Bigger, Better, Even More Crazily Addictive

[MachineGhost]

But that was all a fiction. In truth, SimCity’s simulation engine has never had a place for simulated citizens. Instead, under the hood, the game has always modeled the city the same way the Soviets did—from the top down. For instance, if you decreased funding for your city’s hospitals, SimCity would simply apply a macroeconomic function to approximate how increased levels of sickness would affect the overall economy. The game’s designers knew this was something of a hack, but they had no choice. Early computers didn’t have the horsepower to keep track of how every individual’s deteriorating health might change how he behaved, and how those behaviors might ricochet across the city. Indeed, if you looked closely at SimCity’s screen, you’d often notice cars and people fade in and out of view. “That’s because they weren’t really there,”? says Ocean Quigley, a longtime game designer at Maxis, the studio that makes SimCity. “The whole city was just an abstract, top-down, statistical representation of how a city worked.”? It was, in other words, a simulated simulation.

Well, until now. On Tuesday, Maxis will launch the sixth major version of SimCity. (For now it’s for Windows PCs only; Maxis says it will put out a Mac version this spring.) For the first time, the game does something it has long pretended to do: SimCity simulates discrete urban behavior, tracking how every person and every object interacts. “We now have every car and every person and every garbage truck and every criminal represented by an autonomous agent in the environment,”? says Quigley, who served as the creative and art director on the new game. “Then we give each of them simple rules about how they should behave—so a criminal goes around looking for a place to commit crime, and a policeman goes about looking for places where crimes are being committed. What you get is a city built out of the emergent interactions between all these agents.”?

http://www.slate.com/articles/technolog ... ctive.html