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Emergence by Steven Johnson

A Pattern Language, agricultural Revolution, AOL-Time Warner, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, Danny Hillis, Douglas Hofstadter, edge city, epigenetics, game design, garden city movement, Gödel, Escher, Bach, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Kevin Kelly, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, Menlo Park, mirror neurons, Mitch Kapor, Murano, Venice glass, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, pez dispenser, phenotype, Potemkin village, power law, price mechanism, profit motive, Ray Kurzweil, SimCity, slashdot, social intelligence, Socratic dialogue, stakhanovite, Steven Pinker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, Turing test, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush

You can date it back to the day in the early nineties when Will Wright released a program called SimCity, which would go on to become one of the best-selling video-game franchises of all time. SimCity would also inaugurate a new phase in the developing story of self-organizing: emergent behavior was no longer purely an object of study, something to interpret and model in the lab. It was also something you could build, something you could interact with, and something you could sell. While SimCity came out of the developing web of the bottom-up worldview, it suggested a whole new opening: SimCity was a work of culture, not science. It aimed to entertain, not explain.

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But a quick look at the software best-seller lists will tell you that city simulations are more than just an educational device. Will Wright’s SimCity franchise has now sold millions of copies; it’s likely that the number of virtual towns created using Wright’s tools exceeds the number of real towns formed in modern human history. Some games attract our attention by appealing to our appetite for storytelling, following a linear progression of move and countermove, with clearly defined beginnings and endings; other games catch the eye by blowing things up. Sim-City was one of the first games to exploit the uncanny, bottom-up powers of emergence. Wright’s genius was not simply in recognizing the fun of simulating an entire metropolis on your screen.

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Wright’s genius was not simply in recognizing the fun of simulating an entire metropolis on your screen. He also hit upon a brilliant programming trick that enabled the city to evolve in a more lifelike way—a trick that closely resembles the behavior of ant colonies and embryos. Much has been made of the fact that you can’t ever “win” at SimCity, but it’s probably more important to note that you don’t really “play” SimCity either, at least the way we talk about playing conventional games. Users grow their virtual cities, but the cities evolve in unpredictable ways, and control over the city’s eventual shape is always indirect. You can create commercial zones or build a highway, but there’s never a guarantee that the neighborhood will take off or the crime rate go down.

All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Video Games Conquered Pop Culture by Harold Goldberg

activist lawyer, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, Apple II, cellular automata, Columbine, Conway's Game of Life, Fairchild Semiconductor, G4S, game design, Ian Bogost, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, Mars Rover, Mikhail Gorbachev, PalmPilot, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Oldenburg, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Great Good Place, Thorstein Veblen, urban planning

While Wright had amassed some money from Bungeling Bay royalties, the four years it took to find a publisher took their toll; every company he and Braun met with agreed with Broderbund. Yet, in 1989, it was actually Broderbund that agreed to copublish SimCity with Maxis. Broderbund had just launched an experimental affiliate program that allowed Wright and Braun to keep 80 percent of the profits, instead of just 15 percent of the royalties, and was eager for guinea pigs. Every game would be given on consignment to Broderbund, which would distribute SimCity. Maxis would do the rest of the work, including boxing the game and manufacturing the disks. Initially, Wright and Maxis sold the game themselves at Bay Area computer fairs at which they also passed out flyers.

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The publication of the full-page article was one of the first instances in which a videogame was reviewed by a major newsweekly (the first two were reviews of the interactive text adventures Zork and A Mind Forever Wandering in 1985). The SimCity review was a sign that games were slowly going mainstream and legit. Suddenly, Wright was the “it” designer, and SimCity became the Game of the Year. It had earned approximately $3 million by the time Christmas rolled around. As the PC version sold 500,000 copies and the Nintendo version added sales of 1.3 million more, the phone rang off the hook with requests for Wright to work on simulations.

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But EA recognized Wright’s brilliance and hired some of the country’s brightest designers to help him out. In 1999, they released SimCity 3000, starring the shoot-from-the-hip former mayor of New York City Ed Koch. By that time, Trip Hawkins was no longer involved in the company, but his edict to corral superstars for EA games had not been forgotten by what was becoming the world’s biggest videogame software maker. At the time, the crotchety Koch was a bigmouthed star with a series of bestselling books and was featured semiregularly on NBC’s Saturday Night Live. He was the perfect celebrity for SimCity 3000. In part, it was SimAnt that gave Wright the idea for his next series of games.

Overcomplicated: Technology at the Limits of Comprehension by Samuel Arbesman

algorithmic trading, Anthropocene, Anton Chekhov, Apple II, Benoit Mandelbrot, Boeing 747, Chekhov's gun, citation needed, combinatorial explosion, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Danny Hillis, data science, David Brooks, digital map, discovery of the americas, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Flash crash, friendly AI, game design, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, Hans Moravec, HyperCard, Ian Bogost, Inbox Zero, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Kevin Kelly, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, mandelbrot fractal, Minecraft, Neal Stephenson, Netflix Prize, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Parkinson's law, power law, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, SimCity, software studies, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, superintelligent machines, synthetic biology, systems thinking, the long tail, Therac-25, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K

., “Benevolent Deception in Human Computer Interaction,” CHI ’13: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Paris, France, April 27–May 2, 2013 (New York: ACM Digital Library, 2013): 1863–72. the computer game SimCity: For more on SimCity and how it can shed some light on how a complicated system works, read Doug Bierend, “SimCity That I Used to Know: On the Game’s 25th Birthday, a Devotee Talks with Creator Will Wright,” re:form, October 17, 2014, https://medium.com/re-form/simcity-that-i-used-to-know-d5d8c49e3e1d. Near the end of Average Is Over: Cowen, Average Is Over, 227–28. Cowen is speculating specifically about the future of economics and other social sciences, but we could need such “interpreters” for our future understanding of anthropic systems as well.

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Playing with a simulation of the system we’re interested in—testing its limits and fiddling with its parameters, without understanding it completely—can be a powerful path to insight, and is a skill that needs cultivation. For example, the computer game SimCity, a model of sorts, gives its users insights into how a city works. Before SimCity, I doubt many outside the realm of urban planning and civil engineering had a clear mental model of how cities worked, and we weren’t able to twiddle the knobs of urban life to produce counterfactual outcomes. We probably still can’t do that at the level of complexity of an actual city, but those who play these types of games do have a better understanding of the general effects of their actions.

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At one point, Norman noticed that the computer program had reached the stage where it was “reticulating splines.” This phrase sounded complicated, and that was reassuring to Norman—this program must really know what it was doing. But he didn’t. He got curious, and after some research he discovered—as any good fan of SimCity 2000 would know—that this was actually an inside joke, a nonsensical phrase inserted into the game that only sounds like it means something. Ever since, it has cropped up in various games and other software. Think back to the last time you installed a new piece of software. Did you know what was going on?

Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Popular Culture Is Making Us Smarter by Steven Johnson

Columbine, complexity theory, corporate governance, delayed gratification, edge city, Flynn Effect, game design, Golden age of television, Marshall McLuhan, pattern recognition, profit motive, public intellectual, race to the bottom, sexual politics, SimCity, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, the market place

Why do we use the word "play" to describe this torture ? I ' m al­ ways amazed to see what our brains are willing to tolerate to reach the next level in these games. Several years ago I found myself on a family vacation with my seven-year-old nephew, and on one rainy day I decided to introduce him to the wonders of SimCity 2000, the legendary city simulator that allows you to play Robert Moses to a growing virtual metropolis. For most of our session, I was controlling the game, pointing out landmarks as I scrolled around my lit­ tle town. I suspect I was a somewhat condescending guide-­ treating the virtual world as more of a model train layout than a complex system.

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He said it as naturally, and as confi­ dently, as he might have said, " I think we need to shoot the bad guy. " The i nteresti ng question here for m e is not whether games are, on the whole, more complex than most other cul­ tural experiences targeted at kids today-I think the answer to that is an emphatic yes. The question is why kids are so eager to soak up that much information when it is delivered to them in game form. My nephew would be asleep in five seconds if you popped him down in an urban studies class­ room, but somehow an hour of playing SimCity taught him that h igh tax rates in industrial areas can stifle development. That's a powerful learning experience, for reasons we 'll ex­ plore in the coming pages. But let's start with the more ele ­ mental question o f desire. Why does a seven-year-old soak up the i ntricacies of industrial economics in game form, when the same subject would send him screaming for the exits in a cl a ssroom ?

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But the game has a subtle reward archi tecture that plays a m a j o r role in the game's addictiveness : the software withholds a trove of ob­ jects and activities until you 've reached certain predefined levels , either of population, money, or popularity. You can build pretty much any kind of environment you want play­ ing SimCity, but you can't build a baseball stadium until you have fifty thousand residents. Similarly, Grand Theft Auto allows players to drive aimlessly through a vast urban environment, creating their own narratives as they explore the space. But for all that open-endedness, the game still forces you to complete a series of pre-defined missions be­ fore you are allowed to enter new areas of the city.

Joel on Software by Joel Spolsky

AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, Apple Newton, barriers to entry, Beos Apple "Steve Jobs" next macos , business logic, c2.com, commoditize, Dennis Ritchie, General Magic , George Gilder, index card, Jeff Bezos, knowledge worker, machine readable, Metcalfe's law, Mitch Kapor, Multics, Network effects, new economy, off-by-one error, PageRank, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, pneumatic tube, profit motive, reality distortion field, Robert X Cringely, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, six sigma, slashdot, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, thinkpad, VA Linux, web application

Microsoft obsessed about this, spending a big chunk of change testing every old program they could find with Win-dows 95. Jon Ross, who wrote the original version of SimCity for Windows 3.x, told me that he accidentally left a bug in SimCity where he read memory that he had just freed. Yep. It worked fine on Win-dows 3.x, because the memory never went anywhere. Here's the amazing part: On beta versions of Windows 95, SimCity wasn't working in testing. Microsoft tracked down the bug and added specific code to Windows 95 that looks for SimCity. If it finds SimCity running, it runs the memory allocator in a special mode that doesn't free memory right away. That's the kind of obsession with backward compatibility that made people willing to upgrade to Windows 95.

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I first heard about this from one of the developers of the hit game SimCity, who told me that there was a critical bug in his application: it used memory right after freeing it, a major no-no that happened to work OK on DOS but would not work under Windows, where memory that is freed is likely to be snatched up by another running application right away. The testers on the Windows team were going through various popular applications, testing them to make sure they worked OK, but SimCity kept crashing. They reported this to the Windows developers, who disassembled SimCity, stepped through it in a debugger, found the bug, and added special code that checked if SimCity was running, and if it did, ran the memory allocator in a special mode in which you could still use memory after freeing it. __________ 5.

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They reported this to the Windows developers, who disassembled SimCity, stepped through it in a debugger, found the bug, and added special code that checked if SimCity was running, and if it did, ran the memory allocator in a special mode in which you could still use memory after freeing it. __________ 5. Raymond Chen, The Old New Thing. See weblogs.asp.net/oldnewthing/. This was not an unusual case. The Windows testing team is huge and one of their most important responsibilities is guaranteeing that everyone can safely upgrade their operating system, no matter what applications they have installed, and those applications will continue to run, even if those applications do bad things or use undocumented functions or rely on buggy behavior that happens to be buggy in Windows n but is no longer buggy in Windows n+1.

Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It by M. Nolan Gray

Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Black Lives Matter, car-free, carbon footprint, City Beautiful movement, clean water, confounding variable, COVID-19, desegregation, Donald Shoup, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, game design, garden city movement, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, industrial cluster, Jane Jacobs, job-hopping, land bank, lone genius, mass immigration, McMansion, mortgage tax deduction, Overton Window, parking minimums, restrictive zoning, rewilding, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Silicon Valley, SimCity, starchitect, streetcar suburb, superstar cities, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, transit-oriented development, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban planning, urban renewal, War on Poverty

In this regard, negative though it may at first seem, the project of this book is fundamentally constructive: beyond merely arguing against the arbitrary lines that hold us back, this book is a reminder that a more affordable, prosperous, equitable, and sustainable America is possible. Will you be a part of that journey? Part I CHAPTER 1 Where Zoning Comes From For many Americans, their singular experience with city planning is a little game called SimCity. First released in 1989 and developed by legendary game designer Will Wright, the game invites players to plan their own cities. More of a sandbox than a conventional game with points or levels, each new “round” of SimCity presents players with a virgin field, the power to map out streets and zoning, and the freedom to do whatever they like from there. Poor planning decisions are punished with blinking indicators and unsolicited advice from AI advisors; wise planning decisions are rewarded with happy simulated citizens and a growing city.

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Pursuant to a grand, long-term vision, they can coordinate density to reflect the available infrastructure, keeping the city running like a well-oiled machine. All of these zoning decisions unfold without the pesky intervention of local politics; there are no ornery community boards or NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) litigants in SimCity. The player-as-zoning-tyrant acts alone, beneficently applying their technical expertise to advance the general welfare of their growing city. As you might expect, SimCity leaves a lot to be desired from a realism perspective: zoning isn’t really about separating incompatible uses or coordinating densities, and local interest groups completely drive the process. Yet it’s telling as a Rorschach test for how we think cities work: without zoning, the thinking goes, cities wouldn’t work.

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Most local governments had quietly adopted zoning by the 1970s, at times as a condition for receiving coveted federal funding for transportation infrastructure, housing subsidies, or disaster recovery. The history of zoning, like the institution itself, is messy—perhaps by design. But if you take nothing else from this chapter, remember this: the comprehensive use segregation and density controls envisioned by zoning are a relatively recent invention. Far from the SimCity fantasy of merely regulating noxious uses or rationalizing growth, zoning’s purpose from the start has been to prop up incumbent property values, slow the growth of cities, segregate the United States based on race and class, and enforce an urban ideal of detached single-family housing. While occasionally characterized as a bottom-up movement, the system we have today was heavily shaped by elite preferences of yesteryear and spread with persistent support from the federal government.

Marx at the Arcade: Consoles, Controllers, and Class Struggle by Jamie Woodcock

4chan, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, anti-work, antiwork, augmented reality, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Boris Johnson, Build a better mousetrap, butterfly effect, call centre, capitalist realism, collective bargaining, Columbine, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, David Graeber, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, emotional labour, game design, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global value chain, Hacker Ethic, Howard Zinn, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, Jeremy Corbyn, John Conway, Kickstarter, Landlord’s Game, late capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, microaggression, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Oculus Rift, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, scientific management, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Steve Bannon, systems thinking, tech worker, union organizing, unpaid internship, V2 rocket, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War

In one infamous example, players realized they could essentially kill a sim by removing the ladder to their pool, leaving the sim unable to climb out and causing them to eventually drown. As a developer on The Sims 4 noted, “[The] player reaction to a Sims game without pools was so intense that developers knew they had to rectify the situation as soon as possible.”6 The SimCity series exists on a larger scale. The subject is the city rather than the household, drawing the focus onto a larger and more anonymous mass of citizens. SimCity taps into a similar sandbox/dollhouse experience. It also often demonstrates how much more effectively the player could handle traffic problems than local government in the real world. The city begins as a tabula rasa, with the player able to generate the landscape from which they can begin planning the city.

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I felt at the time that Civilization was not just a game but that it had educational value—another reason for “just one more turn.” My paper manual for Street Fighter Alpha 2 had all the pages torn out, so I had to try and learn the moves with friends while we battled it out in front of the TV. I built sprawling metropolises in SimCity, astonished that I could then fly a helicopter through them in SimCopter. Baldur’s Gate was the closest I ever got to Dungeons & Dragons: I would meet with friends to compare notes on how the characters and story developed. Moving on from those games, I explored postapocalyptic wastelands in Fallout and played for the evil side in Dungeon Keeper.

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Rather than carrying out the military’s previous priority of strategizing for war itself, this product was more about seeing how potential soldiers could be reached through videogames, which signaled how popular games had become. Meanwhile, simulation games, like The Sims, were becoming vastly popular, building on the success of Utopia, Populous, Civilization, and SimCity.80 Valve, the publisher of the seminal Half-Life, launched the online distribution platform Steam in 2003. This move built on the success of the modification (mod) of Half-Life into Counter-Strike, a series that today continues to be incredibly popular as an esport—played in professionalized videogame tournaments.

