The Orthogonal Bet: SimCity, Maxis and the ambitious modeling of everything

Samuel Arbesman:
Your book is awesome. This book, Building SimCity: How to Put the World in a Machine. For me, I grew up with SimCity. My first taste of it was the black and white Macintosh version, like the original SimCity, and then went to SimCity 2000, which in my mind, the true embodiment of SimCity. There were a lot of cool ideas in the original one, top-down, but then once you have isometric, it was just great. And for you, it's not just intellectually interesting, but there's also a personal connection to SimCity, or at least Maxis, because you actually worked there.

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Chaim Gingold:
Yeah. So like you, I also grew up playing SimCity on a black and white, on a Mac SE, which I'm sure I pirated from the neighbor kid. We got it probably around 1989, '90 and then later played SimCity 2000, which I think still is gold standard.

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Samuel Arbesman:
Did you grow up... Other than SimCity, had you grown up playing more traditional games, or was it always those kinds of games that you played, the weird sandbox, simulation, toy kind of games?

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Chaim Gingold:
I was really into [inaudible 00:00:53] as a kid. I grew up playing these arcade games. I was exposed to Pacman, and at some point we bought the neighbor's Atari 2600 and played that stuff.
But also, my dad was a math professor, still is, and he was bringing home the Mac SE, and then he brought home this Apollo workstation, like this very, very high end Unix workstation. They don't make them any more. It was like... I remember it had like a thousand floppy disks that you had to... It was hours to install the OS on it. And so we were also exposed to the world of these Unix games, like obviously Snake, I think Hunt the Wumpus, all these games didn't really make sense to us. We went to the computer labs at the university, and so [inaudible 00:01:30] got a taste of, I think, this older computer game culture as well. So the Maxis games were kind of like, heady... I don't know, they were just fun, but they were clearly different. But there was also... I mean as you know, as you and I both know, there was... The world of early '90s Mac gaming, as Richard Moss has written about, kind of a wild place, very diverse place.

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Samuel Arbesman:
So you were interested in all these different game cultures, but it sounds like you had two minds about the gaming world, in terms of getting involved in it.

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Chaim Gingold:
The medium of computer games is about building games.

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Samuel Arbesman:
Tell me more about that. Is it that the people who actually build computer games don't necessarily like playing the games as much? And so it's almost like using new techniques and new technologies to figure out ways of creating these open world... The actual endeavor of computer games is less about the playing and more about the creation using these new technologies. Is that what you're thinking?

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Chaim Gingold:
There's the whole Maxis tradition of these very creative sandbox-y games. I think that Minecraft, Roblox, very dominant game genres nowadays that are about making stuff... Maybe making games is kind of what games are about. Looking at the whole long history of computer games, there's this pattern I saw over and over again, where it's like Wozniak built the Apple II so that he could play BASIC games. That was his main motivation. And then he really wanted... He knew that he needed BASIC to make the games, so the Apple II comes out of the box with the ability to make your own software. And that's what gets Bill Budge, who makes Pinball Construction Set, going. People start modifying his game. So there's something about the pleasure of making games as a key part of the fun.

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Samuel Arbesman:
Even with like Doom, there are all these mods, going back to Glider and Glider PRO, there was a level editor or house editor. There was always this interplay between playing the game and then figuring out a way to make a game that you can allow others to play with.

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Chaim Gingold:
Exactly. Yes, exactly. Doom is super important in the history of this modding, and I think that the games that have an outsized impact tend to be ones about openness.

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Samuel Arbesman:
Okay. So let's jump back. Okay. So you were doing your master's, and you had to get an internship, and you were trying to figure out where to do that, or how to do it.

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Chaim Gingold:
Let's see. I was doing a master's degree at Georgia Tech. At the time the program was called Information Design and Technology, and my advisor was Janet Murray, who wrote Hamlet on the Holodeck, and I had a lot of awesome professors. Part of that program was there was an internship required between years one and year two. So Janet Murray says, "You got to do an internship. Have you thought about what you're going to do?" And I was like, "I don't really know." And I was like, "Kind would like to work in games, but I don't know."
And then I get this email from... Sitting in the computer lab one day, and I get this email from her, and she says, "I just got this email from a Maxis recruiter. Are you interested in working with Will Wright?" I was like, yeah. It's like [inaudible 00:04:08] hero. It's getting to work for Willy Wonka. And an hour later I get an email back from Janet, basically, "You've got the internship."
But then Will... Then he asked me an interview question over email, and I was like... Even the interview question I thought was brilliant, it was like an email or homework question. It was like, if you had to represent any civilization in the universe with only 10 parameters, what would the 10 parameters be? And so just even, of course, the framing of the question itself just shows his brilliance, where he's trying to... It's like, how do you take this impossible subject, which is impossible to get your head around, and compress it down to just 10 dimensions?

