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The Totalitarian Buddhist Who Beat Sim City

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Re: The Totalitarian Buddhist Who Beat Sim City

#41

Post by yummyfajitas »

nano81 wrote: post #33
vollmond wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, no. He has a perfectly stable, high-population city, but it has none of those things except crime-free status "There are a lot of other problems in the city hidden under the illusion of order and greatness: Suffocating air pollution, high unemployment, no fire stations, schools, or hospitals, a regimented lifestyle - this is the price that these sims pay for living in the city with the highest population. It’s…

I don't know how the game works so this may not even be part of it, but it's incredible if such a high density population was able to keep growing for 50,000 years without being constantly devastated by disease and epidemics, despite not having any hospitals.

Flush toilets, mosquito control, not coughing on people and washing your hands after pooping are much more important for preventing epidemics.

All a hospital will do is cure a small number of people in a small scale epidemic. But lets face it, if Mangasanti is your goal, you are probably willing to let 20 people die of preventable diseases at home.

Re: The Totalitarian Buddhist Who Beat Sim City

#42

Post by praptak »

jimbokun wrote: post #22
aharrison wrote: post #13

I am truly in awe. It routinely amazes me the lengths to which many people go to in their chosen domain. Some people choose physics, or medicine. Some people choose Rubiks cubes, train sets, or Sim City. I find it hard in my day to day life to decide I will work on something for three years to truly and utterly dominate it. Especially something such as Sim City. I would say that I wish this gentleman had worked on cu…

"Of course, this guy is an architecture major, so maybe we will see that same level of skill, dedication, and attention to detail come out in the real world." God help us.

I believe that the following quote from the guy himself might indicate that he does not want it copied in real life: "I wanted to magnify the unbelievably sick ambitions of egotistical political dictators, ruling elites and downright insane architects, urban planners and social engineers."

Re: The Totalitarian Buddhist Who Beat Sim City

#44

Post by mclin »

RiderOfGiraffes wrote: post #34

Can someone please invent a game where people like this can play obsessively, and yet the results are useful? Can we invent a game, say, where (even if the participants don't realise it) what they produce is a hyper-dense, hyper-efficient CPU? Or RAM? Or parallel architecture?

It's called business :P

Re: The Totalitarian Buddhist Who Beat Sim City

#45

Post by lionhearted »

nazgulnarsil wrote: post #40
lionhearted wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can someone please invent a game where people like this can play obsessively, and yet the results are useful? In terms of making productive output? Maybe not. But there's plenty of games that'll give you a deeper appreciation of how to think and will help you develop your character. Civilization IV will teach you a lot about how the path of technology generally went, historical buildings and achievements, and is go…

pet peeve: civilization games have almost nothing to do with even the standard historical interpretation of how technology developed and affected society.

> pet peeve: civilization games have almost nothing to do with even the standard historical interpretation of how technology developed and affected society.

Care to elaborate?

Re: The Totalitarian Buddhist Who Beat Sim City

#46

Post by Semiapies »

RiderOfGiraffes wrote: post #39
lionhearted wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can someone please invent a game where people like this can play obsessively, and yet the results are useful? In terms of making productive output? Maybe not. But there's plenty of games that'll give you a deeper appreciation of how to think and will help you develop your character. Civilization IV will teach you a lot about how the path of technology generally went, historical buildings and achievements, and is go…

Yes, there are games that genuinely benefit the player. I'd like to see more of them, too. They take a lot of work, and it's hard to make them have very wide appeal, so the benefit to society is genuine, but small. The idea I'd like to see gain traction is for someone, or several someones, to write a game that may only get a small audience, but to get a truly hardcore audience, and to have the results of the game-pla…

You're elected.

Let us know what you come up with.

Re: The Totalitarian Buddhist Who Beat Sim City

#47

Post by harshpotatoes »

derefr wrote: post #30
derefr wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The word is "decadence."

(EDIT: I didn't mean to make the above sound mean or anything—your description is both precise and accurate. "Decadence", in the sociopolitical usage, is simply the word which also refers exactly to the concept you have described—perfection that "is precariously hanging on the edge of destruction": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decadence , and specifically http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decadence#Leninism , for the sens…

Heh. I like it. It's a new word for me, actually.

I think SimCity is exactly what Lenin thought of when he thought of the west.

Re: The Totalitarian Buddhist Who Beat Sim City

#48

Post by harshpotatoes »

stratospark wrote: post #21
harshpotatoes wrote: post #11

The city reminds me of the Caves of Steel from Isaac Asimov. There are no roads in Magnasanti, only hyper efficient subways. The population density is extreme, nearly seven million people piled into such a small area, every building is like a sky scraper from Manhattan. And did anybody else notice how every building is a historical landmark? All utilities are shipped in from neighbors. This city is precariously hangi…

Try "The Concentration City" by J.G. Ballard. Fire and brimstone may be a lesser hell.

That will be next on my list, I don't read enough anymore.
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