You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All by Adrian Hon

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", 4chan, Adam Curtis, Adrian Hon, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Astronomia nova, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, bread and circuses, British Empire, buy and hold, call centre, computer vision, conceptual framework, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, David Sedaris, deep learning, delayed gratification, democratizing finance, deplatforming, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, electronic logging device, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, fake news, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, Galaxy Zoo, game design, gamification, George Floyd, gig economy, GitHub removed activity streaks, Google Glasses, Hacker News, Hans Moravec, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, job automation, jobs below the API, Johannes Kepler, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, linked data, lockdown, longitudinal study, loss aversion, LuLaRoe, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, megaproject, meme stock, meta-analysis, Minecraft, moral panic, multilevel marketing, non-fungible token, Ocado, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Parler "social media", passive income, payment for order flow, prisoner's dilemma, QAnon, QR code, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, r/findbostonbombers, replication crisis, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Coase, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skinner box, spinning jenny, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, why are manhole covers round?, workplace surveillance

We hear about the few exceptions, like how Minecraft can teach children about programming and chemistry and ecology, but even then, proponents are silent about the proportion of time children spend in the game learning rather than messing about—not that there’s anything wrong with fun! It’s also tempting to believe games like Civilization and SimCity can teach us useful lessons about world history and city planning, that they both aim to reflect the real world and are successful in doing so, but in reality, they have done neither very well. Civilization’s “technology tree” is an elegant way of giving players meaningful strategic choices, but it promotes a flawed understanding of scientific discovery and cultural development. The conceptual framework that governs SimCity is based on a “capitalistic land value ecology” which may fit one corner of America in the late twentieth century but hardly describes cities in other countries, let alone alternative ideas of what a city can or should be.23 Again, there’s nothing wrong with optimising games for fun, as Sid Meier and Will Wright did when designing these classics.

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As for those nongame purposes, pick any human need or endeavour you can imagine—education, health, science, politics, companionship, terror, and of course, material gain. This means there’s no bright line for what counts as gamification—it’s more of a family resemblance, encompassing everything from SimCity and Peloton to frequent-flyer programmes and Chinese social credit systems. It also means that one can find examples of gamification going back decades and even centuries, long before the term gained wide usage in the first decade of the 2000s. This book covers some of those older examples, but for the purposes of brevity, it is not an exhaustive record of all of gamification or its history.

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Not long after he wrote these words, educational board games grew into a flourishing transatlantic market, teaching everything from geography and history to maths and astronomy.1 These games were enabled by technological advancements of a different kind that made the manufacturing and publishing of board games much cheaper than before. Locke might have admired educational board games, but he’d have loved educational video games like SimCity and Minecraft that can teach urban planning and architecture and programming. Only by learning the history of how games have been used for purposes beyond entertainment can we understand how gamification has taken such a large role in our lives, and how it might come to dominate the world. There is still some debate in the games industry and among academics as to what precisely constitutes gamification, and it’s easy to get mired in definitional quicksand involving related terms like exploitationware, the “gameful world,” and ludification.

Gamification by Design: Implementing Game Mechanics in Web and Mobile Apps by Gabe Zichermann, Christopher Cunningham

airport security, business logic, future of work, game design, gamification, Ian Bogost, lateral thinking, minimum viable product, pattern recognition, power law, Ruby on Rails, SimCity, social graph, social web, systems thinking, urban planning, web application

Since then, thousands of educational software companies have attempted and failed to create another sensation. Figure 1-2. “Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?” is among the best-selling educational games of all time, and was popular among teachers, parents, and students alike. So, where in the world is the next big hit? Games aligning entertainment and education like Civilization and SimCity have taught millions of people history lessons and the basics of urban planning. These are not pedagogical games. They weren’t designed to be educational. But they use history and real city schema as a backdrop to explain ideas; thus, education becomes a byproduct of fun. This is precisely the opposite of what has happened to educational software.

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Organizing and Creating Order Many players are attracted to the idea of organizing things into neat, orderly sets. Not unlike collecting, this drive tends to be rewarded at the end of a particular loop or level. Some games and game-like experiences exploit this in a very unstructured but suggestive way. For example, SimCity allows players to express whatever level of order on their created world they believe is appropriate. Many players would choose to design highly structured and organized cities, even though there was no explicit reward or benefit to doing so in the game. Apparently it was for the players’ own enjoyment, or possibly to get back at undisciplined urban planners.

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Gaining Status Schell, Jesse, Choosing the Right Fun Things Schwartz, Barry, The Tyranny of Choice score-sorting scope (example), Optimizing Leaderboard Output scores, Extending the User Model to Scores and Levels, Adding a Player’s Score and Level to the Sidebar, Adding a Player’s Level to Topic Posts displaying on forums site (example), Adding a Player’s Score and Level to the Sidebar, Adding a Player’s Level to Topic Posts adding player’s score to sidebar, Adding a Player’s Score and Level to the Sidebar, Adding a Player’s Level to Topic Posts extending User model to set scores, Extending the User Model to Scores and Levels search criteria, defining for a model, Optimizing Leaderboard Output Second Life, lawsuit against, Policing Your System secondary markets, virtual economies and, Virtual economies and secondary markets self-policing system, Gaming the System Selvadurai, Naveen, Empty Bar Problem: Foursquare sensitive or private information, leaderboards and, Privacy and Leaderboards sex, as powerful human motivator, Powerful Human Motivators Sherpa, being, Motivational Moment: Be the Sherpa shout-outs, 6. Flirtation and Romance side conversations on Quora, Channeling trolls and side conversations sidebar on forums site, displaying player’s score and level, Adding a Player’s Score and Level to the Sidebar sign-up bonus, awarding in forum application, Awarding a sign-up bonus SimCity, Fun Is Job #1, 4. Organizing and Creating Order order and organization in created worlds, 4. Organizing and Creating Order single-player games, starting design process with, Cooperative Quests Siriano, Christian, Status at the Wheel site activity, displaying, Step 9: Creating an Activities Widget skill points, Skill points Skinner, B.F., Reinforcement Skumo site for finding local businesses (example), Critical Elements of an Online Rewards Experience, Skumo’s objectives, Designing the Games, Level design recommendations, Example rewards structure, Developing a Rewards Program, Step 2: Calling the API, Step 4: Register and Track Players, Step 6: Creating a Leaderboard, Step 9: Creating an Activities Widget Activities widget, Step 9: Creating an Activities Widget business objectives, Skumo’s objectives code calling Badgeville API, Step 2: Calling the API comment badges, Developing a Rewards Program designing the games, Designing the Games leaderboard, Step 6: Creating a Leaderboard levels design, Level design recommendations rewards structure, Example rewards structure tracking behavior of registered players, Step 4: Register and Track Players slot machines, The Fun Quotient, Reinforcement, 3.

The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class?and What We Can Do About It by Richard Florida

affirmative action, Airbnb, back-to-the-city movement, basic income, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, blue-collar work, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, Columbine, congestion charging, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, East Village, edge city, Edward Glaeser, failed state, Ferguson, Missouri, gentrification, Gini coefficient, Google bus, high net worth, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land value tax, low skilled workers, Lyft, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, mortgage tax deduction, Nate Silver, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, occupational segregation, off-the-grid, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Graham, plutocrats, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, restrictive zoning, Richard Florida, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, sovereign wealth fund, streetcar suburb, superstar cities, tech worker, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, white flight, young professional

Finally, Chapter 10 charts the path forward, highlighting what our cities, our nation, and the world must do to overcome the deepening divides of winner-take-all urbanism and inaugurate a new era of urbanism for all. 2 WINNER-TAKE-ALL URBANISM In the fall of 2013, in a hotel suite overlooking New York City’s Times Square, the computer gaming giant Electronic Arts unveiled Cities of Tomorrow, the latest addition to its hugely successful SimCity franchise. Rather than racking up points the usual way, by killing bad guys, players of SimCity games take charge of cities. In the role of mayor, they have the power to change things like tax rates, zoning ordinances, and land use regulations, and to do things that boost economic development and create jobs. Then, by clicking on individual citizens, players can see the effects their changes are having on people’s lives.

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Scott and Michael Storper, “The Nature of Cities: The Scope and Limits of Urban Theory,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 39, no. 1 (2015): 1–15. CHAPTER 2: WINNER-TAKE-ALL URBANISM 1. Geoff Manaugh and Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan, “Sneak Peek of SimCity: Cities of Tomorrow,” Gizmodo, October 11, 2013, http://gizmodo.com/sneak-peek-of-simcity-cities-of-the-future-1443653857. 2. As far as I can tell, the phrase superstar cities was introduced in a 2013 study by economists Joseph Gyourko, Christopher Mayer, and Todd Sinai to identify US cities where housing prices consistently outpaced prices in other cities and appreciated at a rapid clip.

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.), 192, 220, 225 (table) self-employment, 179–180 Sellers, Jefferey, 165 Seoul, 16 (table), 17 service class creativity and, 206 defined, 217 disadvantages of, xiv, xvi, xviii, 6–7 family-supporting work for, 11, 202–206 growth of, 203 housing costs and, 37, 199 in Patchwork Metropolis, 122–123, 130–135, 137–139, 141–147, 149 segregation of, 104–108, 107 (table) wages of, 31–32 Shanghai, 44 (table), 45 Sharkey, Patrick, 117 Silicon Valley, 42, 45, 47, 175 Silva, Rohan, 36 SimCity, 13 Singapore, 16 (table), 17, 42 skyboxification, 103 Smith, Adam, 26 Smith, Patti, 35 social safety net, 204, 209–210 Social Security Act, 204 SoHo, xvi, 2, 19–20, 20 (fig.) creative class and, 36 history of, 61–62 Solnit, Rebecca, 47–48 spatial division of labor, 18 specific creative-class occupations, variable of, 221 startup cities creative class in, 46–48 creativity in, 46–47, 50–55, 52 (fig.)

Bulletproof Problem Solving by Charles Conn, Robert McLean

active transport: walking or cycling, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, asset allocation, availability heuristic, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Big Tech, Black Swan, blockchain, book value, business logic, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, deep learning, Donald Trump, driverless car, drop ship, Elon Musk, endowment effect, fail fast, fake news, future of work, Garrett Hardin, Hyperloop, Innovator's Dilemma, inventory management, iterative process, loss aversion, megaproject, meta-analysis, Nate Silver, nudge unit, Occam's razor, pattern recognition, pets.com, prediction markets, principal–agent problem, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, SimCity, smart contracts, stem cell, sunk-cost fallacy, the rule of 72, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, time value of money, Tragedy of the Commons, transfer pricing, Vilfredo Pareto, walkable city, WikiLeaks

And because you ran a randomized experiment, you know that it's more likely the design—not other variables—influencing user experience. A/B Testing Electronic Arts (EA) recently used an A/B test to explore the impact of sales and promotions on the sale of new game releases.10 Driven by revenue targets coincident with the release of the next version of SimCity, SimCity 5, EA was surprised when the initial advertising layout of the website with a promotional offer in a headline banner were not generating rising pre‐orders. Could it be that the pre‐order call to action was incorrectly placed? Their team constructed several additional variations on the pre‐order page and randomly exposed the site visitors to the different options, say A/B/C/D.

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Option A, without any promotion at all, and Option B with a promotional banner, are shown in Exhibit 6.6. EXHIBIT 6.6 The team concluded that the site with no promotional offer led to 43.4% more purchases of the new game edition, a significant increase. Here A/B testing allowed them to experimentally explore their customers' responses to sales and advertising. In the process they learned that SimCity customers' decision to purchase was not contingent on a promotion. This kind of testing is particularly easy to do in online environments, but can also be employed in different cities or at the retail store level to generate similar results. Real‐world experiments are harder when large numbers are required to create controls for confounding factors, as is often true in healthcare examples, or where it is unethical to expose people to experimental choices without their consent.

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Krzystztofowicz, “Bayesian Re‐Analysis of the Challenger O‐ring Data,” Risk Analysis 28, no. 4 (2008): 1053–1067. 9  The Book of Why by Judea Pearl and Dana Mackenzie (Allen Lane, 2018) has a good example of confounding factors with the example of the correlation between Nobel Prize winners and per capita chocolate consumption of the country they come from. Wealthy countries invest more in education and eat more chocolate, so the wealth and location of prizewinners are confounders. 10  https://blog.optimizely.com/2013/06/14/ea_simcity_optimizely_casestudy/. 11  The Economist article referenced the work of Hsiang, Kopp, et al. (“Estimating Economic Damage from Climate Change in the United States,” Science 2017) that with each 1 degree Fahrenheit increase the cost of climate change for the United States would be an aggregate reduction of .7% of GDP. http://science.sciencemag.org/content/356/6345/1362.full?

Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia by Anthony M. Townsend

1960s counterculture, 4chan, A Pattern Language, Adam Curtis, air gap, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, anti-communist, Apple II, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Big Tech, bike sharing, Boeing 747, Burning Man, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, charter city, chief data officer, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, company town, computer age, congestion charging, congestion pricing, connected car, crack epidemic, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital map, Donald Davies, East Village, Edward Glaeser, Evgeny Morozov, food desert, game design, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global supply chain, Grace Hopper, Haight Ashbury, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jacquard loom, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, jitney, John Snow's cholera map, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kibera, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, load shedding, lolcat, M-Pesa, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, messenger bag, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, off grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), openstreetmap, packet switching, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, patent troll, Pearl River Delta, place-making, planetary scale, popular electronics, power law, RFC: Request For Comment, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, scientific management, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, social software, social web, SpaceShipOne, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, too big to fail, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, undersea cable, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, working poor, working-age population, X Prize, Y2K, zero day, Zipcar

Couldn’t it happen that, instead of the Mirror World tracking the real world, a subtle shift takes place and the real world starts tracking the Mirror World instead?”92 Computer simulations seduce precisely because they replace the complexity of the real world. The video game SimCity is addictive because of the simplicity of its underlying model—players quickly figure out how to win by exploiting its predictable dynamics (in fact, the design of early versions was directly borrowed from Urban Dynamics. Following trends in research, SimCity 2013’s GlassBox simulation engine now uses a sophisticated agent-based model).93 But even the best mathematical models of real-world phenomena are always approximations.

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., accessed February 26, 2013, http://www.aip.org/history/heisenberg/p08.htm. 89Asimov, Foundation, 14. 90Lee, “Requiem for Large-Scale Models,” 167. 91Harrison, interview, May 9, 2011. 92Gelernter, Mirror Worlds, 217, Gelernter’s italics. 93“SimCity and Advanced GeoAnalytics,” SpatialMarkets blog, March 16, 2012, http://www.spatialmarkets.com/2012/3/16/simcity-and-advanced-geoanalytics.html. 94Lee, “Requiem for Large-Scale Models,” 169. 95Banavar, lecture, April 10, 2012. 96Gelernter, Mirror Worlds, 222. Chapter 3. Cities of Tomorrow 1Ebenezer Howard, Garden Cities of To-morrow (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., Ltd., 1902), 18–26. 2Robert H.

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The study was subsequently published on the arXiv e-print archive. Elsa Arcaute et al., “City boundaries and the universality of scaling laws,” January 8, 2013, http://arxiv.org/abs/1301.1674. 56Cosma Rohilla Shalizi, “Scaling and Hierarchy in Urban Economies,” ARXIV, e-print arXiv:1102.4101, February 2011, http://arxiv.org/abs/1102.4101. 57Steve Lohr, “SimCity, for Real: Measuring an Untidy Metropolis,” New York Times, February 23, 2013, BU3. 58Geoffrey West, lecture, Urban Systems Symposium, New York University, New York City, May 12, 2012. 59“Thinking Cities: ICT is Changing the Game,” Telefonaktiebolaget LM Ericsson, last modified February 24, 2012, http://www.ericsson.com/news/120221_thinking_cities_ict_is_ changing_the_game_244159020_c. 60Hirshberg, interview, October 26, 2011. 61Michael Batty, interview, August 19, 2010. 62William Bruce Cameron, Informal Sociology: A Casual Introduction to Sociological Thinking (New York: Random House, 1967) 13. 63Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (New York: The Jungle Pub.

Blood, Sweat, and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made by Jason Schreier

cloud computing, crowdsourcing, game design, Google Hangouts, gravity well, imposter syndrome, index card, inventory management, iterative process, Kickstarter, pirate software, side project, SimCity, spice trade, trade route

Few things inspire more anger from video game fans. * Thanks to network issues, SimCity was essentially unplayable for days after it launched in March 2013. Even when the servers settled down and the game started working, players discovered flaws in the simulation: for example, cars would always take the shortest routes between destinations, even if those routes were full of traffic. Cops wouldn’t cross intersections. Trading didn’t function properly. At Kotaku, we created a special tag for the occasion: “SimCity Disaster Watch.” * BioWare later released free downloadable content that expanded and added more choices to Mass Effect 3’s ending.

…

But in 2012 and 2013, a different type of company won the award, beating out the likes of Comcast and Bank of America, as over 250,000 voters flocked to declare that the United States’ worst company was in fact the video game publisher Electronic Arts (EA). There were many reasons for this ignominious victory, including the rise of optional “microtransaction”* payments in EA games and the spectacular disaster of the publisher’s online-only SimCity reboot.* What may have rankled gamers most, however, was what they believed EA had done to BioWare. BioWare, a development studio founded in 1995 by three medical doctors who thought making games might be a cool hobby, leaped into fame in 1998 with the Dungeons & Dragons–based role-playing game Baldur’s Gate (a game so influential that it would play a major role in the stories of two other games in this book, Pillars of Eternity and The Witcher 3).

