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《模拟城市》首席设计师Stone Librande专访

发布时间:2013-06-17 15:42:39 Tags:,,,

作者:Geoff Manaugh & Nicola Twilleymay

在设计师Will Wright设计出经典的城市规划电脑游戏《模拟城市》近25年以后,不仅世界人口在人类有史以来首次实现大规模城市化,而且对城市及其设计的兴趣也越来越浓厚。

由技术公司、经济学家和文化机构提出的城市规划曾经被当作无聊的笑话,现在却成了热门话题、人类未来的关键词。如果我们相信这个论调,城市确实已经成为人类最伟大的胜利。

a shot from Architecture of Density(from theatlantic)

a shot from Architecture of Density(from theatlantic)

(取自摄影师Michael Wolf的《Architecture of Density》系列)

2013年3月,十年来的第一个新版《模拟城市》发布了,在赞扬声中夹杂着粉丝对EA的“永远在线”数字版权管理政策和反复的服务器崩溃的失望。

在发布前几周,Venue有幸玩到《模拟城市》的新资料片曼哈顿。那时,我们兴奋地布置小路和公园,一边开采石油一边安装风轮机,把城市的居民都抛到脑后了,以至于我们还没建好消防站,民宅就失火了。

16SIMCITY(from theatlantic)

16SIMCITY(from theatlantic)

三个小时后,我们头晕目眩地盯着时代广场的霓虹灯光,突然觉得把如此复杂、动态的环境转换成连贯的游戏结构是一件多么抽象的工作,这个转换过程中体现出来的想象力和价值观令人震惊。

幸运的是,该游戏的首席设计师Stone Librande很乐意与我们进一步探讨他的研究和决策过程,以及现实玩家让他感到吃惊的游戏方式。我们通过面谈和电话完成了我们的专访,以下是交谈内容。

17SIMCITY(from theatlantic)

17SIMCITY(from theatlantic)

Nicola Twilley(T):我想,我应该先问你设计《模拟城市》的灵感来源是什么,是阅读书籍、采访城市建设专家还是游览不同的城市?

Stone Librande(L):在过去制作《模拟城市》时,我们已经广泛阅读图书馆中关于城市规划的书了。那些书籍确实是很好的参考,但我个人认为,最吸引我的是使用“Google Earth”和“ Google Street View”来观察世界各地和真实的城市。我认为这是一种了解城市之间的差异和不同地区的小镇的好办法。

谷歌提供了一种工具,可以用来测量对象的大小。我经常使用它研究不同的城市。比如,我会搜索旧金山,测量它的公园和街道,然后去我自己的家乡测量一下,再看看二者有何差异等等。我的灵感其实不是来自城市规划的书,而是分析现实的世界。

我还研究了Netflix网站上的记录片视频。视频中有许多好东西。几乎每天晚上饭后我都在看这个系列的记录片。有关于水资源问题、石油问题、食品工业、制造业、下水道系统等,覆盖了城市建设的方方面面,对我启发很大。

18SIMCITY(from theatlantic)

18SIMCITY(from theatlantic)

Geoff Manaugh(M):在你评估那些真实的城市时,你是否发现了什么令人惊奇的模式或空间关系?

L:是的,当然有。我认为最令人称奇的就是停车场。当我开始测量我们当地的商场时,我没有料到停车场会那么大,停车的空间比真正的商场大得多,令我非常惊讶。这是一个问题,因为我们本来打算模拟真实的城市,但我们很快意识到真实的城市中有太多停车场了,如果游戏中的停车场也达到相同的比例,那么我们的游戏肯定会很无聊。

M:那么你的游戏变成《模拟停车场》,而不是《模拟城市》了。

L:(笑)确实。所以我们的做法是,想象停车场都在地下。我们的游戏中确实有停车场,但我们把它们缩小了——所以,如果是小商场,那么周围会配置6、7个停车场;如果是大会展中心或大型运动场,那么就会配套相当大的停车场——但是当然不会像现实的商店或运动场的停车场那么大。我们得尽力而为,使游戏看起来仍然吸引人。

19SIMCITY(from theatlantic)

19SIMCITY(from theatlantic)

(使用缩放工具观察由We Are the Champignons设计的城市)

T:我想听听设计和测试过程。你有没有给你希望加入到游戏中的城市和城市形态设计故事板?