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Samuel Arbesman:
And so when you were there, Spore came out in the fall of 2008, I believe, so Spore was still very much in its infancy.

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Chaim Gingold:
I was the only full-time person working on it that summer, which is part of what was fun for both of us. So there was Ocean Quigley, who was the art director for Spore, had done some work on it, and then who... You know Ocean, who had then been pulled away on... Everyone had been pulled away to do other stuff that was more high priority. And then Jason Schenkel, he'd already built this whole powers of 10 zoomable prototype playable game, and they say how they'd done some stuff and they'd been pulled away. So I was in the hallway outside of Will's office, and I was just making cool prototypes for Spore. So that summer it was like three months, and we did three different prototypes. I remember building one agent simulation that tried to do a pattern language kind of stuff that was relevant to Spore. I mean, just really out [inaudible 00:05:28] cellular automata models of bacteria and solar system and galaxies, civilizations spreading through galaxies, and...

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Samuel Arbesman:
And that magpie-like approach to like, okay, let's take all these ideas from all these different domains of architecture, biology, and mathematics, and going back to SimCity, there's a huge amount of prehistory and intellectual foundation for SimCity as well, the SimCity origin story. There's the capsule version of, Will Wright was working on this other game, and he liked building the level editor more and building these little cities, and so it was like, let's actually turn this into a real game. But in addition to that, there's all these other things around systems dynamics and cellular automata and... It's a huge amount of number of influences, like Pinball Construction Set, games that allow you to build games. And this is actually... A decent fraction of your book is really about this prehistory, this intellectual history.

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Chaim Gingold:
Yeah. I mean, I think that's a big part of what made... If you think back to us being kids, encountering SimCity versus encountering Mario and all this other stuff, I think part of what made SimCity so unique is the synthesis of all these different ideas that went into it. I think you can... When you played that game, it immediately felt like nothing else that was out there.

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Samuel Arbesman:
Well, there was a lot under the hood. You could tell... In your book, you actually go into, what was actually under the hood and how it was done. And some of that's a little bit smoke and mirrors, but clearly there was a decent amount of sophistication under the hood. It wasn't just fun little world that you're walking around and are laying tiles on it. It's like, you lay tiles down, and then it's up to the simulation to decide what actually happens to these things that have been zoned for commercial or residential or whatever it is.

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Chaim Gingold:
Some of the influences... So like you said, there's the system dynamics, a simulation technique developed by Jay Forrester who is a pioneer of digital computing. In the 1950s, he developed the first interactive graphical computer, and then he was like... "Yeah, I think computing... We've kind of solved all the hard problems with computers." So he was like, "I'm going to try to move on to something else." And in a sense, he was kind of right. But in a sense, it's a really funny comment in retrospect. So he then went on to do all this... He went to the business school at MIT from engineering, and developed this whole technique for modeling businesses as these dynamic systems, and then went on to model cities and then the world and economies.

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Samuel Arbesman:
The weird thing is, many years down the line, a lot of people who are involved in city design and urban dynamics, they were influenced by playing SimCity as kids, and so it's a very interesting circle there.

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Chaim Gingold:
And then of course there's the Pinball Construction Set [inaudible 00:07:55] I use that as a shorthand, but Pinball Construction Set is the first time that the GUI, the graphical user interface, the conventions that crystallize at Xerox PARC in the 1970s, that's the first time... Even though the Macintosh is the the well-known computer example, Pinball Construction Set is actually the first time that those things reach a broad audience in the form of a computer game, which is I think a delicious story. And Bill Budge, who worked on that, had worked at Apple as an engineer, and been exposed to those ideas.
But what's interesting is that the first version of SimCity was originally written for the Commodore 64. And Will... And he says, at the time, he's like, "I wanted to make a GUI," and he made a thing with icons and so on, but it's really clunky and it doesn't quite [inaudible 00:08:41] lot of great execution of the GUI ideas, but once it got onto the Mac, and Will had this bigger team that... There was a dedicated Mac engineer, the ideas there, the approach could blossom and really take on the affordances in the Mac, and use the toolbox that Apple offered, and come into its own. And they had MacPaint at that point to look at.