…

All winter, LucasArts’ management would proclaim that things were going to be OK, even telling employees not to bother handing out their résumés at the annual Game Developers Conference in March. The biggest rumor, as conveyed by several LucasArts employees, was that EA had a deal in place to buy LucasArts and finish production on Star Wars 1313 and First Assault. But then, the rumor alleged, the new SimCity turned out to be a debacle, which led to EA and its CEO, John Riccitiello, “mutually agreeing” to part ways, which caused the LucasArts deal to fall apart. Riccitiello, however, told me that these negotiations weren’t as close as LucasArts’ employees had believed. “Virtually everything gets discussed on some deal with somebody,” he said.

Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System by Nick Montfort, Ian Bogost

Colossal Cave Adventure, Fairchild Semiconductor, functional programming, game design, Google Earth, higher-order functions, Ian Bogost, Ivan Sutherland, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, SimCity, software studies, Steve Wozniak

Crane’s solution to the puzzle of ROM mapping a large world with little ROM was to not store the world in ROM at all. Instead, the world is generated, consistently, by code. Generated environments are common in games as far back as dungeon-crawlers like Rogue. But typically, after an environment is generated, it has to be stored in memory for use during play. For example, a new game of SimCity starts with a process of terraforming, in which the [110] land, seas, mountains, forests, and rivers are created. In order for the player to be able to build a city atop it, the terrain data must then be saved somewhere, either on disk or in RAM. The Atari VCS has no disk storage, of course, and its paltry 128 bytes of RAM often provides barely enough room to manipulate the state of the game.

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Atari. 1980. M Network. Kool-Aid Man. Atari VCS and Intellivision. Mattel Electronics. 1983. Mattel. Simon. Handheld game. Engineered by Ralph Baer. 1978. Mayer, Steve, Dave Shepperd, and Dennis Koble. Starship 1. Atari. 1977. Mayfield, Mike. Star Trek. SDS Sigma 7 and HP minicomputers. 1971. Maxis. SimCity. PC and Commodore 64. Programmed by Will Wright. Brøderbund. 1989. Meier, Sid. Civilization. PC, Macintosh, and other home computers. MicroProse. 1991. Microsoft. Excel. Macintosh and Windows application with video game Easter Egg. 1985. Midway. Sea Wolf. Arcade. 1976. Midway. Defender. Arcade. Developed by Eugene Jarvis. 1980.

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See Read-only memory Ross, Scott, 124 Russell, Steve, 7 Salvo, Ed, 128 Same-screen sprite register, 105 Scrolling, 106 Seaquest, 105, 132 Sears Telegames, 121 Sea Wolf, 86 Sega Master System, 134, 137 Sesame Street games, 124 Shark Jaws, 125, 126 Shaw, Carol, 104 Shay, Nukey, 77 Shooter games, 96. See also specific shooter games Side pager, 107 Side scroller, 107 Index Sigma 7 minicomputer, 125 SimCity, 110–111 Simon, 121 Skiing, 105 Skinning, 105 Sky Skipper, 123 Slocum, Paul, 132, 142 video games for the VCS (see Combat Rock; Synthcart) Slot machines, 7 Slot Racers boundaries for virtual space, 46 collision detection, 48 description of, 43 horizontal symmetry of playing field, 47 mazes, 68 playfield graphics, 48 programmer (see Robinett, Warren) single screen, 106 sprites, 108 VCS adaptation, 44 SLSA (Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts), 147 Smith, Bob, 88, 116 Smith, Jay, 121 Social context, of video games, 78–79 Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSA), 147 Soft censorship, 134 Software platforms, 148 Sonar Sub Hunt, 121 Sound.

Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World by Henry Grabar

A Pattern Language, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, big-box store, bike sharing, Blue Bottle Coffee, car-free, congestion pricing, coronavirus, COVID-19, digital map, Donald Shoup, edge city, Ferguson, Missouri, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Google Earth, income inequality, indoor plumbing, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, Lyft, mandatory minimum, market clearing, megastructure, New Urbanism, parking minimums, power law, remote working, rent control, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Seaside, Florida, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, SimCity, social distancing, Stop de Kindermoord, streetcar suburb, text mining, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, TikTok, traffic fines, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, walkable city, WeWork, white flight, Yogi Berra, young professional

Go to note reference in text Philadelphia has 2.2 million: Scharnhorst, “Quantified Parking.” Go to note reference in text “When I started measuring”: Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley, “The Philosophy of SimCity: An Interview with the Game’s Lead Designer,” Atlantic, May 9, 2013, theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/05/the-philosophy-of-simcity-an-interview-with-the-games-lead-designer/275724. Go to note reference in text the production of cement: Johanna Lehne and Felix Preston, Making Concrete Change: Innovation in Low-Carbon Cement and Concrete (London: Chatham House, 2018), chathamhouse.org/2018/06/making-concrete-change-innovation-low-carbon-cement-and-concrete.

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Many American downtowns, such as Little Rock, Newport News, Buffalo, and Topeka, have more land devoted to parking than to buildings. Dodger Stadium, Los Angeles. Ten additional Dodger Stadiums would fit inside the ballpark’s parking lot. In the mid-aughts, when the team of programmers at Maxis were working on the first new SimCity in a decade, they studied American municipal architecture, politics, and urban design to try to produce a compelling simulacrum. Lead designer Stone Librande used Google Earth to measure his surroundings. The biggest surprise he found was the size of the parking lots. “When I started measuring out our local grocery store, which I don’t think of as being that big, I was blown away by how much more space was parking lot rather than actual store,” he said.

…

See shopping centers management, 85, 202, 260–61 mandates, costly parking, 209 Manhattan, New York, 87, 101–2, 107, 148, 254–55 street parking in, 31–33, 35–36, 37–39, 41, 45, 99–100 traffic agent in, 33–34, 37–39 Manville, Michael, 157, 167, 193 Marina City, Chicago, 128 market demand, parking policy compared to, 86 Markowitz, Marty, 256 Marsden, Brett, 112 Marusek, Sarah, 22 Maryland, Silver Springs, 68 Massachusetts, 76, 85, 109, 205 Boston, xii, 20, 86, 94 mass production, of automobiles, 55 Matta-Clark, Gordon, 251 Maxis, SimCity of, 76 McCahill, Chris, 82 McCardell, William, 95–96, 98 McClintock, Miller, 53 McClure, Paul, 23 McCourt, Randy, 159 McGlockton, Markeis, 23 McKenna-Foster, Daniel, 155–57, 160 McNew, James, 93 Mebrahtu, Freweyni, 95 Melbourne, Australia, 21 Mell, Richard, 126 merchants, in downtown, 29, 54, 58–59, 72 meter maids, police attacking, 36–37 meters, parking, 161–62, 163, 165, 166–67, 168–69 in Chicago, 121–22, 123–24, 127, 132–34, 137–38, 139, 140, 143, 198–99, 203–4, 260 Mexico City, minimum parking laws in, 273, 274 Meyer, Chris, 204 Miami Beach, Florida, 92 Michigan, 59–60, 63, 65, 74, 152–53 Millard-Ball, Adam, 83 Millennium Park, Chicago, 122–23 Miller, Bella, 110 Milliron’s, big-box store of, 59 Minneapolis, Minnesota, 55, 204, 214 Minnesota, 55, 60, 111, 204, 214 mismanagement, of commercial parking, 19–20 Missouri, Ferguson, 163–64 Mister Softee, 248–50 Mitchell, Joni, 160 mixed-use buildings, 217 models, parking, 128, 180, 183, 219 Mohammad Abu-Salha, Yusor, 23 monopolies, in commercial parking, 109–10 Moore, Joe, 134 Moore, Michael, 9 Morgan Stanley, 125, 126, 136, 140–41, 142 parking meters of, 121–22, 123–24, 132–34 Morono, Leon, 103 Mumford, Lewis, 72 municipal parking, 67–68, 73 murders, 22–23, 37, 150 N Najdovski, Christophe, 274–75 Naqvi, Ali, 113–14 National Conference of Housing (1929), 237–38 National Municipal League, 64 National Parking Association (NPA), 105, 106–7, 112 Neal, Esther, 35 Neumann, Adam, 110 Nevada, Las Vegas, 181, 243 Newark, New Jersey, 98–99 Newport News Shipbuilding, Virginia, 25 Newsom, Gavin, 212 New York, 20–21, 52, 66, 85–86, 238, 262 bicycles in, 256, 257–58 during coronavirus pandemic, 270–72 Dumbo in, 252, 254 Genovese crime family in, 101–3 government employees in, 43, 45 Manhattan, 31–34, 35–36, 37–39, 41, 45, 87, 99–100, 101–2, 107, 148, 254–55 Operation Meltdown in, 250, 259 parking garages in, 99–103 parking requirements in, 215 parking supply in, 75 parking whisperer in, 26 pedestrians in, 253–55 Queens, ix–x, xiv, 82 Rochester, 63 Rockaway Beach, 9 street parking in, 247–48, 258, 263–64, 271 Syracuse, 58–59 towing service in, xv traffic in, 53 New York Daily News (newspaper), 48–49, 264–65 New York Ice Cream, 249–50 New York Police Department (NYPD), 40, 47, 48, 50 New York-Presbyterian Healthcare System, 107 The New York Times (newspaper), 37, 48, 64, 264 Nichols, Chrissy Mancini, CPM relation to, 198–99 Nichols, Mike, 15 Nixon, Richard, 92, 228 Norris, Mary, 41 North Carolina, Charlotte, 216–19 Northland shopping center, Detroit, 59–60, 65 North Plano, Texas, 223 Norway, Oslo, 274 NPA.

The Charisma Machine: The Life, Death, and Legacy of One Laptop Per Child by Morgan G. Ames

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Benjamin Mako Hill, British Empire, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, clean water, commoditize, computer age, digital divide, digital rights, Evgeny Morozov, fail fast, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, hype cycle, informal economy, Internet of things, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Lou Jepsen, Minecraft, new economy, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Peter Thiel, placebo effect, Potemkin village, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, SimCity, smart cities, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Hackers Conference, Travis Kalanick

One can install a game, or any XO software, by downloading the activity bundle (a file with the extension .xo) from a website, which will automatically install it, or by using the xo-get program manager on the XO, modeled on the Linux utility apt-get (see Hager, [Olpcaustria] “xo-get & svg-grabber”). For instance, to install the game SimCity, an XO user can navigate to the SimCity page on the OLPC wiki (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/SimCity) and click on the link to the activity bundle, or she can acquire the bundle in some other way that doesn’t automatically install it—from a friend’s laptop, for instance—and then type “xo-get install simcity.xo” in the terminal. 35. OLPC Wiki, “Games.” 36. For a (somewhat gamer-centric) overview, see Gonzalez, “Two Tribes Go to War.” For a discussion of the context of the controversy, see King and Borland, Dungeons and Dreamers. 37.

Cities: The First 6,000 Years by Monica L. Smith

Anthropocene, bread and circuses, classic study, clean water, diversified portfolio, failed state, financial innovation, gentrification, hiring and firing, invention of writing, Jane Jacobs, New Urbanism, payday loans, place-making, Ponzi scheme, SimCity, South China Sea, telemarketer, the built environment, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal, wikimedia commons

Inspired by the inherent link between trees and good governance, urban leaders around the world have started tree-planting programs, including the Million Trees initiatives of New York and Los Angeles, as well as the Green Delhi program and the Huangpu East Bank Urban Forest of Shanghai. And if we want a true measure of the extent to which the presence of nature is understood as a component of urban environments, we need look no further than simulator games like SimCity and Cities: Skylines. No matter how futuristic their constructions, there are always trees in the landscapes of imagined cities. The inescapability of nature in urban areas confirms that our place in the world as a biological species is hardly budged by the fact that for the past six thousand years we have surrounded ourselves with buildings, paved pathways, city walls, and water and food supplies that come from far away.

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Marzluff, “Small Birds Use Their Brains to Live Among Us,” Psychology Today, Feb. 25, 2013, www.psychologytoday.com. Peregrine falcon populations: Marcel A. Gahbauer et al., “Productivity, Mortality, and Management of Urban Peregrine Falcons in Northeastern North America,” Journal of Wildlife Management 79, no. 1 (2015): 10–19. SimCity and Cities: Skylines: “Amazingly Detailed Metropolises Recreated in Cities: Skylines—in Pictures,” Guardian, July 15, 2015, www.theguardian.com. a technique called stable-isotope analysis: Gideon Hartman et al., “The Pilgrimage Economy of Early Roman Jerusalem (1st Century BCE–70 CE) Reconstructed from the δ15N and δ13C Values of Goat and Sheep Remains,” Journal of Archaeological Science 40 (2013): 4369–76.

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., 172 Scheld, Suzanne, 161 seaports, 166 seasonality, 233–34 sedentary lifestyle, 223 senatus consulto (SC), 175 Severan Marble Plan, 31–32, 33, 37, 51 sewage, 133–40 sewers of Paris, 137–38 shamans, 7 Shanghai, 108–9, 110–11 shell beads, 102–3 Shulak, 135-36 sidewalks, 135, 140–41, 231, 246 Silk Road, 27, 172, 179 Silverstein, Michael J., 196–97 SimCity (video game), 231 Sisupalgarh, 5, 252–53, 256 challenges of excavation, 55, 126 mason’s handprint, 47–48 street layouts, 38 surface survey, 61–62 trash deposits, 155, 157–58, 159–60 slums, 108–13 Smith, Adam, 115, 272n social relations, 35–36, 246–47 socioeconomic status, 62, 132, 156, 192, 196–97, 207 soil and soil samples, 49, 52 Solórzano Pereira, Juan de, 194, 242 songbirds, 230 South Africa, 224–25 souvenirs, 178–80 Spanish conquest of Aztec Empire, 20–23 of Inca Empire, 23–24 sparrows, 230 speech, 91–95, 99 Sri Lanka, 27 status, 62, 132, 156, 192, 196–97, 207 Steedman, Ian, 211–12 Stiner, Mary, 102–3 Stonehenge, 6, 71–72, 117, 120, 249 stratigraphy, 46–47 streets, 140–45 “strong ties,” 98 subsidence, 206–7 surface survey, 59–62 Susa, 191, 238 Tabula Peutingeriana, 226 take-out food, 167–69 Taxila, 49 telephone lines, 147–48 Tell Brak, 59, 76–79, 85, 261 eye idols at, 66, 77–79 “first” city, 76–79, 89, 268–69n Mallowan dig at, 54, 57, 64–65, 76, 77–78, 79 physical crimes at, 213–14 water and waste, 136 Temple of Peace, Rome, 31 Templo Mayor of Tenochtitlan, 205–7, 250 Tenochtitlan, 22–23, 245 middle managers, 205–8 Templo Mayor of, 205–7, 250 urban collapse, 254 Teotihuacan, 13, 36, 59, 89, 244, 245 apartment complexes, 112–13, 215–16 layout, 39 people and pathways, 143 population, 279–80n reconstruction, 249–50 trade, 166 urban collapse, 254 water and waste, 136 Tepe Sharafabad, 51–52, 85 terra sigillata, 249 Thames River, 139 Theory of the Leisure Class, The (Veblen), 165 Thucydides, 278n Tigris River, 85 Tikal, 89, 154, 228, 250, 253 Till, Jeremy, 38–39 Timbuktu, 27 time management, 211–12 toilets, 135, 136–37 Tokyo Edo period, 163–64 Tsukiji fish market, 2–3 Tomb of Puabi, 82, 85 tombstones, 196 toolmaking, 96–97, 100 tourism, 162–64 Tower Bridge, London, 109 trade, 27, 165–67, 197–98 Trading Up: Why Consumers Want New Luxury Goods (Silverstein and Fiske), 196–97 transportation infrastructure, 140–45 transport modes, 19–20 trash, 153–60, 180–81 waste infrastructure, 133–40 trash piles, 44, 154–55 Monte Testaccio, 1–3, 159–60, 166 Triple Alliance, 22 T-shirts, 178–79 Tsukiji fish market, 2–3 Tushan, 246–48 Tutankhamun, 81 tzompantli, 205–6 “ugly artifact,” 152, 153 unfamiliarity, 8 University College London, 71–72 University of Michigan, 153 University of Pennsylvania, 81 uniwheels, 141 Ur, 61, 80–82, 85, 245 Ur of the Chaldees (Woolley), 81–82 Ur, Jason, 64, 86, 142 “urban” vs.

