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We live in simulated worlds of our own making, detecting patterns in the chaos and complexity of raw experience and boiling them down into operable categories and generalizations. Sometimes we do this well, and sometimes…

This week’s guest, computer scientist and game designer Chaim Gingold, wrote what I consider the best book available on the history and sociality of simulations: Building SimCity: How to Put the World in a Machine (MIT Press) takes readers from the prehistory of modern computing through the post-war development of cybernetics and systems thinking and into the entangled relationship of video games, military info-tech, civil engineering, software-based education, and complexity science that forms today’s “invisible environment.”

Sim City is more than a legendary video game. It is case study in how the digital revolution reshaped the ways we think, teach, design, and govern…and how what simulation as a mode of discourse can hide and reveal, oppress and empower us. In this dialogue we explore the the tensions between games and play, the analog and digital, abstraction and tactility, and mysticism and colonialism in simulation-induced experiences. We investigate the rise and fall of Sim City game developer MAXIS, weave threads through the history of computing and software development, systems science, and the philosophy of technology, and ask:

What makes some abstractions better than others?

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Mentions

Will WrightJohn Conway’s Game of LifeVannevar BushAlan Kay & Xerox PARCEd Catmull - Creativity, Inc.James Clerk MaxwellEthan MollickBrian Sutton-SmithGottfried LiebnizLarry OwensJay ForresterLauren F. KleinEdgar MitchellRusty SchweickertJulian of NorwichChris LangtonKen ForbisMark ZuckerbergElon MuskSam AltmanSam Arbesman - The Magic of CodeTimothy MortonDonna HarawayNick BostromJoshua DiCaglio - Scale TheoryStanislaw Lem - The CyberiadKevin Kelly - Out of ControlStewart Brand & The Whole Earth CatalogFred Turner - From Counterculture to CybercultureDe Kai - Raising AI

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