L:游戏的城市建设方式是无限的。我的意思是,你可以用许多不同的方法玩游戏,所以基本上不可能有故事板或一套明确的叙述方案来体现玩家的游戏方式。

20SIMCITY(from theatlantic)

20SIMCITY(from theatlantic)

(Stone Librande给“绿色城市”和“矿业城市”制作的初期故事板。)

相反地,我的办法是设想两种极端情况——在办公室里,我们分别称之为“伯克莱”和“匹兹堡”(游戏邦注:二者均为美国城市),也可以叫作“绿色城市”和“污染城市”。比如说,如果你打算建设一座乌托邦城市——使用风能、太阳能,教育和文化产业发达,环境优美,绿化程度高,建筑密度低,那么你在我们的游戏中就会采取“绿色城市”的建设模式。

但我们也设想到另一种情况,有些玩家只想尽量挣钱,所以他们就会剥削或甚至虐待他们的居民。这类玩家不会给居民提供教育,会把他们当成为城市挣钱的苦力,会建火力发电厂,随处堆放垃圾,不关心居民的健康问题。

22SIMCITY(from theatlantic)

22SIMCITY(from theatlantic)

(Stone Librande给“绿色城市”制作的中期故事板。)

我制作了一系列故事板,显示了这两种城市从初期到末期的发展过程,最终都是城市崩溃。再说说多人模式,可以把这两种城市结合起来,也就是“如果这两座城市开始合作,那么它们就可以解释彼此的问题。”

我的想法是把它们当成我们的游戏的两种极端情况。玩家所做的事情总是落在这两个极端之间,产生各种奇怪的组合。我们无法预测所有情况。

基本上,我们发现,如果我们设想到这两种极端情况,那么我们至少理解了我们需要制作的美术范围是什么,以及我们要设计的游戏体验是什么。

2SIMCITY(from theatlantic)

2SIMCITY(from theatlantic)

(Stone Librande给“矿业城市”制作的中期故事板。)

T:在这个过程中,为了使“污染城市”或“干净城市”更加好玩,你是否发现了什么必须调整的东西?

L:看匹兹堡这种染污城市,那就相当明显了。你很容易就理解为什么染污城市会失败,但你还得理解为什么干净城市也会崩溃。如果你有一种总是失败或总是成功的城市模式,那就说明游戏的设计确实很糟糕。每一种模式都有自己的问题。

对此,我们开始逐一观察两张图解,我们知道游戏中应该具备的所有系统——如能源、公共设施、财富等级、人口数量等等,我们基本上把这些系统分成互补的两种情况。

也就是说,如果匹兹堡是这种情况,那么剩下的情况就属于贝克莱的。那就是为什么当二者相结合时,可以解决彼此的问题——一方的问题正是另一方的解决办法。

3SIMCITY(from theatlantic)

3SIMCITY(from theatlantic)

(Stone Librande制作的“绿色城市”和“矿业城市”的结合故事板。)

T:玩过之后让我感到印象非常深刻的是,你在游戏中加入很多不同的且复杂的系统,具体的系统如水利,抽象的系统如经济。但是,你的游戏连“贝克莱”这种城市模式都有了,却完全没有加入食物系统,这让我特别不解。

为什么没有呢?