From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog: A History of the Software Industry by Martin Campbell-Kelly

Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, business process, card file, Charles Babbage, computer age, computer vision, continuous integration, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, Donald Knuth, Gary Kildall, Grace Hopper, history of Unix, hockey-stick growth, independent contractor, industrial research laboratory, information asymmetry, inventory management, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Larry Ellison, linear programming, longitudinal study, machine readable, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Multics, Network effects, popular electronics, proprietary trading, RAND corporation, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, SimCity, software patent, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, vertical integration

From their earliest days, videogames had been classified as “racin’, fightin’, or shootin’.” With time, more complex classification systems emerged in the industry and in gaming magazines (table 9.4). No two classification systems were quite alike, and many games were not easy to categorize. (Was the ubiquitous Tetris a puzzle, or a strategy game? Was SimCity a simulation, or a strategy game?) In any case, precise classification was an academic problem. The point of genre publishing was that certain categories of game appealed to large groups of users and therefore had less need to overcome market inertia. The most successful games became subgenres, and transferring hit games to all the available gaming platforms was a major source of revenue.

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The most popular videogame characters and Table 9.4 J. C. Herz’s phylogeny of video games. (Publication dates represent when games were introduced in the US. All games listed are currently in production—not necessarily with the original publisher, and usually with a minor title change to indicate the latest versions—e.g., SimCity 2000, Tiger Woods PGA Golf 2001.) Genre Action “The largest phylum in videogamedom, comprising most of the home console universe and virtually all arcade games; these games are also known as ‘twitch’ games and ‘thumb candy’.” Adventure “Adventure games are about accumulating an inventory of items that are then used to solve puzzles.”

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(Nintendo, 1985) Sonic the Hedgehog (Sega, 1985) Prince of Persia (Mindscape, 1989) Zork (Infocom, 1980) Legend of Zelda (Nintendo, 1986) Myst (Cyan, 1993) Street Fighter (Capcom, 1987) Virtua Fighter (Sega, 1993) Tekken (Nameco, 1995) Tetris (Spectrum Holobyte, 1986) Ultima (Origin Systems, 1980) Wizardry (Sir-Tech, 1981) Final Fantasy (Square, 1987) Flight Simulator (SubLOGIC, 1978) SimCity (Maxis, 1989) Gran Turismo (Sony Computer Entertainment, 1998) PGA Tour Golf (Intellivision, 1983) NHL Hockey (Intellivision, 1983) Populous (Electronic Arts, 1989) Railroad Tycoon (Microprose, 1990) Civilization (Microprose, 1991) Quotations and classification from pp. 24–31 of Herz, Joystick Nation; data on classic games from various web sites.

What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing by Ed Finn

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, Charles Babbage, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Claude Shannon: information theory, commoditize, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, DeepMind, disruptive innovation, Donald Knuth, Donald Shoup, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Conference 1984, High speed trading, hiring and firing, Ian Bogost, industrial research laboratory, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Conway, John Markoff, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late fees, lifelogging, Loebner Prize, lolcat, Lyft, machine readable, Mother of all demos, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Netflix Prize, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, power law, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, ride hailing / ride sharing, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skinner box, Snow Crash, social graph, software studies, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, wage slave

The participants in the Critical Code Studies Working Group adopt familiar tactics of close reading and intensive contextual scrutiny, but at a lower rung in the layer of computational abstraction, reading software itself as cultural text. This frame can generate breathtaking insights into the gap between abstraction and implementation, for example by revealing the ideological assumptions of SimCity’s crime rate calculations, as digital culture scholar Mark Sample has done.13 These critics perform their debates algorithmically, through discussion on collaborative platforms and publication via open-access platforms like the electronic book review and Digital Humanities Quarterly. Indeed, one of the great challenges of editing the Critical Code Studies discussions for publication on ebr, where I served for a time as a thread editor, was capturing the vibrancy of computationally mediated discussion forum exchanges and distilling it into a more traditionally fixed textual format.

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., 144–145 Rid, Thomas, 199n42 Riskin, Jessica, 136–137 Robotics, 31, 34, 43–45, 132–134, 188 Rood of Grace, 137 Rotten Tomatoes, 96 RSE encryption, 163 Samantha (Her), 77–85, 154, 181 Sample, Mark, 194–195 Sandvig, Christian, 107, 131 Sarandos, Ted, 98, 100, 104 Schmidt, Eric, 66, 73, 127 Schwartz, Peter, 160–161 Scorsese, Martin, 59 Searle, John, 4 Shannon, Claude, 27 Sharing economy, 54, 123, 127–129, 145, 148 Shoup, Donald, 127 Silicon Valley, 3, 9, 30–31, 49, 54, 87, 100, 124, 182 SimCity (game), 194 Simondon, Gilbert, 40, 42–44, 53, 59, 84, 106, 118 Singhal, Amit, 72, 76 Siri abortion scandal and, 64 abstraction and, 64–65, 82–84 anticipation and, 73–74 as beta release, 57 CALO and, 57–58, 63, 65, 67, 79, 81 cognition and, 57–65, 71–84 computationalist approach and, 65, 77 consciousness and, 57–65, 71–84 conversation and, 57–65, 71–84 DARPA and, 11, 57–58 Easter eggs in, 60, 148 effective computability and, 58, 62, 64, 72–76, 81 emotional work and, 148 Enlightenment and, 71–76, 79–80, 82 gender and, 60–61, 80 interfaces and, 59–60, 63, 75, 77 intimacy and, 11, 75–81 language and, 57–65, 71–84 launch of, 57 machine learning and, 62–65, 182 market issues and, 59, 75–77 meaning and, 65 ontology and, 62–65, 71–73, 82, 84 parsing data and, 182 performing knowledge and, 59–61 quest for knowledge and, 71–75, 82, 84 reading, 58–59 reduced abilities of, 59 speed of, 131 Skinner boxes, 61, 115–116, 119–120, 122 Smith, Adam, 12, 146–147 Smith, Kevin, 88 Sneakers (film), 3 Snow Crash (Stephenson), 1, 3–5, 9, 17, 36, 38, 50 Social behavior, 22, 146 addiction and, 114–119, 121–122 discrimination and, 21, 130 exploitationware and, 115–116 Social gaming, 114, 118, 120–122 Social media, 6 Arab Spring and, 111, 186 changing nature of, 171 digital culture and, 3, 7, 18, 22, 43, 49, 66, 87, 156, 160, 191, 193–194 Enlightenment and, 173 identity formation and, 191 in-person exchanges and, 195 intellectual connection and, 186 newsfeeds and, 116, 177–178 peer review and, 194 raising awareness and, 174 Spoiler Foiler (Netflix) and, 101–102, 108 transaction streams and, 177 Uber and, 148 Software agency and, 6 Apple and, 59, 62 apps and, 6, 8, 9, 15, 59, 83, 91, 94, 102, 113–114, 124, 128, 145, 149 blockchains and, 163–168, 171, 177, 179 cathedrals of computation and, 6–8, 27, 33, 49, 51 Chun on, 33, 42, 104 Church-Turing thesis and, 25 consciousness and, 77 dehumanizing nature of, 116 depersonification of, 6 digital materiality and, 53 experience and, 34 as foundation of computational expression, 47 imagination and, 186, 194 in-house affect and, 59 interfaces and, 124 (see also Interfaces) logic of general substitutability and, 33 Manovich and, 112 material layers and, 48 as metaphor for metaphors, 35 Metaverse, 50 networks vs. individuals and, 118 open source, 6, 162, 167 Pasquale on, 21 reality and, 10 self-modification and, 1, 38 Weizenbaum and, 33–40 Solaris (Lem), 184 Sourcery, 3, 10, 17, 21, 33–34 Space of computation, 2–5, 9, 21, 42, 45, 76, 154, 185 Spacey, Kevin, 98–99, 106–107 Spoiler Foiler (Netflix), 101–102, 108 SRI International, 57, 59, 63, 169 Srinivasan, Balaji, 169 Star Fleet Federation, 67 Star Trek computer anticipation and, 73–74 conversation and, 67 Google and, 11, 65–82, 159, 186 interfaces and, 67–68 LCARS and, 67–68 Memex and, 186–189, 195 public expectations and, 67 Star Trek: The Next Generation (TV series), 67 Stephenson, Neal, 1, 3–5, 9, 17, 36, 38, 50, 51 Stiegler, Bernard, 43–44, 53, 106 Streaming content, 49, 54, 87, 90–92, 97, 99, 101–102, 104, 205n39 Strogatz, Steven, 44, 183 Sumerian myths, 3, 5, 16 SuperPACs, 174 Symbolic logic, 2, 21, 24, 39, 41, 44, 54–55 Symposium (Plato), 82 Tacit negotiation, 20 Taggers, 54, 88, 92–93, 96, 99 Tanz, Jason, 116 TaskRabbit, 124 Taylorism, 93 Teller, Astro, 66 Terminator (film series), 191 Terrorism, 163, 178 Theory of Communicative Action, The (Habermas), 109 Theory of Moral Sentiments (Smith), 12, 146–147 Thiel, Peter, 170–171, 174 Third parties, 59, 114, 125, 132–133, 147, 162, 170–171 Thurston, Nick, 12, 140–145 Tindr, 128 Transaction fees, 164–165 Transcendent Man (Kurzweil), 184 Transparency bazaar model and, 6 cryptocurrency and, 160–164, 168, 171, 177–178 feedback and, 146 freedom and, 9 interfaces and, 189 market issues and, 160–164, 168, 171, 177–178 politics of algorithms and, 18, 20 proprietary platforms and, 9 Traveling salesman problem, 19 “Trending Topic” widget, 180 Turing, Alan, 8, 23, 42, 79–80, 182 Turing Machine, 182 Berlinski and, 9, 24 computability boundary and, 23–24 concept of, 23 effective computability and, 42 finite-time processes and, 42 game of life and, 29–31 language and, 33, 41 McCulloch-Pitts Neuron and, 28 as though experiment, 23–24 as uniting platform, 25 Turing’s Cathedral (Dyson), 6 Turing test, 43, 79–82, 87, 138, 142 Turner, Fred, 3, 46 Twain, Mark, 151 Twitter, 53, 101–102, 173, 177, 179, 194–195, 210n43 Uber, 9, 12, 97, 138 abstraction levels of, 129 African Americans and, 130 business model of, 54, 93–94, 96 feedback system of, 145–148 interface economy and, 123–133, 145, 147 massive infrastructure of, 131 threats to, 129 Ubiquitous computation algorithms and, 3–4, 15, 33, 43, 54, 119, 124–125, 127, 178, 189–190 Bitcoin and, 178 colonization of margins and, 119 gamification and, 124 imagination and, 189–190 interfaces and, 189 Uber and, 125, 127 Unit Operations (Bogost), 118 U.S.S.

The Data Revolution: Big Data, Open Data, Data Infrastructures and Their Consequences by Rob Kitchin

Bayesian statistics, business intelligence, business process, cellular automata, Celtic Tiger, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, congestion charging, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data science, discrete time, disruptive innovation, George Gilder, Google Earth, hype cycle, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, late capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, longitudinal study, machine readable, Masdar, means of production, Nate Silver, natural language processing, openstreetmap, pattern recognition, platform as a service, recommendation engine, RFID, semantic web, sentiment analysis, SimCity, slashdot, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, smart grid, smart meter, software as a service, statistical model, supply-chain management, technological solutionism, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, transaction costs

The aim is to determine how a system functions and how it might behave under different scenarios, and to statistically evaluate their performance with a view to improving their efficiency and effectiveness (Robinson 2003). A popular example is the computer game SimCity which simulates how a city will grow and develop under the conditions of the players choosing, based on an underlying model of known urban processes. Likewise, weather forecasts are based on simulations of how the weather will develop given prevalent conditions and scientific knowledge. There are many different kinds of simulation models, many of which utilise machine learning in order to automatically refine the model and to deal with emergent properties such as unforeseen events. SimCity is an agent-based model (Batty 2007). The model consists of an environment where individual features such as buildings and roads are assigned certain characteristics.

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Linehan, T.P. (1991) History and development of Irish population censuses’, Journal of the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland, XXVI(IV): 91–125. Lohr, S. (2012) ‘Sure, big data is great. But so is intuition’, New York Times, 29 December. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/30/technology/big-data-is-great-but-dont-forget-intuition.html (last accessed 3 January 2013). Lohr, S. (2013) ‘SimCity, for real: measuring an untidy metropolis’, New York Times, 23 February, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/technology/nyucenter-develops-a-science-of-cities.html (accessed 1 April 2013). Longo, J. (2011) ‘#OpenData: digital-era governance: thoroughbred or new public management Trojan horse?’, PP+G Review, 2(2), http://ppgr.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/longo-ostry.pdf (last accessed 16 September 2013).

Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide by Henry Jenkins

barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, collective bargaining, Columbine, content marketing, deskilling, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, game design, George Gilder, global village, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, means of production, military-industrial complex, moral panic, new economy, no-fly zone, profit motive, Robert Metcalfe, Saturday Night Live, search costs, SimCity, slashdot, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, the long tail, the market place, Y Combinator

A t the same time, the modding community may come as close to an experimental or independent games movement as currently exists, with large number of amateurs producing games that are only loosely affiliated with the commercial industry, at a time when the consolidation of control over games production falls more and more into the hands of a small number of major publishers who are risk-averse and driven toward blockbuster-scale profits. 3 Mods represents the most extreme version of more widespread practices through which game players customize their characters, their environments, or their play experiences. W i l l Wright, the creator of SimCity (1989) and The Sims (2000), argues that the games industry maintains much lower walls between creators and consumers than most other sectors of the entertainment industry, in part because most of the people in the industry remember when people designed games out of their garages. 4 W i t h The Sims, Wright created the world's most spectacular dollhouse, convinced the public to pay to come 3 H e c t o r Postigo,"From Pong to Planet Quake: Post-Industrial Transitions from Leisure to Work," Information, Communication & Society, D e c e m b e r 2003.Julian Kucklich,"Precarious Playbour: Modders and the Digital Games Industry," presented at the Creative Gamers Conference, University of Tamplere.Tampiere, Finland, January 2005. 4 Unless otherwise noted, references to W i l l W r i g h t reflect interview with author.June 2003.

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W i l l Wright, the creator of SimCity (1989) and The Sims (2000), argues that the games industry maintains much lower walls between creators and consumers than most other sectors of the entertainment industry, in part because most of the people in the industry remember when people designed games out of their garages. 4 W i t h The Sims, Wright created the world's most spectacular dollhouse, convinced the public to pay to come 3 H e c t o r Postigo,"From Pong to Planet Quake: Post-Industrial Transitions from Leisure to Work," Information, Communication & Society, D e c e m b e r 2003.Julian Kucklich,"Precarious Playbour: Modders and the Digital Games Industry," presented at the Creative Gamers Conference, University of Tamplere.Tampiere, Finland, January 2005. 4 Unless otherwise noted, references to W i l l W r i g h t reflect interview with author.June 2003. Skenovano pro studijni ucely 166 Quentin Tarantino's Star Wars? inside and play and encouraged them to modify it to their own specifications. Wright and his team tapped the preexisting fan base for his SimCity franchise, offering key Webmasters the right to participate in ongoing discussions around the game's design and development, giving them advanced access to mod tools they could use to design their own skins or produce their own furnishings, and allowed them to see Webcasts and download thousands of images as the game was being developed.

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. , 21,169-171,173-176, 181-182,184-185,194,197, 201 Rubio, K e v i n , 132 Rumsfeld, D o n a l d , 215 Saatchi & Saatchi, 69 Sacks, Eric, 151 Saksa, M i k e , 104 Salla, Jeanine, 124 Salon.com, 52, 104, 220, 237 Sanchez, E d , 102-103 San Diego Union-Tribune, 61 Sandman, The, 101 San Jose Mercury, 104 Satanism, 192-194 Saturday Night Live, 224 Saturn, 79 Saving Private Ryan, 153 SBC, 83 Reel Families: A Social History of Ama- scaffolding, 178 teur Film, 142 Schamus, James, 113 reenactments, 114 Scheppers, L o r i Jo, 192 relativists, 44 Schneider, A n d r e w , 118 religion, 171,198 Scholastic, 185 Schudson, M i c h a e l , 225-226 Republican National Convention, 225 science fiction (genre), 100,164,199, Republicans, 217, 239 202 resistance, 248 Restaurant, The, 69 Sci F i Channel, 102 return on investment, 62 secular humanism, 194 Revolution Will Not Be Televised, The, Sef ton-Green, Julian, 128 210 Seiter, Ellen, 175 Sella, M a r s h a l l , 245 Rheingold, H o w a r d , 251 September 11,1, 221, 232, 250 Richardson, A s h l e y (avatar), 228-230, Sequential Tarts, 249, 257 232 serialization, 33, 78,129 Riddick Chronicles, The, 108 Sesame Street, 1-3 Ring, The, 109 700 Club, The, 202 Roberts, K e v i n , 69, 73, 91, 246 7th Heaven, 200 Robertson, Pat, 202 Shadowmancer, 202-203 R o b i n H o o d , 146 Shakespeare in Love, 139 Robot Carnival, 101 Shaking the World for Jesus, 199 Rogers, John, 251-252 shared knowledge, 51 role p l a y i n g , 176-177, 201, 204 shareware, 256 Rolling Stone, 224 Shawn, 34-36, 46-47, 52 romance (genre), 199 Shelley, Percy, 153 Romero, George, 114 Skenovâno pro studijni ücely Index Shiny Entertainment, 101 Showtime, 60 Sienkiewicz, Bill, 101 Silver, Joel, 101 SimCity, 165-166 Simmons, Russell, 223 Sims, The, 19,165-166, 228-231 Sims 2, The, 154 Simulacra and Simulation, 99 60 Minutes, 212-213 skins, 153-154 Slashdot, 240-241 Slate, 121, 253 smart mobs, 210, 251 Smith, Dana, 143 Smoking Gun, The, 86 Snewser, 51, 57 soap opera, 33,129 sock puppet, 35 song videos, 155 Sony 8,108 Sony Interactive, 97 Soprano, J.

