by DonHopkins | 2025-09-13 19:33:25+00:00
Will Wright credits Jay Forrester for inspiring him to simulate a city on the computer:

https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/the-replay-interviews...

>How did the leap from Raid's world editor, to SimCity with its urban design theories, happen?

>WW: First, it was just a toy for me. I was just making my editor more and more elaborate. I thought it would be cool to have the world come to life. So I started researching books on urban dynamics, and traffic, and things like that. I came across the work of Jay Forrester, who was kind of the father of system dynamics. He was actually one of the first people I found that actually simulated a city on a computer. Except in his simulation, there was no map; it was just numbers. It was like population level, number of jobs -- it was kind of a spreadsheet model.

>So I took his approach to it, and then applied a lot of the cellular automata stuff that I had learned earlier, and get these emergent dynamics that he wasn't getting in his model. I found when I was reading all these theories about urban dynamics and city behavior, that when I had a toy simulated version on the computer, it made the subject much more interesting than reading a book -- because I could go to my computer model and start experimenting.

>That just bought the whole subject to life for me and then, more and more, I started thinking, "Other people might enjoy this." But even then I never thought SimCity would have a broad appeal. I thought it might appeal to a few architects and city planner types, but not average people.

But Will's goal was to make a game that was fun to play, not to accurately simulate reality or make predictions. Intentionally inspiring magical systems thinking for entertainment, education, and storytelling!

Chaim Gingold's SimCity Reverse Diagrams:

https://smalltalkzoo.computerhistory.org/users/Dan/uploads/S...

>These reverse diagrams map and translate the rules of a complex simulation program into a form that is more easily digested, embedded, disseminated, and and discussed (Latour 1986).

>The technique is inspired by the game designer Stone Librande’s one page game design documents (Librande 2010).

>If we merge the reverse diagram with an interactive approach—e.g. Bret Victor’s Nile Visualization (Victor 2013), such diagrams could be used generatively, to describe programs, and interactively, to allow rich introspection and manipulation of software.

Will Wright on Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games (1996) (2023 Video Update):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34573406

https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-user-interfaces-to-s...

>Some muckety-muck architecture magazine was interviewing Will Wright about SimCity, and they asked him a question something like “which ontological urban paradigm most influenced your design of the simulator, the Exo-Hamiltonian Pattern Language Movement, or the Intra-Urban Deconstructionist Sub-Culture Hypothesis?” He replied, “I just kind of optimized for game play.”

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22062590

>DonHopkins on Jan 16, 2020 | parent | context | favorite | on: Reverse engineering course

Will Wright defined the "Simulator Effect" as how game players imagine a simulation is vastly more detailed, deep, rich, and complex than it actually is: a magical misunderstanding that you shouldn’t talk them out of. He designs games to run on two computers at once: the electronic one on the player’s desk, running his shallow tame simulation, and the biological one in the player’s head, running their deep wild imagination. "Reverse Over-Engineering" is a desirable outcome of the Simulator Effect: what game players (and game developers trying to clone the game) do when they use their imagination to extrapolate how a game works, and totally overestimate how much work and modeling the simulator is actually doing, because they filled in the gaps with their imagination and preconceptions and assumptions, instead of realizing how many simplifications and shortcuts and illusions it actually used.

https://www.masterclass.com/classes/will-wright-teaches-game...

>There's a name for what Wright calls "the simulator effect" in the video: apophenia. There's a good GDC video on YouTube where Tynan Sylvester (the creator of RimWorld) talks about using this effect in game design.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia

>Apophenia (/æpoʊˈfiːniə/) is the tendency to mistakenly perceive connections and meaning between unrelated things. The term (German: Apophänie) was coined by psychiatrist Klaus Conrad in his 1958 publication on the beginning stages of schizophrenia. He defined it as "unmotivated seeing of connections [accompanied by] a specific feeling of abnormal meaningfulness". He described the early stages of delusional thought as self-referential, over-interpretations of actual sensory perceptions, as opposed to hallucinations.

RimWorld: Contrarian, Ridiculous, and Impossible Game Design Methods

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdqhHKjepiE

5 game design tips from Sims creator Will Wright

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scS3f_YSYO0

>Tip 5: On world building. As you know by now, Will's approach to creating games is all about building a coherent and compelling player experience. His games are comprised of layered systems that engage players creatively, and lead to personalized, some times unexpected outcomes. In these types of games, players will often assume that the underlying system is smarter than it actually is. This happens because there's a strong mental model in place, guiding the game design, and enhancing the player's ability to imagine a coherent context that explains all the myriad details and dynamics happening within that game experience.

>Now let's apply this to your project: What mental model are you building, and what story are you causing to unfold between your player's ears? And how does the feature set in your game or product support that story? Once you start approaching your product design that way, you'll be set up to get your customers to buy into the microworld that you're building, and start to imagine that it's richer and more detailed than it actually is.