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Samuel Arbesman:
Related to the actual development of SimCity, you mentioned there were Mac engineers involved and things like that. Were the other people early on in the development of SimCity also reading really widely, and trying to take ideas from all these different domains? Or was it very much like Will Wright, his vision was combining all these things together in his head, and then everyone else around him was executing? It sounded like later, by the time you were doing Spore and stuff, it was more distributed, where there are lots of people thinking about these kinds of things. But early on, was it really just him, or were there other people doing these kinds of things?

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Chaim Gingold:
If you look at the SimCity code, the original SimCity code, it's clearly like, Will owns the simulation code. So the core, that model is his model, and he's the one who's I think pulling from all these different influences. However, I don't think you would have SimCity... I don't think you'd have a successful SimCity without the other people that worked on it. So for instance, Jeff Braun, Will's business partner who co-founded Maxis, he's very modest when you talk to him. He says, there's no... He's like, "I don't have any idea... There's no idea of mine that's in SimCity." And I think he's appropriately humble.
However, I think that Jeff is a business guy who wants to sell a product to a mass market. And I think that Will's inclination is probably more, I'm going to make this really cool... I have this genius idea and I'm going to follow my inclinations, regardless of whether or not other people want it, and make this cool thing for me. Though he is very savvy about thinking about other people and what they want. Remember Will had shelved SimCity. It wasn't called SimCity yet, because Broderbund, the publisher of Raid on Bungeling Bay, didn't want it. They were like, "This is too weird."
Jeff was critical to see that and say, "There's something here," to look at the Commodore 64 prototype and to say, "There's something here, we can make this into a mass market product." And Jeff was the one who then built that bigger team around Will and was like, "No, no. I believe in this. I'm going to spend my money on this. I'm going to bring it to market. I'm going to help this reach a wider audience."
And having worked with Will, he's very smart about interaction design, but that kind of interface design is... It's always other people that come in and complement him and do that. So I think that he had the overarching idea [inaudible 00:11:05] that more refined version that hits the Macintosh is definitely the result of a collaboration with other people. But the core synthesis is his.

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Samuel Arbesman:
So he created this thing, and Maxis had an unbelievable hit with SimCity, and then they're like, okay, let's try to turn this one-of-a-kind thing into a genre of game, or simulation toy, or whatever it was. Maxis was a very different type of game company from all the other game companies that were around at the time. At least that's my sense.

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Chaim Gingold:
Yeah. I think you're probably right. And at the same time, I also think... I just think about there was all this weird diversity at the time that we don't really remember. I'll go on the Internet Archive and flip through all the old Macworlds and other game magazines, there's all kinds of weird stuff too. But yeah, Maxis was strange. I think that's fair to say. They were unusual. I mean, Jeff originally wanted to build a game publisher. That was his vision. That was his business idea. And they released SkyChase first, which was this dog-fighting game, and which is something that I didn't know about. And I remember when I first talked to Jeff, he was like, "You don't know about this? Let me tell you about SkyChase."
So SkyChase was not a... There's a reason why no-one knows about it. He says, "I knew SimCity was going to be the hit." And SkyChase was the first game they released in this publisher-distributor partnership with Broderbund, where... I think that that analogy he used at one point is, the first pancake always comes out burned. So he was like, we need to do one first to practice with the whole thing, and then we'll do SimCity. That was going to be the big one.
And so I think that early on they had a wider portfolio, and then SimCity was the one that really hit. And I think that, over time, it became clear that Maxis... That was where they needed to be and stay. I don't know that that was obvious to Jeff from the beginning.