L:游戏中确实没有食物,但并不是我们没有考虑到—-这只是一个作用范围的问题。早期设计中确实有农业和食物系统,但是,部分因为制作电子游戏的自然过程,部分因为交付时间和预算,我们不得不让这部分内容由虚拟城市自行处理,而市长——也就是玩家不需要考虑这个方面。

但我看到了一些很棒的食物系统设定,所以不能在游戏中加入,确实是件遗憾的事。

4SIMCITY(from theatlantic)

4SIMCITY(from theatlantic)

5SIMCITY(from theatlantic)

5SIMCITY(from theatlantic)

(数据面板显示幸福指数。在《模拟城市》中,幸福指数会随着财富、交通顺畅和公共安全水平而增加,而交通拥紧和污染会降低幸福指数。)

M:既然游戏已经问世了,且因为现在游戏都是在线玩的,所以我得想象你这是在制作一份不可思议的档案,里面包含不同玩家可能做的所有决定和可能建造的所有类型的城市。我很好奇,我们能用这些信息做什么。是否可以作为一种模拟建设,看看人们一般会犯什么错误,或什么城市模式最受欢迎?如果可以,这些信息是只能用于开发以后的《模拟城市》,还是给现实中的城市规划者或市长的提供一种受欢迎的城市化模式?

L:这是个有趣的问题。不过我很难回答你,因为玩家玩这款游戏的方式太多了。我们设计游戏时考虑了尽可能多的游戏方式,因为我们的目标是让尽可能多的玩家在游戏中收获快乐。

我们所谓的“硬核玩家”希望获得成就感,所以我们设计了排行榜,刺激他们通过排名表现自己的优越。上榜的条件可能是:“让最多人入驻你的城市”。这样,硬核玩家就会想法设法吸引尽可能多的人入住城市,以显示他们可以获胜。或者上榜的理由也可能是争取让最富有的人进入城市,这需要的策略与吸引最多人是不同的。要让富人定居在你的城市中是很困难的。

这些排行榜和挑战可以刺激硬核玩家采取不同的游戏策略。这就好像我们把诱饵放在前面,说:“嘿,就这么玩,看看你能玩到什么程度。”所以,一定程度上我们污染了游戏,因为我们的做法其实给玩家设置了一个特定的方向和特定的目标。

另一方面,还有一些叫作“创作型玩家”,他们的游戏目标并不是获胜——他们只想创作故事。他们只想做出一些漂亮的东西。例如,当我的妻子玩游戏时,她会建很多学校和公园,但一点也不关心增加城市收入或人口。

她只想建造一座宜居的、理想化的小镇。

6SIMCITY(from theatlantic)

《模拟城市》的局部视野(from theatlantic)

所以,回到你的问题,因为玩家类型太多,我们很难根据原始数据判定:“这就是人们想要居住的城市类型。”也就是说,我们确实有很多可供参考的数据,例如达到多少人口时需要公园或电车系统。我们可以从总体上评估这些东西,但我认为这对现实中的城市规划作用并没有那么大。

T:既然有那么多种类型的玩家和游戏方式,那么《模拟城市》的“胜利”方式也有很多种吧?你自己是否建设出了特别成功的城市,如果有,为什么成功?

L:当然,你要带着目标才能在《模拟城市》中获胜。如果你玩游戏时带着某个目标,比如说得到很高的支持率和居民幸福指数,那么你的游戏策略应该与积累城市财富和增加人口很不一样。

至于我自己的城市建设,实在太多了。我已经玩这款游戏太多次了,因为一开始为了理解系统,我必须把每个系统都玩至少一次。我建过能源城市、赌博城市、矿业城市——每一种类型我都尝试过一次。

完成那部分工作后,我现在在家玩时只是为了娱乐,我发现自己更喜欢中等密度的城市。对我而言,高密度的城市实在太难管理和经营了。我不想成为纽约的市长,但愿意当小镇的镇长。后者的工作容易多了。

基本上,我不想建一座摩天大楼林立的城市。最多我只会因为好看才建一两座大厦。

SimCity 4(from theatlantic)

《模拟城市4》的截图(from theatlantic)

M:我很好奇你是怎么处理旧版本的《模拟城市》的,你是否担心过前作的遗产或变更?现在这个版本的游戏有什么创新点或变化?你认为有什么东西已经成为不可丢弃的标志?