Gamers at Work: Stories Behind the Games People Play by Morgan Ramsay, Peter Molyneux

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, augmented reality, Bill Atkinson, Bob Noyce, book value, collective bargaining, Colossal Cave Adventure, do what you love, financial engineering, game design, Golden age of television, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, index card, Mark Zuckerberg, oil shock, pirate software, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, Steve Jobs, Von Neumann architecture

Gary ran the entertainment and education division as a senior executive. Executive publishers ran the day-to-day operations, working for each of the Carlston brothers. I was running the group that published entertainment products and education products, such as the Carmen Sandiego line. We were doing the distribution for SimCity, which was published by Maxis. I was in charge of acquisitions, project management, and both external and internal development for the products. Ramsay: So, why did you decide to go from there to starting up Stormfront? Daglow: I felt like there was an opportunity. One of the things that we used to talk about with others was those who end up entrepreneuring eventually get itchy and want to do something on their own.

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We had another game called Old Time Baseball, which was a nostalgic baseball game built on the same engine. So, out of all that, we lost well over a million dollars in the process. If there had not been a strike, I think it all would have been successful at some level. I don’t think we would have had a mega hit like a Tetris or a SimCity, but I think we would have had a solid hit. We would have made quite a bit of money, and it would have gone well. But with the strike, we’ll never know, because we didn’t have a control group. In the face of the strike, we got very strong positive feedback on the game. We got very strong reviews and won some awards, but the sales did not cover all the extra expenses.

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You might not have believed in yourself if you understood how smart you would have to be, and how many ways you could fail. The number of ways you can fail is so enormous. But living through the process certainly gives you perspective. We learned a lot. Ramsay: What are you doing now? Lanning: We found another partner, Daniel Goldman. Daniel goes back with Will Wright to the original SimCity. He did the Windows versions for free because they couldn’t afford to pay him. Daniel started his first venture when he said, “Okay, I’ll do the Windows versions for free, and then I’ll have some royalties.” Daniel did very well. He built his first online network in 1983. He started Total Entertainment Network, sold it to EA, and it became Pogo.

Creative Intelligence: Harnessing the Power to Create, Connect, and Inspire by Bruce Nussbaum

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, declining real wages, demographic dividend, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, follow your passion, game design, gamification, gentrification, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, industrial robot, invisible hand, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gruber, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, lone genius, longitudinal study, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Max Levchin, Minsky moment, new economy, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, QR code, race to the bottom, reality distortion field, reshoring, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, six sigma, Skype, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, supply-chain management, Tesla Model S, The Chicago School, The Design of Experiments, the High Line, The Myth of the Rational Market, thinkpad, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, We are the 99%, Y Combinator, young professional, Zipcar

Scaffolds built by oinking pigs get increasingly more complicated and difficult to knock down, but luckily the little birds you catapult at the pigs are equipped with more sophisticated bombs or flying patterns so that you can better meet the new challenges. The subtle techniques you learn in the first few levels of each new “world” prepare you for more complicated levels down the line. In other words, you learn as you go (and go a little crazy in the process). In SimCity, one of the most popular games in the world, building your own city gets increasingly more complex and difficult as you proceed. At the beginning, you can ignore most of the aspects of the simulation as you begin to build your city. But gradually, you have no choice but to learn about limiting pollution, reducing crime, managing tax rates, removing waste, and all the other functions that go into making a city viable.

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Pollock, “A Video Game Improves Behavioral Outcomes in Adolescents and Young Adults with Cancer: A Randomized Trial,” Pediatrics, vol. 122, no. 2, August 1, 2008, accessed September 13, 2012, http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/122/2/e305.full. 138 “A game designer”: Edutopia, “Big Thinkers,” http://www.edutopia.org/digital-generation -katie-salen-video?page=1,accessed September 13, 2012; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimCity, accessed October 21, 2012. 139 Humans vs. Mosquitoes: http://humansvsmosquitoes.com/background/, accessed September 13, 2012; Lauren Graham, “Climate Conversations—Can a Game Combat Malaria?” AlertNet, July 17, 2012, accessed October 20, 2012, http://www.trust.org/alertnet/blogs/climate- conversations/can-a-game-combat-malaria/. 139 It was designed by students: Ibid. 140 In 1485, Leonardo da Vinci: http://www.flyingmachines.org/davi.html, accessed September 13, 2012. 140 It was not only a beautiful work: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ornithopter, accessed September 13, 2012. 140 in 1959, a wealthy British businessman: Aza Raskin, “Wanna Solve Impossible Problems?

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See Education; Universities Schultz, Howard, 52 Schumpeter, Joseph, 245–46 Science fiction, 109–10 Scientific talent, 20–21 Screens, flexible, 61–62 Second Life game, 155 Self assessment embodiment and, 49–52 knowledge mining and, 79–80 Serial entrepreneurs, 205 Serra, Richard, 118 Service industries, engagement framing in, 101–2 Shadow artists, 218 Shapeways, 169 Shareholder capitalism. See Financial capitalism Sharma, Usha, 74–76 Sharp, Amy Turn and Joe, 162–66 Shenk, David, 119 Shortfall, innovation, 234–37 Silicon Valley, 182, 246 SimCity game, 139 Simple games, 135 Simplicity, complex games and, 139–40 Sims video game, 121 Siri, 207 Sixth sense. See Donut knowledge Skills, Creative Intelligence, 257–61 Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, 91–92 Small government vs. big government, 249, 265 Smallknot, 244–45 Smart Design, 109 Smartphones, 65, 95, 98–100, 103, 104–5 Smith, Caspar Llewellyn, 65–66 Social context.

Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires by Douglas Rushkoff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, buy low sell high, Californian Ideology, carbon credits, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, CRISPR, data science, David Graeber, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, digital capitalism, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, Fairphone, fake news, Filter Bubble, game design, gamification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Haight Ashbury, hockey-stick growth, Howard Rheingold, if you build it, they will come, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megaproject, meme stock, mental accounting, Michael Milken, microplastics / micro fibres, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, mirror neurons, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), operational security, Patri Friedman, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Plato's cave, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, QAnon, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Sam Altman, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, SimCity, Singularitarianism, Skinner box, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the medium is the message, theory of mind, TikTok, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, We are as Gods, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , working poor

He’s taken every conceivable system into consideration, from topsoil management and effluent processing to local currencies and governance. Yet even though a lot of this is supposed to be determined from the bottom up, by the people in a particular region and based on the specific climate and natural resources, the whole idea sounds a bit more like a game of SimCity than the process for a real-world community to develop. For at its core, ReGen is what Ehrlich calls a “software stack for starting, managing, and eventually autonomously improving neighborhoods.” A “software stack” is techspeak for a collection of different components, or apps, that can be used together or independently to accomplish some bigger task.

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Rather than helping an existing village or neighborhood utilize more regenerative principles, the ReGen project itself must be spawned on virgin territory, from the ground up, ex nihilo . For Ehrlich, if he ever finds the funding, this means buying a swath of forest and then clearcutting the land he needs for the farming community nestled within it. This is the way “God games” like SimCity and Civilization always work. You start with a blank slate. It’s a hubristic claim on world-building reminiscent of Walt Disney’s efforts to translate the utopian simulacres of Disneyland into a plan for a real, privately owned town called Celebration—which proved a disaster. The “new urbanist” developers behind Celebration and subsequent privately planned “communities” believed they were proving that the market yielded better neighborhoods than government planning.

Aerotropolis by John D. Kasarda, Greg Lindsay

3D printing, air freight, airline deregulation, airport security, Akira Okazaki, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, big-box store, blood diamond, Boeing 747, book value, borderless world, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, conceptual framework, credit crunch, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Easter island, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, financial engineering, flag carrier, flying shuttle, food miles, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, fudge factor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gentleman farmer, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, global supply chain, global village, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, hive mind, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, inflight wifi, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, invention of the telephone, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, Joan Didion, Kangaroo Route, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, kremlinology, land bank, Lewis Mumford, low cost airline, Marchetti’s constant, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Calthorpe, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, pre–internet, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, savings glut, Seaside, Florida, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, starchitect, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, tech worker, telepresence, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, thinkpad, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Tony Hsieh, trade route, transcontinental railway, transit-oriented development, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, warehouse robotics, white flight, white picket fence, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Climbing on all sides is a mix of low-rises and sleek spires—condos, offices, even South Korea’s tallest building, the 1,001-foot Northeast Asia Trade Tower. Strolling along the park’s canal, we heard cicadas buzzing, saws whining, and pile drivers pounding down to bedrock. I asked whether he’d stocked the canal with fish yet. “It’s four days old!” he spluttered, forgetting he wasn’t supposed to rest until the seventh. As far as playing God (or SimCity) goes, New Songdo is the most ambitious instant city since Brasília appeared fifty years ago. Brasília, of course, was an instant disaster: grandiose, monstrously overscale, and immediately encircled by slums. New Songdo has to be much better, because there’s a lot more riding on it than whether Gale can repay his loans.

…

From this distance, they resembled giant sandworms burrowing into the desert. Festival City was in fact an aerotropolis within an aerotropolis, a microcosm of the emirate itself. Everyone and everything in it—its luxuries, laborers, architects, accents, even its aspirations—was flown in from someplace else. Playing SimCity for Real Festival City is barely a speck on the city’s maps. The snub has more to do with politics than size, as it’s one of the few megaprojects, real or imagined, that weren’t controlled through one holding company or another by Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the ruler and “CEO” of Dubai Inc.

…

Planeloads of journalists who once breathlessly touted every pleasure dome in Xanadu returned to pass judgment, switching their metaphors to Ozymandias: “The towers of Dubai will become casualties not of human greed but of architectural folly,” predicted one screed in The Guardian. “Their lifts and services, expensive to maintain, will collapse. Their colossal façades will shed glass. Sand will drift round their trunkless legs.” The roots of the “Dubacle” are less melodramatic. During the boom, the sheikh’s chosen instruments played SimCity for real, without bothering to read the manual. They had two building blocks: cities within a city and corporate “free zones” interspersed between them. The former are cocoons for expatriates, the latter the reason they set up shop here in the first place. Anything goes in the zones, where the last vestiges of sharia law are checked at the door.

The Most Human Human: What Talking With Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive by Brian Christian

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Blue Ocean Strategy, carbon footprint, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, complexity theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, David Heinemeier Hansson, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, George Akerlof, Gödel, Escher, Bach, high net worth, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Ken Thompson, l'esprit de l'escalier, language acquisition, Loebner Prize, machine translation, Menlo Park, operational security, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, SimCity, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, starchitect, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Thales of Miletus, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Turing machine, Turing test, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

Allegedly, game publisher Brøderbund was uncomfortable with the fact that SimCity was a game with no “objectives,” no clear way to “win” or “lose.” Says creator Will Wright, “Most games are made on a movie model with cinematics and the requirement of a climactic blockbuster ending. My games are more like a hobby—a train set or a doll house. Basically they’re a mellow and creative playground experience.” But the industry wouldn’t have it. Brøderbund “just kept asking me how I was going to make it into a game.” To me, Brøderbund’s unease with SimCity is an existential unease, maybe the existential unease. Games have a goal; life doesn’t.

Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now by Douglas Rushkoff

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Andrew Keen, bank run, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, big-box store, Black Swan, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, cashless society, citizen journalism, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, disintermediation, Donald Trump, double helix, East Village, Elliott wave, European colonialism, Extropian, facts on the ground, Flash crash, Future Shock, game design, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, Inbox Zero, invention of agriculture, invention of hypertext, invisible hand, iterative process, James Bridle, John Nash: game theory, Kevin Kelly, laissez-faire capitalism, lateral thinking, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Merlin Mann, messenger bag, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, mutually assured destruction, negative equity, Network effects, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, passive investing, pattern recognition, peak oil, Peter Pan Syndrome, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, Ralph Nelson Elliott, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, scientific management, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, social graph, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, technological determinism, the medium is the message, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing test, upwardly mobile, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero-sum game

“Shooters,” where the player runs around and shoots monsters or other enemies, may seem the most present-tense but actually offer the least amount of player authorship. While the player can kill things on each level in any number of ways, this only brings him to the next predetermined level. “God” games, like SimCity and Civilization, let players build and supervise worlds. The player may be charged with planning a city, managing a civilization from its inception, or even evolving life from the beginning (as in Spore). The biases of these worlds are determined by the choices the player makes. Violent choices yield a violent world; focusing on business may create a world more dominated by economics; and so on.

…

See also MyLifeBits; TheBrain self-confidence, narrative collapse and, 53 self-consciousness, digiphrenia and, 111 self-determination, 66 self-interest/selfishness, 193–94, 221, 223, 248, 250 senses: conflict of, 109–10; digiphrenia and, 109–10, 114–15 September 11, 2001, 3, 10–11, 17–18, 48, 198, 207, 216 serious games, 63 Shaate Zadek Medical Center, 191 share/sharing: fractalnoia and, 203–5, 211, 238–40; overwinding and, 142, 155, 156, 169, 192, 194; sports and, 40. See also cooperation/collaboration Sheen, Charlie, 31, 203, 219 Shirky, Clay, 93, 116 “Shooters” (game), 62 shopping. See consumers short forever. See overwinding SimCity (game), 62 Simmons, Bill, 41 simplification, 220, 247 The Simpsons (TV show), 23, 25–26, 28 simulations, digiphrenia and, 84 singularity, 3, 8, 252, 253, 254, 256, 258, 260, 263 situation comedies, 30 skaters, 132–33 Skype, 70 Slavin, Kevin, 179–80 sleep, polyplastic, 95 smart phones, 83, 84, 99, 211 Smith, Adam, 226 Smith, Zadie, 34 soap operas, 33 social games, 62–63 social interaction: digiphrenia and, 85, 96, 109; overwinding and, 169, 184; television and, 24 social issues, games and, 63–64 social media/networks: fractalnoia and, 199, 204, 209, 211, 214, 215, 216–17; narrative collapse and, 64.

Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture by David Kushner

AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, book scanning, Colossal Cave Adventure, Columbine, corporate governance, Free Software Foundation, game design, glass ceiling, Hacker Ethic, informal economy, Marc Andreessen, market design, Marshall McLuhan, Neal Stephenson, Saturday Night Live, side project, Silicon Valley, SimCity, slashdot, Snow Crash, software patent, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, X Prize

“We have this opportunity to do something totally new here, something fast and texture-mapped. If we can make the graphics look great and fast, and make the sound cool and loud, and make the game explosively fun, then we’re going to have a winner, especially with the theme.” The computer game industry was still meek, after all. SimCity, a hit game, challenged players to build and micromanage a virtual town. Civilization, another success, was a heady Risk-like strategy game based on famous historical battles–blood not included. Wolfenstein could be like nothing the industry had ever seen. “It will be just shocking,” Romero concluded, “a totally shocking game.”

…

His terms for publishers were brash: $3 million per game with a 40 percent royalty, plus, he wanted to keep all the intellectual property rights as well as rights to port his company’s games to other platforms. Companies balked but didn’t back away. This was the age of vanity game development houses. Sid Meier, legendary designer of Civilization strategy games, had his own company, Firaxis. Will Wright, creator of the best selling SimCity series, had his company, Maxis. Richard Garriott had Origin; a former employee of his named Chris Roberts would spawn off his own, Digital Anvil. After the success of Wolfenstein, Doom, and Quake, Romero was not just famous, he was bankable. Publishers flew him and Tom out first-class, putting them up in thousand-dollar-a-night suites in Beverly Hills and whisking them around in limousines to the best restaurants in town.

