2025-01-07 2 min read

We're reading Building SimCity

We're reading Building SimCity
SimCity 2000 being played on an iMac G3. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

For people of a certain age—my age—playing SimCity, probably on a desktop computer in a public part of your childhood home, was a defining part of early nerd culture. SimCity was weirdly engaging, an escape from my own small town life. It offered a sense of expanded scale, contracted time, and the thrill of having not only agency but a godlike amount of power. The decisions I made playing SimCity—decisions made unilaterally and often capriciously—played out with the rapidity and precision that my tweenage self wished for. In short, SimCity looked like real life, but it acted and felt nothing like it. This, and the fact that many parents preferred it over first-person shooters like Wolfenstein 3D and Doom, made SimCity perfectly suited for the kind of kid who would eventually grow up to gawk at factories and train yards.

SimCity was also "a microcosm of the histories and cultures of computer simulation," and in Building SimCity: How to Put the World in a Machine, Chaim Gingold explores SimCity's role in the history of computing, business, and education. The book has received praise from video game geeks, educators, and titans of Silicon Valley history, and I'm excited to read it with the Scope of Work Members' Reading Group starting this Thursday. I'm also thrilled that the author, himself a game designer who worked alongside SimCity creator Will Wright on Spore, will join us for an hour-long conversation when we finish Building SimCity in March.

How can you participate? Well, I'm glad you asked:

In the meantime, enjoy this story (adapted from Building SimCity) about the brash SimCity licensing negotiations between Maxis and Nintendo, and this one (ditto) about how EA saved The Sims from cancellation to create a $5B franchise, and this absolutely epic recounting of how Maxis almost released SimCity analogs for (no joke) oil refineries, electrical utilities, and the American health care system.

We'd love for you to join us—whether it's for the nostalgia, the pleasure of reading books with a thoughtful and friendly group, or just to celebrate a game that defined what computer simulation could be.

Spencer Wright
Spencer Wright
Spencer Wright is the (mostly accidental) founder of Scope of Work, which he started writing (as The Prepared) in 2013. Today he serves as its editor-in-chief and chief dilettante.
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