Chaos Manor Awards 2003, Part 3

By Jerry Pournelle

February 2, 2004

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Column 282 (Continued from the Previous Week)

Sim City

The original Maxis Sim City game was a model governed by the prejudices of its designer, who really hated private cars and loved public transportation, and the first Sim City games showed that.

Each successor has been more complex—Moore's Law made that possible—as well as more useful as a check list of factors to be used for urban planning. The latest one, Sim City 4 with the Rush Hour extension, may not be quite as much fun as some of the earlier ones—I am told that anyway—but it's a lot more useful as a planning simulator.

Understand, God forbid that real cities be planned using only the results of a Sim City 4 With Rush Hours simulation. I am saying that those responsible for city planning could do a lot worse than use Sim City 4 to model some aspects of their real city. Think of it as a suggestion generator.

As to having fun with Sim City, I don't use the game the way the designers intended. My usual move is to hack into the game file with a hex editor and give myself a lot more money than they intended me to have. Then I try to design an ideal University Town and add the equivalent of Silicon Valley. I suppose this predilection comes from the days when Stefan Possony and I were given a grant to study just why Silicon Valley worked, and whether the conditions could be created in other parts of the country. We were pretty successful—at least the sponsors of the study thought so—and now it's fun to see if Sim City will allow this to be done in simulation. So far the game doesn't give control over a couple of crucial variables, but you can manage to trick it by liberal use of startup money.

Electronic Arts / Maxis continue to improve Sim City, not just in visual presentation but in the complexity of the simulation model, and I find it an interesting way to spend an afternoon, when I can find an afternoon when my time isn't already allocated—

High Speed Access Comes to Chaos Manor

This was the year I tried satellite connection, IDSL, and cable modem in that order.

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