Building Microservices by Sam Newman

airport security, Amazon Web Services, anti-pattern, business logic, business process, call centre, continuous integration, Conway's law, create, read, update, delete, defense in depth, don't repeat yourself, Edward Snowden, fail fast, fallacies of distributed computing, fault tolerance, index card, information retrieval, Infrastructure as a Service, inventory management, job automation, Kubernetes, load shedding, loose coupling, microservices, MITM: man-in-the-middle, platform as a service, premature optimization, pull request, recommendation engine, Salesforce, SimCity, social graph, software as a service, source of truth, sunk-cost fallacy, systems thinking, the built environment, the long tail, two-pizza team, web application, WebSocket

Erik Doernenburg first shared with me the idea that we should think of our role more as town planners than architects for the built environment. The role of the town planner should be familiar to any of you who have played SimCity before. A town planner’s role is to look at a multitude of sources of information, and then attempt to optimize the layout of a city to best suit the needs of the citizens today, taking into account future use. The way he influences how the city evolves, though, is interesting. He does not say, “build this specific building there”; instead, he zones a city. So as in SimCity, you might designate part of your city as an industrial zone, and another part as a residential zone. It is then up to other people to decide what exact buildings get created, but there are restrictions: if you want to build a factory, it will need to be in an industrial zone.

Ajax: The Definitive Guide by Anthony T. Holdener

AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, business logic, business process, centre right, Citizen Lab, Colossal Cave Adventure, create, read, update, delete, database schema, David Heinemeier Hansson, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, full text search, game design, general-purpose programming language, Guido van Rossum, information retrieval, loose coupling, machine readable, MVC pattern, Necker cube, p-value, Ruby on Rails, SimCity, slashdot, social bookmarking, sorting algorithm, SQL injection, Wayback Machine, web application

Some examples of turn-based games are Sid Meier’s Civilization (1991) from MicroProse, Heroes of Might and Magic (1995) from MobyGames, and Shattered Union (2005) by 2K Games. Economic genre games include titles such as SimCity (1989) Gaming on the Web | 725 from Maxis, Railroad Tycoon (1990) from MicroProse, and Capitalism (1995) by Interactive Magic. Meanwhile, SimEarth (1990) by Maxis, Black and White (2001) from EA Games, and Dungeon Keeper (1997) from Electronic Arts are a few examples of God-like games. As one of the first turn-based games of its kind, SimCity, shown in Figure 21-4, helped to pave the way for a popular genre that is still strong today. Figure 21-4. SimCity, which helped to start the genre of turn-based games Turn-based strategy games are graphics-intensive in that many things are going on at once.

…

., 349–355 confirmation window, 349–351 larger forms, 353–355 prompt window, 351–353 tool tips, 355–360 Necker cube, 183 Nederlof, Peter, 188 .NET Framework, 41, 58 architecture, 58 assemblies, 59 .NET Remoting, 596 NETaccounts (financial accounting), 626, 904 Netscape browsers browser wars with Microsoft, 10 layout engines, 18 network databases, 48 network stack, 816 news and weather services, 636–641 list of some services, 637 NewsIsFree, 637–641 NewsCloud, 637, 904 NewsGator, 637, 904 NewsIsFree, 637, 637–641, 905 API functions for use with web service, 638 getNews( ) request, results of, 639 using SOAP and PHP to pull data from, 640 nodes appending by specifying a location, 109 appending node to list of child nodes, 108 methods used to create, 107 referencing table nodes, 136 standardized list of node types, 105 nodeType property, 113 <noframes> element, 318 Nonstandard Event module, 130 O O(n log n) sorting algorithms, 268 O(n2) sorting algorithms, 268 O’Reilly, Tim, 661 OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards), 596 object databases, 48 object literals, 825 object manipulations (animation), 467–472 object positioning (Rico), 464 obscurity, avoiding in application design, 145 one-stop shops, 149 onFailure property, 277 onreadystatechange property (XMLHttpRequest), 69, 80 onSuccess property, 277 Open Group, 596 open source services, 668 OpenAJAX Alliance, 94 openPageInDIV( ) function (example), 326 openPopUp( ) function, 340 Opera browsers Presto layout engine, 19 user changes, 363 operating systems alert windows, 335 fonts, 163–166 interoperable communication with SOAP, 597 optimization of Ajax applications, 807–839 Ajax optimization, 838 client and server communication, 838 code optimization, 839 data, 839 client-side, 818–830 JavaScript, 822–830 XHTML and CSS, 819–822 execution speed, 809 file size, 808 HTTP, 809–815 compression, 813–815 headers, 810–813 packets, 815–818 optimal sizes, 817 server side, 830–838 compression, 830–833 SQL, 833–838 Optrata mashup, 662 Oracle, 45 open source version, 10g Express Edition, 46 web site, 45 organic layout, 158 Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS), 596 organizing tools, 155 overflow: hidden (CSS rule), 442 P packets, 815–818 optimal sizes, 817 requests for JavaScript, CSS, and media files, 818 TIP/IP, 808 page indexing, 569 page layout, 329–334 dynamic nature of pages, 330 separating structure from presentation, 333–334 page loading, status bar for Ajax, 240–243 page reloads, web pages in 2000, 7 paged navigation, 228–231 Ajax solution, 230 solution using DHTML techniques, 228 pagination, table, 283–291 sorting paginated tables, 289–291 using Ajax, 287–289 using JavaScript, 285–287 palettes, 436 panels, 149 parallel lines, 763 ParseKeypress( ) function (example), 765 ParseMouseClicks( ) function (example), 766 parseResponse function, 100 parsers documentation, 27 validating parsers, 27 parseStateToQueryString( ) function, 245 parseXML( ) function, 80 parsing JSON strings, 90 path between two points approximating a straight line, 748 pause time between frame switching, 442 PC Direct Source storefront, 161 PEAR modules, 63 Index | 945 pen colors (whiteboard), 715–718 People Finders, 666 people searches, 667 perception, 3D objects in 2D space, 183 PeriodicalUpdater object, 868 PeriodicUpdater object, 101 persistent stylesheets, 372 Personal Web Server (PWS), 36 PhishTank, 905 phone number reference service, 650 phone numbers, validating, 539 photo services, 641–649 Flickr, 642–649 list of popular APIs, 641 PHP, 39, 41 adding a post programmatically to del.icio.us, 624–626 adding compression to a site, 831 base64_encode( ) function, 312 calling FeedBurner MgmtAPI’s Find Feeds method, 622 chat client structure, 679 checking on parameters, 556 code to create a table for a server response, 277 error and logging constants, 410 error handler, custom, 411 frameworks, 62 full text site search, 568 get_points.php file, sending whiteboard information to clients, 713 handling a JSON request from the client, 88 inline documentation, 27 logError script, 427 modular server-side components used to build page structure, 805 mysql_real_escape_string( ) function, 535 parsing <meta> elements on a site, 566 preparing and sending search hints back to user, 579 put_message.php file (chat application), 687 REST request to AWS, 610 script handling a RAW POST sent as XML, 526 script handling an XML data request, 74 script handling GET or POST from the client, 525 script handling RAW POST as JSON, 526 946 | Index server-side script handling dynamic bar graph request, 477 slide show application, script for Internet Explorer, 315 slide show application, script sending pictures from server, 312–314 SOAP request to AWS, 607 SoapClient( ), 637 using feeds to distrubute information, 615 using to pull data from NewsIsFree, 640 using with JSON, 87 phpDocumentor parser, 27 pictures (see images; photo services) pipe character (|), separating lists, 226 Pixagogo, 642, 905 pixels (font sizing), 386 planning phase, Ajax web application development, 24 platform games, 731 plug-ins for browsers, 733 Flash, 733 Java applets, 734 Shockwave, 734 PNG alpha-transparency, support by browser engines, 18 PNG image format, 437, 439–453 alpha transparency, 439 building animations with JavaScript looping, 442–444 more robust animation object, 444–448 PNG CSS, 441 using Ajax, 448–453 character animation, 735 differences from GIF, 440 pop-up boxes building custom, 336 CSS styling rules for alert window, 338 dragging functionality, adding, 344–347 keeping focus and closing, 339–343 pop-up windows, 360–362 file sharing application, sending a file, 692 list of features, 361 user consent for, 361 (see also navigation windows) port types element (WSDL), 601 Portable Network Graphics (see PNG image format) portlets, 668 ports element (WSDL), 601 position of an object, animating dynamically, 464–467 POST method (see GET and POST methods) postfix incrementing operators, 830 PostgreSQL, 46 preferred stylesheets, 372 font size, 389 presentation layer, separation from structure or data layer, 250 Presto, 19 standards supported, 18 print files (CSS), units of measurement, 371 processing instructions (PIs) in XML, 849 product codes (UPC Database), 653, 909 professional licenses, 667 Programmable Web, 668, 892 programming languages compiled, optimization of, 807 language for the backend, optimization and, 808 object databases, 48 selecting for mashup backend, 670 Progressive JPEG, support by browser engines, 18 project managers, prerequisites for this book, xiv prompt window, 351–353 properties CSS2 and JavaScript equivalents, 119–124 Event object, 132–133 informational DOM stylesheet properties, 126 informational properties (DOM), 114 innerHTML, 138–140 Internet Explorer alternatives to DOM 2 stylesheet, 127 JavaScript errors, 409 nodeType, 113 traversal properties (DOM), 116 protocol stack, web services, 597 Prototype Framework, 95, 863–869 $F( ) function, 496 accordion object, 238 Ajax response callbacks, 864 Ajax with Prototype, 863 automating requests, 868 dynamic page updating, 867 Element object, show( ) and hide( ) methods, 242 evaluating JSON, 866 event handling, 577 Event object, pointerX( ) and PointerY( ) methods, 704 events and event handling, 342 global responders, 867 helper functions, 98 objects used with Ajax, 99–102 passing parameters to HTTP method, 865 use by Rico library as base, 460 use in file menu example, 198 pseudoselectors, Internet Explorer and, 223 Public Record Finder, 666 public records, 666 differences in availability from states, 666 puzzle games, 730 PWS (Personal Web Server), 36 Pythagorean theorem, 759 Python, 39, 42 frameworks, 61 Q query string, passing page number in, 228, 230 Quest for Glory game series, 727 quick sorts, 268 quote_smart( ) function, 687 R Rademacher, Paul, 660 radio buttons custom, 499 properties, 499 form controls, 493 setting error indicator to, 553 Rails (see Ruby on Rails) RangeError object, 409 RAW POST method, 525 PHP script handling as XML, 526 script handling as JSON, 526 RDF Site Summary (RSS 0.9 and 1.0), 16 reading style for web content, 147 readyState property (xmlDoc), 80 readyState property (XMLHttpRequest), 69 using in status bar, 242 real estate company, mashup for, 671 RealEDA Reverse Phone Lookup, 650, 905 Really Simple Syndication (RSS 2.0), 16 (see also RSS) Index | 947 real-time communication (see communication needs for business) real-time strategy games, 724 receptivity to user feedback, 142 rectangular collision detection, 754–759 reference services, 650 ReferenceError object, 409 regular expressions, 538 checking for valid email addreses, 540 Dojo validation objects, 551 phone number checks, 539 Rehabilitation Act, Section 508, 33 relational databases, 48–54 creating tables, 48–51 deleting records from a table, 53 getting records from the database, 52 implementation of dimensional databases, 47 inserting records into tables, 51 performance improvement with stored procedures, 54 updating records, 53 relative font sizes, 386 release (software development), 23 reloading web pages, classic web sites, 7 Remote Procedure Call (RPC), 595 removeChild( ) method, 110 removeEventListener( ) method, 131 repositioning objects and storing the positions, 403–407 dragging objects, 403 storing information in a database, 404 Representational State Transfer (see REST) Request Entity Too Large error, 421 requirements analysis, 23 Ajax web application development, 24 residential information in the U.S. and Puerto Rico, 651 Resig, John, 96 resolution testing, 26 Responders object, 867 <response> elements code attribute, 612 response headers (HTTP), 810 response to search query, 590 responseText property (XMLHttpRequest), 69 responseXML property (XMLHTTPRequest), 76 948 | Index responseXML property (XMLHttpRequest), 69, 78 REST (Representational State Transfer), 604 eBay API, 653 requesting search results, 654 example request to Flickr web service, 648 Flickr request and response, 642 request to AWS, 609 triangle of nouns, verbs, and content types, 605 RESTful design, 605 Result objects (Google AJAX Search API), 587 CSS classes for each object, 592 Results objects (Google AJAX Search API) CSS styling structures, listed, 592 reusability (web applications), 142 Rhapsody, 632, 906 RIAs (Rich Internet Applications), 30 Rich Site Summary (RSS 0.91 and 1.0), 16 Rico, 97 Rico library animating an element on the page, 466 dragging and dropping capabilities, 460 object positioning through Effect object, 464 reference, 875 role-playing games (RPGs), 728–730 massive multiplayer online RPGs (MMORPGs), 730 root element or root node, 104 rows collection, 136 RPC (Remote Procedure Call), 595 RSS, 614 differences between Atom 1.0 and RSS 2.0, 16 feed results of getNews( ) request on NewsIsFree, 639 feed used to create REST web service, 615 feed validation, 616 GeoRSS feed, 630 standards and versions, 15 support by browser engines, 18 version 2.0, 15 Ruby, 39, 43 Ruby on Rails (RoR or Rails), 59 rule of thirds, 163 rules collection (Internet Explorer), 128 S Safari browsers, WebCore layout engine, 18 sans-serif fonts, 162 Sarissa library, 97, 884–885 Ajax requests, 884 parsing data from the server, 885 web site, 83 XML, 885 XSLT transformation with, 84–86 scraping data for web feeds, 613 screen descriptor (GIF), 435 screen files (CSS), units of measurement, 371 screen.css file, 369 <script> elements needed to use Rico, 466 script.aculo.us, 95, 869–875 auto-completion, 869–872 components, 802 Draggable object, 344–345, 403 dragging and dropping functionality, 455–457 Effect object, 238 effects, 467, 875 online demonstration, 468 inline editing, 873–875 organic site layout, 159 sortable list, integrating Ajax, 303 sorting lists via drag-and-drop solution, 298 scripting languages, 39 server scripting errors, 410 used for ASP, 40 search engines, 154, 565 problems with sites using Ajax, 921 use of databases, 570 using on a local site, 570–575 searches, 565–593 dynamic searching with Ajax, 577–581 giving hints to the user, 577–580 submitting a search from hints, 580 Googling a site, 581–593 search services, 651 types of site searches, 565–576 advanced searching, 576 full text parsing, 568 keyword searches, 566 page indexing, 569 using public search engines on local sites, 570–575 web application search tools, 151 Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, 33 security, risks associated with use of Ajax, 919–921 SeeqPod (music service), 632, 906 <select> elements, placement of labels, 485 SELECT statements (SQL), 52 selectNodes( ) method, 83 selectSingleNode( ) method, 83 serialize( ) method, 86 serif fonts, 162 server responses, 531–533 example of client handling complex response, 532 reporting success or failure, 531 Server Side Include (SSI), 38 server side of Ajax applications, 804–806 breaking into components and modularizing, 806 modularizing SQL, 805 optimizations, 830–838 compression, 830–833 SQL, 833–838 using for structure, 804 server-side errors, 410–413 database, 412 external errors, 413 notifying the user, 419 server scripting errors, 410–412 server-side scripting, 28, 39–44 ASP/ASP.NET, 40 handling dynamic bar graph request (fa_stats.php), 477 Java, 43 logging errors, 427 PHP, 41 Python, 42 Ruby, 43 to web services, 607–610 Service Description level (web services), 597 Service Discovery level (web services), 597 Service Messaging level (web services), 597 Service Transport level (web services), 597 Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), 596 services element (WSDL), 601 servlets (Java), 38, 44 setAttributeNode( ) method, 107 setDragTarget( ) method, 458 setSiteRestriction( ) method (GwebSearch), 586 shapes, drawing for whiteboard, 719 Index | 949 Shea, Dave, 332 shell sorts, 268 Ship, Howard M. Lewis, 61 Shockwave, 734 shopping carts, 155 shopping services, 652–655 eBay, 653–655 .shtml file extension, 38 SimCity, 725 simple path movement, 747 simple to use applications, 142 Simpy (bookmarking service), 623, 906 slang dictionary, 650, 910 Slashdot, paneled design pattern, 149 slide show application, 304–315 Ajax-enabled, in action, 314 CSS styling rules, 305–307 JavaScript code, 307–311 server-side PHP script to send images, 312–314 working slide show using Ajax, 311 slideBy( ) method, 465 slider bar for font sizes, 389–392 slideTo( ) method, 465 sliding an element around on the page, 464 Smarty, 63 SmugMug, 641, 907 Snipshot, 642, 907 SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture), 596 SOAP, 597 request to AWS using PHP, 607 request to NewsIsFree, 637 using to pull data from NewsIsFree, 640 Social Security numbers, validating, 540 software development life cycle, 22–24 simplification for web applications, 24 Sortable object, 298 create( ) method, options to pass in object parameter, 298 onUpdate callback, 303 sorting lists, 297–302 tables, 264–279 JavaScript versus Ajax sorting, 279 JavaScript, using, 264–275 keeping style with sorts, 280–283 paginated tables, 289–291 using Ajax, 275–279 sorting algorithms, 268–269 950 | Index Sowden, Paul, 372 spacing, text, 166 spellcheckers, 157 spider performing a full text search, 569 spreadsheets, 157 Spring framework, 60 SQL (Structured Query Language) CREATE TABLE statement, 49 DELETE statement, 53 INSERT statement, 51 Microsoft SQL Server, 45 modularizing in server-side coding, 805 optimization, 809, 833–838 inline queries, 834–837 stored procedures, 837 origin of, 45 retrieving and storing information for draggable object, 404 SELECT statements, 52 stored procedures, 54 UPDATE statements, 53 SQL injection attack, 535 function dealing with quotes, 687 square collision detection, 754 SRC Demographics, 650, 907 SSI (Server Side Include), 38 ASP (Active Server Pages), 40 stamps for whiteboard application, 719 standards organizations, 10 standards, compliance with, 19 (see also web standards) static directions (character movement), 742 status bar, showing Ajax actions, 242 Status object, 242 status property (XMLHttpRequest), 69 statusText property (XMLHttpRequest), 69 Stenhouse, Mike, 244 storage engines (MySQL), 46 stored procedures, 54, 805, 837 storing information, 155 desktop application tools, 157 straight line between two points, 748 strategy games, 724–726 abstract, 724 real-time, 724 turn-based, economic, and God-like, 725 stress testing, 26 StrikeIron Historical Stock Quotes, 626, 907 StrikeIron Residential Lookup, 651, 908 StrikeIron U.S.