L:首先,当我们开始项目时,团队成员并不多,我们都同意不把新游戏叫作《模拟城市5》。我们只想叫它《模拟城市》,因为如果游戏盒子上出现“5”,那么所有人都会认为一定有一款更简单的《模拟城市4》。那就与实际情况有出路了,因为许多人都说《模拟城市4》太复杂了。那是我们得到的反馈。

我们确定游戏名称后,觉得像解放了似的:“好吧,现在我们可以重新设计这个品牌和这个游戏了。”

从技术上说,很大的区别在于“GlassBox”引擎,所有中介对象都产生自下而上的模拟。《模拟城市》之前的所有版本都是用电子表格设计的,也就是在单元格内输入数字,然后传播到邻近的单元格,整个城市就是一个公式。

《模拟城市》的原型基本上是用Excel做的。没有图像,只有一连串的数字。但可以输入代表某类建筑的代码和公式,以决定城市中有多少能源和人口。这是静态的城市,就好像一组快照。

8SIMCITY(from theatlantic)

城市中出现火灾(from theatlantic)

因为我们的《模拟城市》——新版《模拟城市》需要中介对象活动起来,所以必须让游戏以动态的方式呈现。我不能把城市看作截图,然后告诉别人是怎么回事;我必须看到活动中的城市,我才能充分理解你的道路规划是否合理、你的能源是否流通、你的水利是否通畅、你的污水系统是否可行、你的垃圾是否处理了等等。比如,垃圾是否处理得看垃圾车有没有把垃圾倒进垃圾箱,这在截图上是看不出来的。

9SIMCITY(from theatlantic)

9SIMCITY(from theatlantic)

我们决定采用中介对象导向型模拟并且使之自下而上运作后,所有设计都要围绕这个决定展开。设计最庞大的一个部分是:“既然我们知道中介对象要运作这个,那么学校与这些对象的关系如何?火灾和警察系统呢?时间系统呢?”《模拟城市》的所有旧版本都没有解决这些问题——它们只能做一个人口犯罪率的表格,然后运行那些方程式。

M:当你开始把东西变成中介对象时,是否出现了一些影响玩法、出乎你的意料的空间效果?

L:是有影响,但我们预料到了。因为一切都要处于动态,所以我们必须好好计算距离和时间。我们必须大量计算在现实生活中,一个人从城市的一边走到另一边需要多少时间,换到游戏中又需要多少时间。我们还要计算现实中和游戏中的小车的速度,使之与走路作比较后不失真。在现实中,小车的速度一般是8英里每小时,但在游戏中好像太慢了,或者说人走得太快了,而事实上人的行走速度只有2英里每小时。

我们知道会出现这个问题,但我们只能调整现实指标,好使游戏中的动态显得真实。我们与动画师合作,根据我们的直觉来模拟人群的动态。

10SIMCITY(from theatlantic)

10SIMCITY(from theatlantic)

(放在居工区下风向区域的工业区)

游戏并不是100%按照现实设定的,但必须看起来像真的,在游戏过程中我们始终遵循这个原则。例如,如果我们的游戏中的飞机跑道遵守现实比例,那么它就会占据整个城市。像这类问题,我们只能折衷处理,希望看起来显得真实。

T:事实上,我们很想问的一个问题是游戏的时间。玩家可以选择不同的游戏速度,而且有明显的城市建设阶段和某个变化发生所需的天数,这让我特别感兴趣。你是否研究过城市变化的速度和不同城市的生活节奏?

L:我们看了一篇关于“不同城市的行走速度”的好文章。我觉得非常有趣。在纽约这样的大城市里,人们走得非常快,而在中等城市或小镇里,人们走得就慢多了。对此,我们使游戏中的市民行走速度随城市规模扩张而增加,但在最终版本中,我们却没有这么做。

13 SimCity(from theatlantic)

12 SimCity(from theatlantic)

我知道你的意思:在游戏中,大城市里的人们更繁忙、走得更快。但我们并没有在游戏中做那样的设定,我想这只是更多活动部分的累积效应。与人的直觉相反的是,当城市的交通非常拥挤时,会让人觉得这座城市更大更繁忙,尽管什么东西都动不了了——这与我们把高峰期的交通阻塞当作大城市的典型特征有关。