Samuel Arbesman:
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And you mentioned that maybe we've forgotten how weird the gaming industry, or in truth the software industry was several decades ago. There was a Cambrian explosion, then there were a whole bunch of extinction events, and now there's only the things that have survived. Is it one of these things where there's a certain amount of path dependence, where these certain companies have survived because of random chance, versus because these are the only kinds of things that actually can survive? And so I guess my question becomes, Maxis was weird, among other types of companies that were also weird in their own way. Is it almost predetermined that Maxis was not going to survive because it was one of these kinds of weird species or types of organisms that were just different than the kinds of successful gaming companies that you could create? Or... I mean, it also sounds like there were a number of other reasons that they ended up not being as successful as they could have been.

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Chaim Gingold:
Yeah. I mean, this is a counterfactual. You're like, are there alternate histories of Maxis that would've gone very different, where SimEarth would've been a huge hit, and then SimAnt, and SimLife, the ones... Those canonical weird sim Maxis titles. They were super weird-

Samuel Arbesman:
They were super weird. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Much more simulation, less so toy... I guess toy, but there's not much of a game, they're very distinctively Maxis.

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Chaim Gingold:
Yeah. Because those are the ones that people... Those kept coming out, and they were like... At that point, Maxis... We can get into this or not here, but they took on venture capital funding in 1992, and that was a big influence on them to be more risk-averse, and venture VCs had their own idea for what Maxis should become. And so there's kind of like... Maxis really straddled these different worlds I talk about in the book, between science and popular... Like Will Wright is hanging out with Nintendo, with Shigeru Miyamoto who made Mario, and basically around the same time he's hanging out at the Santa Fe Institute with Arthur Burks, one of the champions of cellular automata, one of the inventors of ENIAC. So he's really in these different worlds. And Chevron is hiring Maxis to do these business simulations, like some refineries, and that's part of what gets the VCs excited, because they see that there's an enterprise simulation company here.
They're straddling these different worlds, and those early Sim titles that we... Like SimLife, SimEarth, they promise more of that SimCity magic, of being able to do it all at once, and hit all those audiences at the same time. They're not able to reproduce it. We can speculate. There's many reasons it could be, at least they're not at the scale that they want to grow the right amount.

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Samuel Arbesman:
So you mentioned... Yeah. So Will Wright is straddling all these different worlds. I guess Maxis is a whole is straddling these worlds. He's talking to the titans of the gaming world, talking to people who are thinking about complexity science. And so there is this very interesting virtuous circle where, on the one hand, Will Wright is influenced by a lot of these ideas, but in turn, a lot of the people from the complexity science world, or computational and quantitative social sciences, are also... Or in biology, they're also being influenced by these things as well. Was he super excited to be part of this science popularization, or public intellectual? Did he want to spend more time in that world?

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Chaim Gingold:
I think he really was. I think that this was not obvious to me. I asked him at one point about how he saw himself after SimCity was released. Because of course also, doing this historical research, it's like, also people don't necessarily remember. Also there's the historiography. There's the stories people tell themselves and each other at different moments in time, and the stories we could go back and tell. And so it gets complicated. However, he did say... So I did ask him, I said, "How did you see yourself there?" He said he saw himself as a science popularizer, very explicitly, and he said that he really looked up to Carl Sagan. It's very telling, because Carl Sagan is, of course, one of the preeminent science popularizers of the 20th century.

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Samuel Arbesman:
To a certain degree, it was very much of that time. There were a lot of ideas swirling around the late '80s, early '90s, that were straddling the sciences and popularization, whether it was the ideas of Carl Sagan, the ideas of fractals, there were a lot of these kinds of things that were deeply interdisciplinary and scientific, but also very appealing to popular culture. Going back to all these counterfactuals and alternate history, is there a sense that Maxis was very much a child of this time, like it was almost like it could only occur during this moment? I love this idea of straddling all these different kinds of worlds, from the gaming world and the sciences and stuff like that. And I wonder, could this kind of thing just keep on happening? Could it happen in the early 2000s? Could it happen today? Or is it the kind of thing where it was very much of that time?