A History of Future Cities by Daniel Brook

Berlin Wall, British Empire, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, carbon footprint, Celtic Tiger, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, company town, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, glass ceiling, high-speed rail, indoor plumbing, joint-stock company, land reform, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Urbanism, open economy, Parag Khanna, Pearl River Delta, Potemkin village, profit motive, rent control, Shenzhen special economic zone , SimCity, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, starchitect, Suez canal 1869, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal, working poor

The report put Dubai on global investors’ maps alongside the better-known capital of the Celtic Tiger and the Mojave Desert outpost that was then the fastest-growing city in the world’s largest economy. All three cities experienced massive booms, but Dubai’s was the most explosive. If early St. Petersburg was a Renaissance perspective drawing brought to life on a marshy tabula rasa, Dubai was a real-life SimCity, a fantastical metropolis that looked as if it had magically leapt from an architect’s laptop running the latest computer-assisted design software out onto the pristine desert. Housing developments sprouted up along the beachfront, and office towers rose along the city’s massive freeway spine, Sheikh Zayed Road, in the most outlandish shapes: an enormous golf tee, a silvery sandworm, even a proposed spherical “Dubai Death Star.”

…

In addition to making Dubai the financial hub of the Middle East, Sheikh Mohammed sought to make it the technology and media capital—pursuing glamorous industries whose viability in an autocracy seemed dubious. In 1999, saltwater-inundated lowlands along Sheikh Zayed Road were drained and set aside to become two contiguous free zones, Internet City and Media City. Today, the fifty-three-story twin Chrysler Buildings standing next to each other along the expressway mark the development. The SimCity Chryslers are a fitting icon for the Internet and Media City free zones, since the zones themselves mimic America on a deeper level, hoping to approximate the constitutionally protected free inquiry that has helped make the United States a global leader in media and technology. To entice companies to locate in Internet City and Media City, Dubai’s authorities exempted the contiguous free zones from the UAE’s strict Internet censorship policy.

Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole by Benjamin R. Barber

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, addicted to oil, AltaVista, American ideology, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Berlin Wall, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bread and circuses, business cycle, Celebration, Florida, collective bargaining, creative destruction, David Brooks, delayed gratification, digital divide, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, G4S, game design, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, informal economy, invisible hand, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, Marc Andreessen, McJob, microcredit, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paradox of Choice, pattern recognition, presumed consent, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, retail therapy, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, SimCity, spice trade, Steve Jobs, telemarketer, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the market place, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tyler Cowen, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, X Prize

In fact, the games turn out to be fairly rudimentary and generic, with traditional gaming spaceships and robots named to accommodate Islamic Jihadist terminology; a few, however, engage in more virulent forms of play, permitting players to shoot virtual Israeli soldiers, for example (e.g., Special Force and Under Siege).25 Then there is the long-lived and much-played series based on the classic SimCity game that allows gamesters to engage in simulated urban and civilization design of a quite creative and altogether pacific nature. Such games are known as “open-ended” because they are aimed less at achieving some winning end than at maximizing ingenuity and imagination along the way. The original SimCity authored by designer Will Wright grew out of a map-making simulation. It gave birth to The Sims, a game in which players simulate a family carving out its own destiny according to loose program rules.

100 Baggers: Stocks That Return 100-To-1 and How to Find Them by Christopher W Mayer

Alan Greenspan, asset light, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, book value, business cycle, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, cloud computing, disintermediation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, dumpster diving, Edward Thorp, Henry Singleton, hindsight bias, housing crisis, index fund, Jeff Bezos, market bubble, Network effects, new economy, oil shock, passive investing, peak oil, Pershing Square Capital Management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, survivorship bias, Teledyne, The Great Moderation, The Wisdom of Crowds, tontine

“This has in turn led them to have exclusive rights to the development of games for several professional leagues along with that of their players. Madden NFL, NBA Live, FIFA, NHL and PGA Tour series have all been produced under the EA sports label since the late 80s and early 90’s. FIFA, its most successful sports franchise, broke its 100 million unit sale in 2010.” EA had other hit franchises too: SimCity, Battlefield and the Need for Speed series. “To have so many hit franchises under one roof is exactly why this company has consistently grown since its inception,” Alejandro concludes. EA is intriguing on many levels. It was in what seems a fickle industry but managed to create a culture that produced winning games.

The History of the Future: Oculus, Facebook, and the Revolution That Swept Virtual Reality by Blake J. Harris

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, airport security, Anne Wojcicki, Apollo 11, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, call centre, Carl Icahn, company town, computer vision, cryptocurrency, data science, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, financial independence, game design, Grace Hopper, hype cycle, illegal immigration, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Minecraft, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, QR code, sensor fusion, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, SimCity, skunkworks, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, Snow Crash, software patent, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, unpaid internship, white picket fence

Iribe didn’t launch into a full-fledged pitch right then and there, but over the next few months it became clear that not only was Iribe serious about starting a company with Antonov, but he also already knew what their start-up should do. “Do you know the company Maxis?” Iribe asked. Of course Antonov knew Maxis. They made SimCity and a bunch of other cool Sim-related games. And they had just been acquired by Electronic Arts for $125 million. They were a big deal! Did Iribe think they should do a company that made simulation games? Did he think that one day their company might actually make them rich? Rich enough to one day have a million dollars . . . each?

…

It wasn’t a game studio like Maxis, but rather an idea that had come to Iribe while listening to a Maxis engineer talk at the 1998 Computer Game Developers Conference.1 That engineer was talking about an in-house tool he had created at Maxis—a graphics-based windowing system that was used to build games like SimCity—and as Iribe listened to this engineer talk, he started thinking about how great it would be if such a tool existed for all game developers. “That’s what we should build,” Iribe explained to Antonov. “A windowing system to compete against Windows and Mac. Initially, we’ll make it for developers, but eventually it’ll be for everything and everyone.”

Hyperfocus: How to Be More Productive in a World of Distraction by Chris Bailey

Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Bluma Zeigarnik, Cal Newport, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, correlation does not imply causation, deliberate practice, functional fixedness, game design, imposter syndrome, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Parkinson's law, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, side hustle, SimCity, Skype, TED Talk, twin studies, Zipcar

The man has almost single-handedly crafted the soundtrack to countless childhoods, and his videos easily attract millions of YouTube views. However, while you may recognize his music, you likely won’t know Jerry Martin’s name. Jerry composed the music scores for video games such as The Sims and SimCity—games that have collectively sold well over 100 million copies worldwide. He’s also created soundtracks for Apple, General Motors, and NBA commercials. Jerry’s music is the perfect place to start when looking at how music influences productivity, as he has created some of the most productive soundtracks in existence.

Data-Ism: The Revolution Transforming Decision Making, Consumer Behavior, and Almost Everything Else by Steve Lohr

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, bioinformatics, business cycle, business intelligence, call centre, Carl Icahn, classic study, cloud computing, computer age, conceptual framework, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Danny Hillis, data is the new oil, data science, David Brooks, driverless car, East Village, Edward Snowden, Emanuel Derman, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Future Shock, Google Glasses, Ida Tarbell, impulse control, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of writing, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John von Neumann, lifelogging, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, meta-analysis, money market fund, natural language processing, obamacare, pattern recognition, payday loans, personalized medicine, planned obsolescence, precision agriculture, pre–internet, Productivity paradox, RAND corporation, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Salesforce, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, six sigma, skunkworks, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, The Design of Experiments, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tony Fadell, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, yottabyte

On-time delivery for the drugs increased to 99 percent from less than 90 percent. The software model gave McKesson the clarity and the confidence to go ahead and is now being used to experiment and improve performance across the company’s distribution network Moreover, IBM is adapting the software it developed for the giant pharmaceutical distributor—a kind of SimCity for supply chains—to other industries. And while it may be exceptional in some respects, McKesson’s success illustrates where the big-data approach shines today. It shows data really being used to guide decisions and to make better decisions, ones that trump best guesses and gut feel, experience and intuition.

A Burglar's Guide to the City by Geoff Manaugh

A. Roger Ekirch, big-box store, card file, dark matter, Evgeny Morozov, game design, index card, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, Minecraft, off grid, Rubik’s Cube, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, statistical model, the built environment, urban planning

I was reminded of a strange book called Local Code by architect Michael Sorkin. Local Code was Sorkin’s attempt to design a whole city from scratch—with one big twist. The whole thing had been written as if it were the byzantine, nearly impossible to follow codes and regulations for an entire, hypothetical metropolis. The effect is like stumbling upon the source code for SimCity. Sorkin’s exhaustively made point was that, if you know everything about a given metropolis, from its plumbing standards to its parking requirements, its sewer capacity to the borders of its school districts, then you could more or less accurately imagine the future form of that city from the ground up.

The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date by Samuel Arbesman

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 11, bioinformatics, British Empire, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, data science, David Brooks, demographic transition, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, Galaxy Zoo, Gregor Mendel, guest worker program, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, index fund, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, John Harrison: Longitude, Kevin Kelly, language acquisition, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, Marc Andreessen, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, National Debt Clock, Nicholas Carr, P = NP, p-value, Paul Erdős, Pluto: dwarf planet, power law, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, scientific worldview, SimCity, social contagion, social graph, social web, systematic bias, text mining, the long tail, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation

Even then, its usage didn’t enter the popular consciousness until decades later. Gumbel’s confusion, and our amusement at this situation, is a testament to the rapid change that the Internet has wrought. But, of course, these changes aren’t limited to the Internet. When I think of a 386 processor I think of playing SimCity 2000 on my friend’s desktop computer, software and hardware that have both long since been superseded. In digital storage media, I have personally used 5-inch floppy disks, 3-inch diskettes, zip discs, rewritable CDs, flash drives, burnable DVDs, even the Commodore Datasette, and in 2012 I save many of my documents to the storage that’s available anytime I have access to the Internet: the cloud.

Dual Transformation: How to Reposition Today's Business While Creating the Future by Scott D. Anthony, Mark W. Johnson

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Apollo 13, asset light, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, blockchain, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, diversified portfolio, driverless car, Internet of things, invention of hypertext, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, late fees, Lean Startup, long term incentive plan, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, obamacare, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, pez dispenser, recommendation engine, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, software as a service, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, subscription business, the long tail, the market place, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, transfer pricing, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator, Zipcar

The third realm is “full digital immersion,” using “open-scale technology to remove structures around the size of the class.” The first project in this realm is a global freshman academy with about two hundred thousand students. Finally, the fourth realm is “education through exploration” that blurs the line between game playing and education. “You’ve played games like SimCity, SimAnt, and Spore, right?” Crow says. “Imagine playing a game that by the end of it you have mastered college chemistry, college biology, and college physics.” ASU has also used technology to target nontraditional students that would never consider touching foot on its traditional campus. For example, in 2014 it announced a deal with Starbucks that allowed Starbucks baristas to receive degrees through the program for free.

For the Love of Money: A Memoir by Sam Polk

Bear Stearns, carried interest, Credit Default Swap, eat what you kill, fixed income, food desert, hiring and firing, Northern Rock, nuclear winter, Rosa Parks, SimCity

She hung out with a tough crew, got in fights, and started wearing her hair in cornrows. After Sloane graduated in May, we flew down to Charlotte together to look at apartments. From the moment she stepped off the plane, I could tell she felt out of place. She loved fashion and culture, an LA-and-New York kind of girl. Charlotte was SimCity with fried pickles. We stayed in a motel that looked much better on the Internet than in person. One night, we were startled awake at 3:00 a.m. by a man pounding on our door, shouting. It was just a drunk who’d forgotten his room number, but when I saw Sloane’s face, I knew she wasn’t moving to Charlotte.

The Genius Within: Unlocking Your Brain's Potential by David Adam

Albert Einstein, business intelligence, cognitive bias, CRISPR, Flynn Effect, Gregor Mendel, job automation, John Conway, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, SimCity, Skype, Stephen Hawking, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray

One was Lewis Carroll, author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, which itself contains many maths references and in-jokes. Another is John Conway, perhaps best known for inventing what is known as Conway’s ‘Game of Life’ – a simple simulation of evolution and development called a cellular automaton, which spawned several generations of life simulation games, such as ‘SimCity’ and the rest. In theory, most people could learn to use these anchor points and calculations to identify days from dates, at least for a span of a few decades. It takes time to work out the answer this way though – much longer than savants. It also demands plenty of conscious attention, and so it helps to have lots of conventional intelligence.

The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality by Bhaskar Sunkara

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Donald Trump, equal pay for equal work, fake news, false flag, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gig economy, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, income inequality, inventory management, Jeremy Corbyn, labor-force participation, land reform, land value tax, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Meghnad Desai, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Kinnock, new economy, Occupy movement, postindustrial economy, precariat, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, single-payer health, Steve Bannon, telemarketer, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%

Outside of theory, there’s no such thing as a “free market”—capitalism requires both planning and a regulated market. But the question about what role each would play under socialism is an open one. You spend long nights eating Hawaiian pizza and discussing it with Fred. As a doctor who sees how well the government-run health care system works, and as an avid SimCity 2000 fan, Fred proposes that markets can be done away with and replaced with central planning. In this system, regional or national planners decide what the economy should produce and then ask firms to turn out a certain amount of goods. They might have discretion in how they do so, but they have to hit their quotas.

Supertall: How the World's Tallest Buildings Are Reshaping Our Cities and Our Lives by Stefan Al

3D printing, autonomous vehicles, biodiversity loss, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, colonial rule, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, Deng Xiaoping, digital twin, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, Donald Trump, Easter island, Elisha Otis, energy transition, food miles, Ford Model T, gentrification, high net worth, Hyperloop, invention of air conditioning, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, Marchetti’s constant, megaproject, megastructure, Mercator projection, New Urbanism, plutocrats, plyscraper, pneumatic tube, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, SimCity, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social distancing, Steve Jobs, streetcar suburb, synthetic biology, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the built environment, the High Line, transit-oriented development, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, tulip mania, urban planning, urban sprawl, value engineering, Victor Gruen, VTOL, white flight, zoonotic diseases

As cities are getting more circular, more sophisticated systems will need to manage and share resources. In 2014, Singapore launched a digital twin, a virtual version of the city called “E3A,” “Everyone, Everything, Everywhere, All the Time.” It displays 3D renderings of all the city’s parks, buildings, and waterways, like the video game SimCity, based on real-time data such as energy use, pollution, and noise. The computer model can run virtual experiments and test policies before they are actually implemented. For instance, it can explore the impact of a new building or park on the shadows and wind flows. Systems like this may soon be able to calculate and evaluate the many opportunities for buildings to generate resources.