具有真正的高峰期表明时间对一款基于中介对象的游戏是多么重要。我们花了很多时间制作游戏的时间周期,使游戏的体验更加逼真。在之前的《模拟城市》中,白天/夜晚周期中只体现在图像效果上——如果你不喜欢,你可以选择关闭,因为它不影响模拟。在我们的游戏中,早上和晚上各有一段通勤高峰期、学校高峰期和购物高峰期。工厂是24小时运作的,但商店在晚上会打烊,所以不同的对象有不同的工作时间表。

13SIMCITY(from theatlantic)

13SIMCITY(from theatlantic)

结果是,游戏产生了一个非常有趣的周期——这些模拟市民在一段时间内会消失,使公交车和路面空空荡荡,之后他们又会出现。当你玩这款游戏时,确实会为它着迷。我自己经常盯着游戏看,什么也不做——几乎是被催眠了,我只想看着街道上车如流水马如龙。在那种情况下,你不是看着某个人,而是看着所有人。就像望着波浪在沙滩上来来回回。

对我而言,这是最游戏最吸引人的方面。玩家会在游戏中忘记时间。我们一直听到有人这么说:“我坐在电脑前玩,三个小时过去了,我才醒悟过来怎么回事?”部分是因为太投入,另一部分是因为游戏成功地把玩家吸引到游戏自己的时间框架中,使玩家忘记了现实世界的时间。

14SIMCITY(from theatlantic)

14SIMCITY(from theatlantic)

T:玩家的游戏方式或反应有没有让你感到惊讶?有没有什么东西是你已经想要更改的?

L:让我吃惊的一件事是,甚至在游戏刚发布时,不到一周,玩家们在《模拟城市》中的累计游戏时间就相当于人类的900年了。

人们做得最多的事都在我们的希望或意料之中。例如,我预料到许多故事和创意——比如拍视频等。YouTube有已经有很多教程视频,玩家们分享了很多视频,真的很精彩。

15SIMCITY(from theatlantic)

15SIMCITY(from theatlantic)

(《模拟城市》的玩家Calvin Chan制作的视频截图)

出乎我意料的事是,在第一周,有两名《星际争霸》的玩家决定现场直播他们的游戏比赛。顺便一提,硬核玩家经常会把自己的《星际争霸》对战情况向广大观众进行直播。他们是第一批使自己的城市规模达到10万的玩家,当时聊天室里有2万人为他们加油和提建议,如“不要建在那里!”、“你在做什么,你为什么不建设电车系统?”、“加油,伙计!”就这样一直持续了三个小时。这就像一场现场运动比赛,两万名观众为他们喜欢的城市规划加油助威。我确实为此感到惊喜。

不过,我不确定我们可以怎么利用这种玩法,毕竟我们做的不是体育竞技游戏,但似乎这款游戏能够让人们想到那种玩法。我开始分析视频,并发现如果你只是看人们玩《星际争霸》,你可能不会太了解这款游戏,你的反应差不多是“我不知道我在看什么,我不知道什么时候应该叫好,我不知道是否应该为刚刚看到的东西兴奋。”

但是,如果你看着某人建设一座城市,你会非常了解这个过程。我的意思是,我不必告诉你不要把垃圾场建在居民区,不然臭哄哄的味道会把居民逼走;我也不必教你把污水排到什么地方。我认为玩家这么投入是因为,这款游戏的建设城市规则对每个人来说都是非常直观的。(本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译,拒绝任何不保留版权的转载,如需转载请联系:游戏邦

The Philosophy of SimCity: An Interview With the Game’s Lead Designer

by Geoff Manaugh & Nicola Twilleymay

More Screenshot of our own SimCity (called, for reasons that made sense at the time, We Are The Champignons) after three hours of game play.

In the nearly quarter-century since designer Will Wright launched the iconic urban planning computer game, SimCity, not only has the world’s population become majoritatively urban for the first time in human history, but interest in cities and their design has gone mainstream.

Once a byword for boring, city planning is now a hot topic, claimed by technology companies, economists, so-called “Supermayors,” and cultural institutions alike as the key to humanity’s future.

Indeed, if we are to believe the hype, the city has become our species’ greatest triumph.

