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Magnasanti: The Largest and Most Terrifying SimCity (2010)

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Re: Magnasanti: The Largest and Most Terrifying SimCity (2010)

#81

Post by bduerst »

joaomacp wrote: post #13
danbolt wrote: post #6

I think it's important to remember that a "system" in a video game is a work of art just like the game itself. The systems, in a lot of ways, reflect the ideas and thoughts of the authors of that game. Magnasati's highlights and flaws help illustrate that thinking, or what tax rates are best for doing well in the game. An example that comes to mind is Factorio, where solar panels are more tricky to operate than gener…

> have men be either gay or straight, but women to be bisexual There is some scientific truth to it: https://www.bbc.com/news/health-34744903

Gerulf Rieger is controversial in this regard, I wouldn't take him too seriously: https://www.transgendermap.com/politics/psychology/gerulf-ri...

Re: Magnasanti: The Largest and Most Terrifying SimCity (2010)

#82

Post by grawprog »

brailsafe wrote: post #74
grawprog wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, despite my op, the one I would really like is the park management one. The one that lets you designate custom size parks and stuff. I mostly got disheartened and pollutey when I realized I couldn't turn the large forest into a park. So I cut it all down and proceeded to lower the quality of life for all. I was tempted once to grab them all during a sale, it would have been $40 down from like $160 or somethi…

I feel the same way about it being a time suck, and the same way about the parks expansion. I did end up getting the parks expansion for free when they had some event recently, and it's ok. It's ok, but sort of just that. You still have to build entrance gates on flat edges of roads, and you can only place park specific buildings inside, which is just annoying. I like the addition of bike transport though. One of my…

>that I can't see where a given workforce is living

With the early game it wasn't so bad, like one or two districts, but as the city grew, it became too much, hence the residential surrounding industrial stuff.

Most of the dystopian stuff came from my frustration with limitations in the game. The massive amounts of roads and bridges came from the traffic congestion problems and my lack of patience in rebuilding roads or designing transit lines, though i do have 3 massive metro lines that crisscross the city.

The interesting thing to me was the disparity in my city and the dystopianness came from my negligence and lack of patience or caring. The ghettos and ramshackle neighbourhoods built themselves around the zones i built out of just the hell of it much of the time. A lot of it came from stuff the game just generated. Zooming into the close up view in some areas was kinda heart breaking.

It mostly showed me how intentional negligence leads to some of the most nightmarish outcomes and that the games modelling of neighbourhoods based on zoning and surroundings is scarily accurate.

Re: Magnasanti: The Largest and Most Terrifying SimCity (2010)

#83

Post by Natsu »

grawprog wrote: post #5

Not to anywhere near the level of this but i've been playing a map on city skylines where i've been trying to make it as dystopian as possible, though at first I was just trying to model my city, the sad thing is, on a superficial level, it still resembles it. Industrial areas lined with low income housing. A whole neighbourhood with schools next to oil refineries, a prison island that receives its drinking water fro…

> Not to anywhere near the level of this but i've been playing a map on city skylines where i've been trying to make it as dystopian as possible, though at first I was just trying to model my city, the sad thing is, on a superficial level, it still resembles it.

That's NYC, isn't it?

Re: Magnasanti: The Largest and Most Terrifying SimCity (2010)

#84

Post by brewdad »

bluedevil2k wrote: post #76
andrepd wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's always the same comment. Yeah most things are strictly better than they have been throughout almost the whole of human existence. Good. Guess what. I'm not content: I want them to be even better. And other things aren't that good. Some things are worse, and we should understand why and focus on that. In fact it may not be clear that the world is better today that 20 years ago (again, in some aspects unequivocall…

> Some things are worse Such as?

Speaking as a USAian, we are 20 years further along the Global Warming/Climate Change path with no significant improvements. Wealth inequality is worse than it has ever been since WWII at least. Access to healthcare has improved, IF you can afford it. A significant percentage of our countrymen can't. Oh, and there's a pandemic going on that our nation's leaders would rather sweep under a rug and call fake news or a Democratic hoax.

If you live in a country whose population gives a fuck about other people, YMMV.

Re: Magnasanti: The Largest and Most Terrifying SimCity (2010)

#85

Post by roenxi »

andrepd wrote: post #68
bluedevil2k wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know it's cool and trendy to trash our current society and treat it like it's the worst time to be alive in human history, but in reality there's never been a better time to be alive in the history of our species. Poverty, infant mortality, childhood mortality, crime...all at all time lows. Literacy, income levels, food quantity, public health...all at all time highs.

It's always the same comment. Yeah most things are strictly better than they have been throughout almost the whole of human existence. Good. Guess what. I'm not content: I want them to be even better. And other things aren't that good. Some things are worse, and we should understand why and focus on that. In fact it may not be clear that the world is better today that 20 years ago (again, in some aspects unequivocall…

> I'm not content: I want them to be even better.

