From today’s vantage point, it’s hard to explain how strange SimCity felt back then. The game that started with nothing, an empty map. Stupidly, I placed a square residential sector in the very top left, mistaking the barren, terraformed environment for something akin to a word-processing document. Then another, then some roads, forming a rudimentary grid. They remained empty, flashing their disapproval. I had no idea what I was doing.

By the time I realized that the residential districts required access to electrical power, some of the game’s more complex dynamics suddenly piped in like Muzak from the store’s beige walls. I figured out how to select a power plant from the game’s toolbar (this was years before I’d use Photoshop) and realized: Nobody wants to live next to a power plant. I resolved to place my coal plant (the only one I could afford) further down the map, and then connect it back to civilization with a meandering path of power lines. The question of what to do stuck with me, even though I had to leave the mall and abandon my fledgling city.

Such was the payload of SimCity: not a game about people, even though its residents, the Sims, would later get their own spin-off. Nor is it a game about particular cities, for it is difficult to recreate one with the game’s brittle, indirect tools. Rather, SimCity is a game about urban societies, about the relationship between land value, pollution, industry, taxation, growth, and other factors. It’s not really a simulation, despite its name, nor is it an educational game. Nobody would want a SimCity expert running their town’s urban planning office. But the game got us all to think about the relationships that make a city run, succeed, and decay, and in so doing to rise above our individual interests, even if only for a moment.

This was a radical way of thinking about video games: as non-fictions about complex systems bigger than ourselves. It changed games forever—or it could have, had players and developers not later abandoned modeling systems at all scales in favor of representing embodied, human identities.

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Last week, as 25,000 game-industry professionals gathered in San Francisco for their industry’s annual Game Developers Conference (GDC), Electronic Arts shut down SimCity creator Maxis’s Emeryville studio, near Oakland. EA had bought Maxis in 1997, and the studio had enjoyed furious growth and influence in the ensuing decade as its virtual dollhouse The Sims rose to prominence, before faltering after the modest success of the highly-anticipated 2008 “everything simulator” Spore. The 2013 release of a reconceptualized SimCity also cost the studio goodwill and revenue, as early players were subjected to a badly malfunctioning, compulsory server connection.

Will Wright created the first prototypes for SimCity after realizing that he enjoyed generating levels for a helicopter combat game more than making the game itself. He adopted some of the urban dynamics models developed by the MIT systems scientist Jay Forrester, adapting them into a “software toy,” as Wright called it, that used cellular automata to percolate the effects of land value, pollution, utilities, and more throughout a model of an urban environment. The city itself, with its tiny cars and varied buildings, are really just visualizations of the underlying simulation, a kind of clever way to see the city running, rather than the city itself.

All of Wright’s games at Maxis followed this model. A software toy, grounded in a worldly theory about a complex system, but abstracted into a playable model about an aspect of the world that seemed too boring or obscure to become the subject of a video game. SimEarth was inspired by James Lovelock’s Gaia principle, which understands the Earth as a single, self-regulating organism. SimAnt was based on Bert Hölldobler and E.O. Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Ants, on the social organization of ant colonies. The smash hit The Sims, often described as a virtual sandbox, was really far more than that, operationalizing Christopher Alexander’s theory of a pattern language for architecture, Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, and Paco Underhill’s investigations into the rationales behind consumer behavior. Even the seemingly fantastical Spore had a similar grounding, mostly in Lovelock’s lesser-known Gaia spore, the theory that intelligent life is more likely to reproduce itself in the universe through space colonization than it is to evolve anew from nothing.