A shot from photographer Michael Wolf’s extraordinary Architecture of Density series, newly available in hardcover.

In March 2013, the first new iteration of SimCity in a decade was launched, amid a flurry of critical praise mingled with fan disappointment at Electronic Arts’ “always-online” digital rights management policy and repeated server failures.

A few weeks before the launch, Venue had the opportunity to play the new SimCity at its Manhattan premiere, during which time we feverishly laid out curving roads and parks, drilled for oil while installing a token wind turbine, and tried to ignore our city’s residents’ — known as Sims — complaints as their homes burned before we could afford to build a fire station.

We emerged three hours later, blinking and dazed, into the gleaming white and purple lights of Times Square, and were immediately struck by the abstractions required to translate such a complex, dynamic environment into a coherent game structure, and the assumptions and values embedded in that translation.

Fortunately, the game’s lead designer, Stone Librande, was happy to talk with us further about his research and decision-making process, as well as some of the ways in which real-world players have already surprised him. We spoke to him both in person and by telephone, and our conversation appears below.

Nicola Twilley: I thought I’d start by asking what sorts of sources you used to get ideas for SimCity, whether it be reading books, interviewing urban experts, or visiting different cities?

Stone Librande: From working on SimCity games in the past, we already have a library here with a lot of city planning books. Those were really good as a reference, but I found, personally, that the thing I was most attracted to was using Google Earth and Google Street View to go anywhere in the world and look down on real cities. I found it to be an extremely powerful way to understand the differences between cities and small towns in different regions.

Google has a tool in there that you can use to measure out how big things are. When I first started out, I used that a lot to investigate different cities. I’d bring up San Francisco and measure the parks and the streets, and then I’d go to my home town and measure it, to figure out how it differed and so on. My inspiration wasn’t really drawn from urban planning books; it was more from deconstructing the existing world.

Then I also really got into Netflix streaming documentaries. There is just so much good stuff there, and Netflix is good at suggesting things. That opened up a whole series of documentaries that I would watch almost every night after dinner. There were videos on water problems, oil problems, the food industry, manufacturing, sewage systems, and on and on — all sorts of things. Those covered a lot of different territory and were really enlightening to me.

Geoff Manaugh: While you were making those measurements of different real-world cities, did you discover any surprising patterns or spatial relationships?

Librande: Yes, definitely. I think the biggest one was the parking lots. When I started measuring out our local grocery store, which I don’t think of as being that big, I was blown away by how much more space was parking lot rather than actual store. That was kind of a problem, because we were originally just going to model real cities, but we quickly realized there were way too many parking lots in the real world and that our game was going to be really boring if it was proportional in terms of parking lots.

Manaugh: You would be making SimParkingLot, rather than SimCity.

Librande: [laughs] Exactly. So what we do in the game is that we just imagine they are underground. We do have parking lots in the game, and we do try to scale them — so, if you have a little grocery store, we’ll put six or seven parking spots on the side, and, if you have a big convention center or a big pro stadium, they’ll have what seem like really big lots — but they’re nowhere
near what a real grocery store or pro stadium would have. We had to do the best we could do and still make the game look attractive.

Using the zoning tool for the city designed by We Are the Champignons.

Twilley: I’d love to hear more about the design process and how you went about testing different iterations. Did you storyboard narratives for possible cities and urban forms that you might want to include in the game?

Librande: The way the game is set up, it’s kind of infinite. What I mean by that is that you could play it so many different ways that it’s basically impossible to storyboard or have a defined set of narratives for how the player will play it.

Stone Librande’s storyboards for “Green City” and “Mining City” at the start of play.

Instead, what I did was that I came up with two extreme cases — around the office we call them “Berkeley” and “Pittsburgh,” or “Green City” and “Dirty City.” We said, if you are the kind of player who wants to make utopia — a city with wind power, solar power, lots of education and culture, and everything’s beautiful and green and low density — then this would be the path you would take in our game.