Want what you like; but (1) pretty much everyone else wants that so it goes without saying, (2) it is common for people with plans to make things better achieve the opposite because they are lousy planners. The existence of things we don't like doesn't mean we know how to deal with them. People come up with ideas that sound good and don't work.

Re: Magnasanti: The Largest and Most Terrifying SimCity (2010)

#86

Post by ehnto »

Lammy wrote: post #37
rightbyte wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sim City 3000 might be the pinnacle of "Sim Cities" when it comes to the feeling of making a big scary city. I would rather play Skylines than 3000 today due to nice feeling and the roads, but the limit that 6 squares depth from the road is as far as housing will "grow" and that you can't make deep neighborhoods or more angled zones, is a sour thumb for what would otherwise be a perfect game. 3000 neighborhoods felt…

Sim City 3000 is my favorite too for all the same reasons and I really wish SC3U shipped with multiplayer like the leftovers suggest it would have: https://tcrf.net/SimCity_3000_Unlimited/Unused_Multiplayer_T...

Looks like the commands for an IRC client, I wonder if they were intending an in-game community based on IRC?

I'm not sure it indicates actual multiplayer capabilities, or just the intention. It just looks like someone dropped an IRC client library into the repo at some point.

Totally speculation of course, but maybe even just a dev tool in the repo that got sent around to different devs/studios so that they could communicate. Slack being IRC for work wasn't a new concept after all.

Re: Magnasanti: The Largest and Most Terrifying SimCity (2010)

#87

Post by LoSboccacc »

rightbyte wrote: post #16
grawprog wrote: post #5

Not to anywhere near the level of this but i've been playing a map on city skylines where i've been trying to make it as dystopian as possible, though at first I was just trying to model my city, the sad thing is, on a superficial level, it still resembles it. Industrial areas lined with low income housing. A whole neighbourhood with schools next to oil refineries, a prison island that receives its drinking water fro…

Sim City 3000 might be the pinnacle of "Sim Cities" when it comes to the feeling of making a big scary city. I would rather play Skylines than 3000 today due to nice feeling and the roads, but the limit that 6 squares depth from the road is as far as housing will "grow" and that you can't make deep neighborhoods or more angled zones, is a sour thumb for what would otherwise be a perfect game. 3000 neighborhoods felt…

weird I've never managed to enjoy 3000 coming from the first and 2000, which was to me the best; in 3000 I always felt too much in control of the city, while in the other it was a constant struggle against problems.

SimCity 4 felt an incomplete and shallow game at start, but I've come to enjoy it greatly with the rush hour expansion of the deluxe edition, which made the city dynamic enough to feel compelling to work with.

back then it was hard to find in depth technical commentary of the game internals, so I don't know how much my feeling match reality

Re: Magnasanti: The Largest and Most Terrifying SimCity (2010)

#88

Post by dflock »

tunesmith wrote: post #2

I think we can often get sucked into optimizing our life to limit the possibility of negative surprises - predictable reliable employment, reliable transportation, go-to meals, healthy habits that work for us - and then we can often end up in a reality where things are stable but potentially boring or soul-crushing. That's what the essay reminded me of - even if the city were ruthlessly efficient but with a nice park…

Go new places, explore! Doesn't have to cost money or be a big deal - just your neighbourhood/area/town on foot or bike.

Or maybe Micro Adventures: https://alastairhumphreys.com/microadventures-landing/

Re: Magnasanti: The Largest and Most Terrifying SimCity (2010)

#89

Post by randomsearch »

chefandy wrote: post #79
ghastmaster wrote: post #12

The image reminds me of Guangzhou, China. I recently looked at google earth images of Guangzhou. I then looked at images of New York City. It is incredible to me that we in the U.S. think of New York City as a sprawling metropolis when not far from the city center it is mostly single family homes on plots of land. Whereas Guangzhou has many more high rise buildings for miles and miles. Get the ruler in Google Earth a…

Personally, I think Guangzhou or any other tier-1 Chinese city would be a great place to live if China wasn't a police state. I know a lot of people see urbanity as something to be minimized or mitigated, but I think well-designed huge cities with robust public transportation are an absolute delight. Sure it's nice to get out every now and then... but people who live in the country also sometimes like to get out and…

Lockdown has given a lot of time to think about this.

Humans are social animals. We need to have contact with people outside our families.

Living in the country / distant suburbia doesn’t give enough social contact to be healthy, I think, at least in the U.K. In the past I imagine small villages were much more sociable, because people weren’t commuting out, and families lived in the same place for a long time.

So overall, I think living in a city is psychologically better for you. Not necessarily in the centre, but close enough that you can easily get there, can access lots of social venues and find people you get in with.

Of course that was pre COVID. Now is the time to go spend that year in the country, you’re not going to miss out on anything.

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