Yes, it's great!

I forgot to answer your first two questions:

> - how much does it go into people and personalities of the team and stakeholders, besides the technical design of the game?

A lot; it all goes together.

> - it sounds like first part of the book is historical and talks about various games, second focuses strictly on simcity?

Yes. And not just games, but computer history and simulation practices (like system dynamics, cellular automata, artificial life) that influenced SimCity and shaped its reception.

Thanks for sharing this!

Feels like there should be an xkcd about this. I asked Claude to write one, but it wasn't very funny. Actually, Claude agrees with you that the energy used for training AIs is mere pocket change compared to climate simulations. (Can I trust Claude? Seems far from disinterested.)

Thank you. Hmm, a big existential question and I haven't had any coffee yet. There is certainly anxiety in the uncertainty. (Was spending over ten years researching and writing this book––intermixed with other things--a good use of time?) But I think I'd be unhappy with something safe. It's an ongoing surprise to me that my career continues to work, but I do occasionally wonder if this is a wise course. My parallel counterfactual selves are doing really different things, but I think I like the real one more. (Though they probably feel the same way.)

Should be! ROMchip posts recordings on their YouTube channel afterwards: https://www.youtube.com/@ROMchipJournal

Focus is the original SimCity, but many Maxis Sim- games up to EA acquisition are touched upon, especially the long saga of what became The Sims.

I'd be very interested to hear of other books and articles like this, too.

Edwin Hutchins's Cognition in the Wild is one of my favorite books. It's very technical and ethnographic, but less historical. It doesn't deal with code, but that's because it's about the nitty gritty of navigation on a Navy ship (pre digital computing), and (here's the historical aspect) it compares this to some traditional Polyponesian navigational practices.

The closest thing off the top of my head are titles in MIT Press's Platform Studies series, like Racing the Beam, about the Atari 2600, which is historical and technical. https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262539760/racing-the-beam/

Maybe Casey O'Donnell's Developer's Dilemma? https://direct.mit.edu/books/monograph/4469/Developer-s-Dile...

If you make a Venn diagram with history, ethnography, technical details, and code as different circles, the central intersection may not be huge, but I think there may be a lot more if you remove some of the constraints. But I want to see more work at this intersection, and I hope more people do it.

I think yes, and so did Vannevar Bush (OK, not the game part). The first two chapters of Building SimCity are dedicated to non-computer simulations for this reason. Vannevar Bush and his analog instruments, like the differential analyzer, are the subject of chapter 2. Bush (and others) argued that good tangible models were excellent complements to, and sometimes superior to, abstract symbolic representations. For this reason he and his colleagues grieved the transition to digital computing.

For example, he writes in Pieces of the Action (p. 262) of "an example of how easy it is to teach fundamental calculus," about a mechanic with a high school education who learned calculus by working on the differential analyzer. "It was very interesting to discuss this subject with him because he had learned the calculus in mechanical terms ‐ a strange approach, and yet he understood it. That is, he did not understand it in any formal sense, but he understood the fundamentals; he had it under his skin."

I think this is fascinating stuff, and chapter 2 goes deep into the subject. Chapter 1 is about Doreen Gehry Nelson and city simulations made by school kids--it's all about games, simulation, tangibility, and learning.

LOL. This must be the reason the Chicago Manual of Style indicates hyphens here. And it must also be the reason an MIT Press copyeditor reviewed the whole manuscript very carefully. (Which then triggered some legalistic arguments from me citing chapter and verse of said stye manual.)