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Chaim Gingold:
I mean, I think it was very much of that time. I don't think that it means that you couldn't do it again. Yeah. I think you're driving at two points. And actually there is a counterfactual... Here's a useful counterfactual. Actually, here's one of the techniques that I use in the book, which I picked up from Jon Peterson's incredible history of D&D, Playing at the World. So he has this thing where he'll look at [inaudible 00:17:30] comparative, he'll like... Well, let's look at what else was happening at the same time. So what are the other lines of exploration?
So you look at Scientific American. Scientific American is this place where cellular automata, fractals, computer simulation is coming... All these scientific ideas are in a sense filtering into a mainstream audience. And there you see advertisers... While I was doing my research, I stumbled across these advertisements. Also Rudy Rucker, who is a famous science fiction author and mathematician, and he shows up in our story. He collaborates with John Walker, I think, this founder, CEO of Autodesk. They make this CA lab, I think it's called... Is it CA Lab? It's one of the... I might get the name wrong, but they make a product, a cellular automata product. It's reviewed in the Whole Earth Review, I think it's advertised in Scientific American. And then he goes on to make, with James Gleick, Chaos programs. And he's writing about it, and he's very excited about being able to take these scientific ideas to a mass audience.
And the advertisement is hilarious. Find your favorite part of the Mandelbrot set. Turn the fractals into music. To me, this is like a cousin of Maxis. Here's someone else trying another science popularization idea in a sense, but it doesn't hit. There's many reasons we can speculate why. I think one of the reasons is that Maxis... There's this goofiness to SimCity. There's Godzilla, or not Godzilla, apparently, but there's this giant monster who destroys your city. There's the sense of humor that's very, very Will Wright. And so it's like this silliness, and it's got this very video gaminess as well about it too. It's not dry. Things explode. Things move quickly. So there's this whole video game influence in there as well.
So I think that part of it is Will's design sensibility, and part of it is I think also a kind of market machinery where, because Maxis titles could pass as games, they could be sold through the distribution channels, like through Broderbund, into the same outlets that would sell other titles. So there was this established... They're sort of piggybacking on this established mechanisms for advertising and moving products to market.

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Samuel Arbesman:
So it was legible enough to slot it into these preexisting categories, but it was able to bring together all these things in a way that CA Lab [inaudible 00:19:35] but CA Lab was just too hard to categorize, and as a result probably didn't... Or it was too serious maybe, or it sounds like...

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Chaim Gingold:
And it's got this compulsive playability that comes from system dynamics, and that instability. It's like, I'm trying to... This thing to stay upright. The game just keeps pushing and pulling at you. It's got more of the fun of a game, even though it's about a city. So it doesn't make a... It's a very contradictory package.

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Samuel Arbesman:
No, I agree. But I think though, whether it's Maxis or these other companies, there's this... In addition to the system dynamics and the cellular automata, all these science ideas, there's also just these two fundamental things, which is this idea of people love... This idea of open-ended play, that okay, you have a framework and you can explore and do things and build your own games, or play in a way that you want, where you can set your own goals and things like that. And then there's also the idea that computers are not just for computation and arithmetic, but also there's this very human aspect to them, which you mentioned with the graphical user interface, and creating these things that bring computing down to the human scale. And I feel like Maxis was able to really blend those two things very well.

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Chaim Gingold:
To me, this is one of the deepest points or one of the most deepest, interesting parts about computing, which is that there's this intrinsic ambiguity to Maxis. Everyone's... Different communities are parsing it in different ways. And in fact, they're buttressing each other's interpretations [inaudible 00:21:02] city planners like, this is so exciting, it's city planning, and the complexity scientists are saying, it's bringing complexity science to the masses. And then the game review magazines are saying, it's so realistic, because look at what these other guys are doing [inaudible 00:21:13]. And then the people that are teaching are like, we can teach with this, because it's fun, and it's easy to use, and Nintendo wants it because it's really fun, and they're also trying to expand the audience for video games.
And this is a point that the historian Michael Mahoney makes about computers, is that computers are fundamentally... At their core, they're very plastic. They're ambiguous. It's like they can be anything. Because if you look at Turing's ideas about the universal Turing machine, it's like a computer, you reprogram it, and it becomes something else. So the idea of this flexible, protean machine that can become, in a sense, whatever you want it to become, that idea is baked into what computers are. And so we make of them what we want. So in a sense, SimCity in some really deep sense is manifesting the inherent plasticity of computing. So it's like... It is, it's like a Rorschach test, a Rorschach blot. You can see what you want in it. And it's playful. There's a playfulness in that ambiguity as well.

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Samuel Arbesman:
I love that. This is amazing. That might be a perfect way to end thinking about this. Thank you. This is Chaim Gingold, the author of Building SimCity: How to Put the World in a Machine. This was fantastic. Thank you so much.

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