TheAgitator.com
The Perfectly Planned Sims City: Strangely Pyongyangish
Wednesday, October 13th, 2010
Here’s a very funny Vice interview with the man who mastered Sim City, the urban planning computer game.
The Consumerist sets the interview up.
Vincent Ocasla says that in fashioning the “Magnasanti” metropolis, he has “beaten” SimCity by creating the max stable population of six million. It consists of four grids of identical 12 x 12 grids with everyone’s workplace within walking distance. There are no roads, the city runs entirely on subways. There’s zero abandoned buildings zero congestion, and zero water pollution.
Sounds utopic! But wait…
Technically, no one is leaving or coming into the city. Population growth is stagnant. Sims don’t need to travel long distances, because their workplace is just within walking distance. In fact they do not even need to leave their own block. Wherever they go it’s like going to the same place….
…The ironic thing about it is the sims in Magnasanti tolerate it. They don’t rebel, or cause revolutions and social chaos. No one considers challenging the system by physical means since a hyper-efficient police state keeps them in line. They have all been successfully dumbed down, sickened with poor health, enslaved and mind-controlled just enough to keep this system going for thousands of years. 50,000 years to be exact. They are all imprisoned in space and time.
Also, no one lives past the age of 50. Bright side: Low health care expenditures!
“Strangely Pyongyangish.”
Sounds like a lot of American cities too. I went to South America a few years ago and was shocked at what freedom actually looks like. It’s idiosyncratic. Every property owner builds however he pleases and the result is beautifully varied and imaginative. Even just a few miles from where I live there is a small community of people who voted not to incorporate and thus have no city council, no police, etc, and its so cool to see the result of people having the freedom to do what they want with their property. Most of America is a bit Pyongyangish too.
How is food delivered to the grocery stores? Delivering it via the subway doesn’t seem very efficient.
Without roads, how do you get equipment in to maintain the buildings? In fact… how did they build them in the first place?
Clearly Bob, the answer is comic-book level nanotechnology.
Wow, the city is so frightening to see the video was yanked for copyright violation.
The comments to the article are freakin’ hilarious.
And you know the chicks dig it. No way he’s not getting laid after he shows her this!
There’s something familiar about him, though…
Oh crap! he’s the President of my Home Owner’s Association! Time to rent a U-Move truck!
Well. I finally got to see the video.
Holy crap.
I locked all my doors, and now I’m cowering in the corner with a laptop and a .45 automatic.
I’d love to see the looks on the faces of the creators of Sim City when they see this.
JS, if you have the time to waste, I invite you to tour Second Life sometime. While the iron fist of the man has cracked down on online gambling and the really twisted sexual stuff has been segregated to its own continent, you’ll find a casual stroll down one of the major roads to be as diverse as you can get. A castle followed by an art gallery followed by a mall followed by the Taj Majal — with a generous helping of strip clubs, houses floating in mid-air, and abandoned lots with spinning cubes advertising “for sale” interspersed between!
I find the chaotic lack of any sort of zoning or urban planning ugly … like that neighbor who doesn’t know when to stop adding lawn flamingos and other plastic ornaments to their property. On the other hand, there is, as you say, the beautiful smell of freedom in the air there. Pity it’s virtual.
I feel like I’ve looked into the dark heart of every politician. A world where everyone is the same, every place is the same and people don’t live long enough to be problematic? That’s the world every communist, fascist and statist dreamed of (apart from the adjacent city where they life in paradise).
This was not the newest version of SimCity, which has been out for quite a while now.
JS,
I’m relatively certain that most North Koreans, given the chance to freely leave North Korea to head to the United States with friends and family in tow, would do so in probably a nano-second. I’m equally certain that most Americans, given the chance to freely leave the United States to head to North Korea with friends and family in tow, would decline such an opportunity immediately. America has its problems, but it is nothing compared to what life is like in North Korea.
Sam I didn’t mean to imply that the US actually sucks as bad as North Korea, I was just making a play on Radley use of the word Pyongyangish.
I loved this game. Mostly because no matter how hard I tried, my citizens always just did what they wanted and ignored my grandious top-down plans. In a way, Sim City made me more of a libertarian than Rand or Hayek ever could.
It’s nice when I see SimCity and Civilization get props for being decent teaching tools for kids. My wish list would be for both games to reward libertarianism, free markets, and anarchism a lot more. But, they still serve as a good way of telling kids “THIS is how they think it works, but here’s why they’re wrong.”
So now we know where central planning gets you.
Shocker, couldn’t see that one coming.
@12
I agree. I have had a lot of fun with both games, particularly Civilization. I am looking forward to when my kids are all old enough to play Civ. I think it is a great learning tool to learn how decisions you make today effect your situation in the future, and often have unintended consequences.
I remember seeing this video months back and recalling that I had mixed emotions about it. On one hand it is amazing that someone had the skills and took the time to figure out how to do that, but at the same time the result seems quite scary.
On the topic of North Korea, I recently finished reading the book,”Eating with the enemy” which I would recommend to anyone interested in North Korea. It is an entertaining book written by a restaurant owner who in his spare time hung out with North Koreans. His friendship with one in particular got him a few interesting trips into North Korea which he details in the book.
One my favorite sentiments I think he expresses well in the book is that our businessmen are more of a threat to the North Korean government than our bureaucrats and military.
” My wish list would be for both games to reward libertarianism, free markets, and anarchism a lot more”
In other words you would like to bias the game to create artificial incentives for free market plays.
Anyone else see the irony here?
He’s ba-ack.
The free market is the original condition. Another way of putting it would be: “My wish list would be for both games to not obstruct libertarianism, free markets and anarchism a lot more.”
Without the impositions of the State, there would only be a free market.
“Without the impositions of the State, there would only be a free market.”
Sort of like Somalia