 9th floor MIT AI Lab at Tech Square.
http://www.catalog.com/hopkins/images/cadr.jpg
JSol, RMS, the gerbil, Liz, and MG, at Kabuki in Cambridge. The expression on Richard's face is saying, "I don't know, why do you wrap gerbils in duct tape?"r bil-liz-mg.jpg
http://www.catalog.com/hopkins/images/jsol-rms-ge
-Don
-Don
-Don
I just used an XKL TOAD-1 a few seconds ago (but it's been a while since I last logged in, but notice how long it's been up):
telnet xkleten.paulallen.com
Trying 204.202.80.66...
Connected to xkleten.paulallen.com
(204.202.80.66).
Escape character is '^]'.
XKLeTen - Tops20 for the Wired World, TOPS-20 Monitor 7(102400)-1
@finger
User Personal name Job Subsys Idle TTY Console location
??? 9 FINGER 25 Internet: [216.218.252.130]
@login a2deh
Job 9 on TTY25 17-Jan-2001 2:51PM
Previous LOGIN: 11-Dec-1998 4:30PM
You have mail from Mailer at 14-Dec-1998 5:04PM
XKLeTen@ finger
User Personal name Job Subsys Idle TTY Console location
A2DEH 9 FINGER 25 Internet: [216.218.252.130]
XKLeTen@ sysTAT
Wed 17-Jan-2001 14:55:23 Up 931:34:02
1+6 Jobs Load av 0.01 0.02 0.01
Job Line Program User Origin
9* 25 SYSTAT A2DEH (216.218.252.130)
1 1 OPR OPERATOR
2 2 NETSRV OPERATOR
3 3 RESOLV OPERATOR
4 4 MMAILR OPERATOR
5 5 EXEC OPERATOR
6 6 MAILST OPERATOR
XKLeTen@
Paul Allen and Bill Gates used to hack on DEC-10's, so Paul Allen has set up a nice TOAD-1 for old times sake. Here's some more info on the TOAD-1: configuration and physical specs.
-Don
GCC came about later as a means to compile Emacs (once it was rewritten in C instead of Teco). CGG wasn't intended to become so popular, or even to be used by human beings -- it just kind of got out of control.
If you don't believe me, here's what Stallard Richman himself has to say:
Why you should not use Unix
-Don
-Don
No-one thinks only Microsoft lackeys hate Unix, except for inexperienced newbie B1FF3R5 who've never used anything but Linux, so they don't have anything to compare it with.
You shouldn't be using Linux if you don't know what sucks about it. The same goes for Windows or any other operating system.
http://www.catalog.com/hopkins/unix-haters/handboo k.html
http://catalog.com/hopkins/unix-haters/etc/magoo.h tml
http://catalog.com/hopkins/unix-haters/whinux/your -time.html
-Don
-Doug Humphrey (aka DIGEX), pissing off the Vax weenies at DECUS
-Don
PC graphics have gotten thousands of times faster in the past years, but hardly as much more fun. We don't need any more graphics acceleration, we need FUN ACCELERATION. But don't look to Michale Abrash and John Carmack for that: they're stuck in a dead end rut, a tedious hell of their own creation, and have never demonstrated a drop of talent for creative game design.
-Don
-Don
Richard Stallman loves you.
-Don
-Don
The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat
Farmer, 1993: Farmer, F. R. (1993). Habitat Citizenry. In Loeffler, C. E., (ed.), Virtual Reality: A Survey of Technology and Culture. Van Nostrand Rheingold.
Farmer et al., 1994 Farmer, F. R., Morningstar, C., et Crockford, D. (1994). From Habitat to Global Cyberspace. In Proceedings from CompCon '94. IEEE Computer Society./ papers/habitat/hab2cybr.txt
ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/academic/communications
Chapter Six: Real-time Tribes. By Howard Rheingold.
-Don
Zork was directly responsible for getting me interested in using the arpanet, around 1980 or so. On MIT-DM, the DEC-10 running a strange version of ITS where Zork was developed, only two people were allowed to play Zork at once. So all the other people would hang around watching them for clues (using a program called :OS that let you spy on the output of somebody else's login session), chit-chatting by sending messages and email, and fooling around with emacs at 300 baud.
MIT-DM was basically the first chat server / online game lobby / waiting room for a bunch of kids across the country awaiting their turn to play Zork.
The exciting adventure you had to get through in order to play Zork was dialing up an arpanet tip (which didn't have passwords yet), typing "@L 70" to connect to MIT-DM (which was #70 of the vast 256 possible addresses), deciding on a unique user name (since RMS was disabled -- err, differently challenged), applying for a tourist account, and making up a hokey reason why the MIT AI Lab should let you use their computer for free during off hours, other than simply "playing Zork". I think the phrase I used was "Programming MDL for algebraic and calculus applications." (I didn't know what it meant at the time, but somebody told me that would work, and it did!) Don't tell anyone on USER-ACCOUNTS that I lied, but at least I wasn't abusive.
Nowdays when everybody's wearing java nipple rings with more computing power than went into launching Skylab, the idea of MIT giving away free accounts for kids to play Zork doesn't seem like a big thing, but it sure meant a lot back then. Thanks!
Did they ever fix the "give axe to troll" bug in the Infocom version? He ate anything you have him, without checking if he was holding it himself. So he'd gobble down his own axe he was wielding at you, then cower whimpering in the corner waiting for you to kill him. Worse yet, you could say "give troll to troll" and he'd eat himself, and disappear in a puff of logic, without clearing the room's troll flag. So if you try to leave the room through the exit he was once blocking, he would appearantly suddenly reappear to block your way, then disappear again, so you couldn't ever kill him!
-Don
-Don
-Don
This isn't a hypothetical question -- I'm really interested in hearing what people think.