The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance by Steven Kotler

Abraham Maslow, adjacent possible, Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Clayton Christensen, data acquisition, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, do what you love, escalation ladder, fear of failure, Google Earth, haute couture, impulse control, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, jimmy wales, Kevin Kelly, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, life extension, lifelogging, low earth orbit, Maui Hawaii, pattern recognition, Ray Kurzweil, risk tolerance, rolodex, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, SimCity, SpaceShipOne, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, time dilation, Virgin Galactic, Walter Mischel, X Prize

University of Virginia psychologist Angeline Lillard: Angeline Lillard and Nicole Else-Quest, “The Early Years: Evaluating Montessori Education,” Science, September 29, 2006, 313(5795), pp. 1893–94. When professor Jeffrey Dyer…and Hal Gregersen: The innovators Dyer and Gregersen are referring to include everyone from high-tech pioneers like Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, SimCity creator Will Wright, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, and Google cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page to culture-shaping creatives like rapper/entrepreneur Sean Combs, chef/entrepreneur Julia Child, and Nobel laureate author Gabriel García Márquez. In 2004, when Barbara Walters interviewed Page and Brin, she asked if the fact that their parents were both college professors was the major reason for their success.

Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", Ada Lovelace, adjacent possible, Alfred Russel Wallace, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Book of Ingenious Devices, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, colonial exploitation, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cotton gin, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Drosophila, Edward Thorp, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, game design, global village, Great Leap Forward, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, HyperCard, invention of air conditioning, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, Islamic Golden Age, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, mass immigration, megacity, Minecraft, moral panic, Murano, Venice glass, music of the spheres, Necker cube, New Urbanism, Oculus Rift, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pets.com, placebo effect, pneumatic tube, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit motive, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Oldenburg, SimCity, spice trade, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, talking drums, the built environment, The Great Good Place, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trade route, Turing machine, Turing test, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white flight, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, working poor, Wunderkammern

began a lineage that would ultimately evolve into the modern video game industry, which generates more than $100 billion in sales annually. This is impressive enough, but perhaps not so surprising. Video games had to start somewhere, after all. But the legacy of Spacewar! extends far beyond PlayStation and Donkey Kong and SimCity. Just as Expensive Planetarium inaugurated a profound shift in the relationship between on-screen data and the real world, Spacewar! itself planted the seeds for a number of crucial developments in computing. The idea that a software application might be codeveloped by dozens of different programmers at different institutions spread around the world—each contributing new features or bug fixes and optimized graphics routines—was unheard-of when the Hingham Institute first began dreaming of space torpedoes.

Experience on Demand: What Virtual Reality Is, How It Works, and What It Can Do by Jeremy Bailenson

Apollo 11, Apple II, augmented reality, computer vision, deliberate practice, experimental subject, fake news, game design, Google Glasses, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), iterative process, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, Neal Stephenson, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, Oculus Rift, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, overview effect, pill mill, randomized controlled trial, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skinner box, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, telepresence, too big to fail, traumatic brain injury

“It’s a Gameboy,” the young man replied, and he proceeded to show Skip the famously addictive Russian puzzle game, Tetris. Skip watched for 10 minutes as the normally easily distractible frontal lobe patient sat glued to the game. “I thought, if only I could develop cognitive therapy that could engage folks like this.” Immediately, he began incorporating games like SimCity into his clinical practice. Not long after this experience Skip heard an interview on the radio with Jaron Lanier. Lanier was touting the work of his company, VPL Research, and the transformative possibilities of virtual reality. Immediately Skip saw the therapeutic potential of virtual environments for treating people with cognitive impairments and anxiety disorders: “I thought, what if we could immerse people in functionally relevant environments and do rehab in those contexts?

The Road Ahead by Bill Gates, Nathan Myhrvold, Peter Rinearson

Albert Einstein, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Berlin Wall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, business process, California gold rush, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, Donald Knuth, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, glass ceiling, global village, informal economy, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, medical malpractice, Mitch Kapor, new economy, packet switching, popular electronics, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, SimCity, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, Von Neumann architecture

SimLife, a popular software program, simulates evolution, so kids get to experience the process instead of just getting facts about it. You don't have to be a child to enjoy this program, which lets you design plants and animals and then watch how they interact and evolve in an ecosystem that you also design. Maxis Software, the publisher of SimLife also produces another program, SimCity, which lets you design a city with all of its interrelated systems, such as roads and public transportation. As a player, you get to be the mayor or city planner of a virtual community and to challenge yourself to meet your own goals for the community, rather than goals artificially imposed by the software's design.

Building and Dwelling: Ethics for the City by Richard Sennett

Anthropocene, Big Tech, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, company town, complexity theory, creative destruction, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Frank Gehry, gentrification, ghettoisation, housing crisis, illegal immigration, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Masdar, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, megaproject, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, open borders, place-making, plutocrats, post-truth, Richard Florida, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, urban planning, urban renewal, Victor Gruen, Yochai Benkler

The budgeting cité has focused on the large ville. It would seem that here, far away from Berlin, Max Weber – had he lived long enough – would have found a kind of city-state in which the citizens control their own fortunes.34 As in budgeting, so too the actual design of the smart city can follow an open, coordinative form. The computer game SimCity was an early version which aimed at generating urban villes through interactive high tech. The ForCity project in Lyons, France, uses sophisticated 3-D models to show what an urban future would look like, drawing on big data sets to construct detailed images of urban future fabric. Though they require expert inputting, ForCity models can translate fairly directly commands such as, ‘Show possible three sidewidths for a street of X population, with Y footfall density and Z sessile density.’

Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World by Jane McGonigal

Abraham Maslow, airport security, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, citizen journalism, clean water, collaborative economy, crowdsourcing, delayed gratification, en.wikipedia.org, fear of failure, G4S, game design, hedonic treadmill, hobby farmer, Ian Bogost, jimmy wales, mass immigration, Merlin Mann, Network effects, new economy, oil shock, peak oil, planetary scale, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Stallman, science of happiness, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, SimCity, smart meter, Stewart Brand, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tony Hsieh, Tragedy of the Commons, urban planning, We are as Gods, web application, Whole Earth Catalog

It’s a twist on the traditional massively multiplayer online concept—and, on first impression, it sounds like an impossible paradox. How can you have a “massively” single-player experience when by definition a single-player experience occurs alone? The inventor of the term is Will Wright, the famed creator of SimCity and The Sims games. He coined it to describe his 2008 game Spore, a simulation of the universe that invites players to design a galaxy from scratch, starting with a single-cell creature and evolving it up into a land-dwelling species, then into tribes, complex civilizations, and ultimately a space-faring, planet-designing megacivilization.

If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities by Benjamin R. Barber

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Celebration, Florida, classic study, clean water, congestion pricing, corporate governance, Crossrail, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, digital divide, digital Maoism, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, gentrification, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global pandemic, global village, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, income inequality, informal economy, information retrieval, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Lewis Mumford, London Interbank Offered Rate, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, megacity, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peace of Westphalia, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, plutocrats, Prenzlauer Berg, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart meter, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, technological solutionism, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, Tony Hsieh, trade route, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, unpaid internship, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, War on Poverty, zero-sum game

Remote health exams via the web can offer improvements in urban (and rural) health care, especially for those without regular access to doctors. And electronic record keeping is a money-saving boon to public health that improves patient care and helps cities deal with new global pandemics. Even video games, going all the way back to SimCity (which was issued in a new version in 2013) and Second Life, allow experimentation with modes of urban design and cosmopolitan living. Second Life, like most web-based innovation, may be exploited mainly for entertainment (virtual sex and shopping and partying), but it also includes rules for living, principles of design, and a virtual currency with some real-world value.

Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism by Stephen Graham

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", addicted to oil, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, anti-communist, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, call centre, carbon footprint, clean tech, clean water, congestion charging, creative destruction, credit crunch, DARPA: Urban Challenge, defense in depth, deindustrialization, digital map, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, edge city, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, failed state, Food sovereignty, gentrification, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Global Witness, Google Earth, illegal immigration, income inequality, knowledge economy, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, loose coupling, machine readable, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, McMansion, megacity, military-industrial complex, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, one-state solution, pattern recognition, peak oil, planetary scale, post-Fordism, private military company, Project for a New American Century, RAND corporation, RFID, Richard Florida, Scramble for Africa, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, SimCity, smart transportation, surplus humans, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, white flight, white picket fence

As yet, through, domestic drones remain unarmed. 110 Kaplan, ‘Hunting the Taliban in Las Vegas’. 111 Nick Turse, ‘Bringing the War Home: The New Military-Industrial-Entertainment Complex at War and Play’, Tom Dispatch, 17 October 2003. 112 Ibid. 113 Stahl, ‘Have You Played the War on Terror?’, 112. 114 Center for Land Use Interpretation, ‘Exhibition Review: Emergency State: First Responders and Emergency Training Architecture’, 2004, available at www.clui.org. 115 Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class, New York: Basic Books, 2003. 116 ‘SimCity will be huge’, Suffolk News Herald, 10 May 2005. 117 Ibid. 118 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Hannah Arendt Illuminations, ed., trans. Harry Zohn, New York: Schocken, 1968, 241. Thanks to Marcus Power for this reference. 119 Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991. 120 Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1994. 121 Abhinava Kumar, ‘America’s Army Game and the Production of War’, YCISS working paper 27, March 2004, 8. 122 James Der Derian, conference brief for Dis/Simulations of War and Peace Symposium, 6–7 June, 2004. 123 Kumar, ‘America’s Army Game and the Production of War’, 8. 124 Roger Stahl, ‘Have You Played the War on Terror?’

If Then: How Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future by Jill Lepore

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Buckminster Fuller, Cambridge Analytica, company town, computer age, coronavirus, cuban missile crisis, data science, desegregation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, fake news, game design, George Gilder, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Howard Zinn, index card, information retrieval, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Perry Barlow, land reform, linear programming, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, packet switching, Peter Thiel, profit motive, punch-card reader, RAND corporation, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, smart cities, social distancing, South China Sea, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, Ted Sorensen, Telecommunications Act of 1996, urban renewal, War on Poverty, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog

In what one historian has called “the twilight of simulation,” universities stopped dedicating funding to systems analysis and simulation, journals stopped publishing, labs closed. MIT shut down its Urban Systems Lab, once headed by Ithiel de Sola Pool, in 1974. For a while it seemed that simulation would live on only in the form of computer games; the first version of SimCity appeared in 1989.3 The people who’d worked for Simulmatics scattered. Peter Shulman, the onetime deputy director of Simulmatics’ Urban Studies Division, went to Vietnam with RAND in 1967, but when he came back to the States the next year, he left New York City for the countryside and became a dairy farmer.

Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (And What It Says About Us) by Tom Vanderbilt

Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, call centre, cellular automata, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, congestion charging, congestion pricing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, DARPA: Urban Challenge, Donald Shoup, endowment effect, extreme commuting, fundamental attribution error, Garrett Hardin, Google Earth, hedonic treadmill, Herman Kahn, hindsight bias, hive mind, human-factors engineering, if you build it, they will come, impulse control, income inequality, Induced demand, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, John Nash: game theory, Kenneth Arrow, lake wobegon effect, loss aversion, megacity, Milgram experiment, Nash equilibrium, PalmPilot, power law, Sam Peltzman, Silicon Valley, SimCity, statistical model, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Timothy McVeigh, traffic fines, Tragedy of the Commons, traumatic brain injury, ultimatum game, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, working poor

“It’s calculating a demand,” says Patel. “But it needs to think ahead and say, ‘How much time do I need for the next signal?’” Over time, ATSAC amasses a profile of how a certain intersection behaves during a given time on a given day. Patel points to a computer screen, which seems to be running a crude version of the game SimCity, with computer renderings of traffic lights and streets but no people. An alert is flashing at one intersection. “This loop at three-thirty on a Sunday has a certain historical value, for a year’s period of time,” Patel explains. “Today it’s abnormal, because it’s not usually that heavy. So it’ll flag that as out of the norm and post it up there as a possible incident.”

In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives by Steven Levy

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, Anne Wojcicki, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, Bill Atkinson, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, business process, clean water, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, Dean Kamen, discounted cash flows, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dutch auction, El Camino Real, Evgeny Morozov, fault tolerance, Firefox, General Magic , Gerard Salton, Gerard Salton, Google bus, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Googley, high-speed rail, HyperCard, hypertext link, IBM and the Holocaust, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, large language model, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, one-China policy, optical character recognition, PageRank, PalmPilot, Paul Buchheit, Potemkin village, prediction markets, Project Xanadu, recommendation engine, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, search inside the book, second-price auction, selection bias, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, SimCity, skunkworks, Skype, slashdot, social graph, social software, social web, spectrum auction, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, Susan Wojcicki, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The future is already here, the long tail, trade route, traveling salesman, turn-by-turn navigation, undersea cable, Vannevar Bush, web application, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator

But there was no way that Google would stop Street View altogether, as some critics demanded. The project was a key component in the company’s bigger information picture. What’s more, Microsoft had its own mirror world, its own fleet of camera-equipped cars cruising the streets, its own low-flying air force to capture three-quarters views of buildings for a SimCity-style picture of the real world. But Google, the market leader, got the attention—and the traffic. But when something went wrong, the reaction was explosive. In early 2010, Google made a horrifying discovery: the cars driving around the streets of the world taking pictures for Street View had “unintentionally” sucked up confidential information—known as “payload data”—from wireless Internet transmitters in the areas they cruised.

The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-But Some Don't by Nate Silver

airport security, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, availability heuristic, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boeing 747, book value, Broken windows theory, business cycle, buy and hold, Carmen Reinhart, Charles Babbage, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disinformation, diversification, Donald Trump, Edmond Halley, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, en.wikipedia.org, equity premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, Freestyle chess, fudge factor, Future Shock, George Akerlof, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, haute cuisine, Henri Poincaré, high batting average, housing crisis, income per capita, index fund, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Japanese asset price bubble, John Bogle, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, Laplace demon, locking in a profit, Loma Prieta earthquake, market bubble, Mikhail Gorbachev, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Monroe Doctrine, mortgage debt, Nate Silver, negative equity, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Oklahoma City bombing, PageRank, pattern recognition, pets.com, Phillips curve, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, power law, prediction markets, Productivity paradox, proprietary trading, public intellectual, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, savings glut, security theater, short selling, SimCity, Skype, statistical model, Steven Pinker, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, transaction costs, transfer pricing, University of East Anglia, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wayback Machine, wikimedia commons

He explained how FRED is organized: “They have schools and workplaces and hospitals all placed according to the right geographical distribution. They have a quite complicated setup where they assign children to schools; they don’t all go to the closest school—and some of schools are small and some of them are real large. And so you get this synthetic sort of a SimCity population.” Dr. Grefenstette and his amiable colleague Dr. Shawn Brown showed me the results of some of FRED’s simulations, with waves of disease colorfully rippling zip code by zip code through SimPittsburgh or SimWashington or SimPhiladelphia. But FRED is also very serious business. These models take few shortcuts: literally everybody in a city, county, or state might be represented.

Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It by Marc Goodman

23andMe, 3D printing, active measures, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, Brian Krebs, business process, butterfly effect, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, don't be evil, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, future of work, game design, gamification, global pandemic, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, Hacker News, high net worth, High speed trading, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, illegal immigration, impulse control, industrial robot, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, Large Hadron Collider, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, license plate recognition, lifelogging, litecoin, low earth orbit, M-Pesa, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, national security letter, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off grid, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, operational security, optical character recognition, Parag Khanna, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, personalized medicine, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, printed gun, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ross Ulbricht, Russell Brand, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, security theater, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, Stuxnet, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tech worker, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, uranium enrichment, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wave and Pay, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, you are the product, zero day

Gamification of securing software might help technology companies avoid the obvious pitfalls of the “Just ship it” mentality by getting tens of thousands of players around the world to go on “bug hunts” for flaws in their software or hardware products, flaws that would otherwise be exploited by Crime, Inc. hackers to the public’s detriment. Such an idea is already under development by DARPA, as well as by several start-ups, including Topcoder and Bugcrowd. These same techniques could be applied to our nation’s critical infrastructure systems as well. Players could be shown anonymized data in a SimCity-style animated game and let loose to find security vulnerabilities in everything from our virtual electrical grids to our transportation networks. In the end, individual gamers may hold the potential to make significant breakthroughs in cyber security, doing it for no other reason than that they enjoy playing the game.

Console Wars: Sega, Nintendo, and the Battle That Defined a Generation by Blake J. Harris

air freight, airport security, Apollo 13, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, disruptive innovation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, game design, inventory management, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, Maui Hawaii, Michael Milken, Pepsi Challenge, pneumatic tube, Ponzi scheme, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Steve Jobs, uranium enrichment, Yogi Berra

He welcomed the audience, invited them to check out Nintendo’s booth after the speech, and then spoke at length about the Super NES, which would hit stores on August 23, 1991. All systems would come with the groundbreaking new Super Mario World game, while four others would immediately be available for purchase: F-Zero, Pilotwings, Gradius III, and SimCity. Their library would quickly grow, with eighteen games available by Christmas. Lincoln confirmed that, as with the Super Famicom, there would be no backward compatibility and the 16-bit Super NES couldn’t play 8-bit NES games. Sensing a degree of dissatisfaction, he quickly assured everyone that Nintendo was still very much committed to supporting the 8-bit system.