But then we made a parallel path for a really greedy player who just wants to make as much money as possible, and is just exploiting or even torturing their Sims. In that scenario, you’re not educating them; you’re just using them as slave labor to make money for your city. You put coal power plants in, you put dumps everywhere, and you don’t care about their health.

Stone Librande’s storyboard for “Green City” at mid-game.

I made a series of panels, showing those two cities from beginning to late stage, where everything falls apart. Then, later on, when we got to multiplayer, I joined those two diagrams together and said, “If both of these cities start working together, then they can actually solve each other’s problems.”

The idea was to set them up like bookends — these are the extremes of our game. A real player will do a thousand things that fall somewhere in between those extremes and create all sorts of weird combinations. We can’t predict all of that.

Basically, we figured that if we set the bookends, then we would at least understand the boundaries of what kind of art we need to build, and what kind of game play experiences we need to design for.

Stone Librande’s storyboard for “Mining City” at mid-game.

Twilley: In going through that process, did you discover things that you needed to change to make game play more gripping for either the dirty city or the clean city?

Librande: It was pretty straightforward to look at Pittsburgh, the dirty city, and understand why it was going to fail, but you have to try to understand why the clean one might fail, as well. If you have one city — one path — that always fails, and one that always succeeds, in a video game, that’s really bad design. Each path has to have its own unique problems.

What happened was that we just started to look at the two diagrams side-by-side, and we knew all the systems we wanted to support in our game — things like power, utilities, wealth levels, population numbers, and all that kind of stuff — and we basically divided them up.

We literally said: “Let’s put all of this on this side over in Pittsburgh and the rest of it over onto Berkeley.” That’s why, at the very end, when they join together, they are able to solve each other’s problems because, between the two of them, they have all the problems but they also have all the answers.

Stone Librande’s storyboard for the “Green City” and “Mining City” end-game symbiosis.

Twilley: One thing that struck me, after playing, was that you do incorporate a lot of different and complex systems in the game, both physical ones like water, and more abstract ones, like the economy. But — and this seems particularly surprising, given that one of your bookend cities was nicknamed Berkeley — the food system doesn’t come into the game at all. Why not?

Librande: Food isn’t in the game, but it’s not that we didn’t think about it — it just became a scoping issue. The early design actually did call for agriculture and food systems, but, as part of the natural process of creating a video game, or any situation where you have deadlines and budgets that you have to meet, we had to make the decision that it was going to be one of the things that the Sims take care of on their own, and that the Mayor — that is, the player — has nothing to do with it.

I watched some amazing food system documentaries, though, so it was really kind of sad to not include any of that in the game.

Data layer showing ore deposits. Data layer showing happiness levels. In SimCity, happiness is increased by wealth, good road connections, and public safety, and decreased by traffic jams and pollution.

Manaugh: Now that the game is out in the world, and because of the central, online hosting of all the games being played right now, I have to imagine that you are building up an incredible archive of all the decisions that different players have made and all the different kind of cities that people have built. I’m curious as to what you might be able to make or do with that kind of information. Are you mining it to see what kinds of mistakes people routinely make, or what sorts of urban forms are most popular? If so, is the audience for that information only in-house, for
developing future versions of SimCity, or could you imagine sharing it with urban planners or real-life Mayors to offer an insight into popular urbanism?

Librande: It’s an interesting question. It’s hard to answer easily, though, because there are so many different ways players can play the game. The game was designed to cover as many different play patterns as we could think of, because our goal was to try to entertain as many of the different player demographics as we could.

So, there are what we call “hardcore players.” Primarily, they want to compete, so we give them leader boards and we give them incentives to show they are “better” than somebody else. We might say:

“There’s a competition to have the most people in your city.” And they are just going to do whatever it takes to cram as many people into a city as possible, to show that they can win. Or there
might be a competition to get the most rich people in your city, which requires a different strategy than just having the most people. It’s hard to keep rich people in a city.

Each of those leader boards, and each of those challenges, will start to skew those hardcore people to play in different ways. We are putting the carrot out there and saying: “Hey, play this way and see how well you can do.” So, in that case, we are kind of tainting the data, because we are giving them a particular direction to go in and a particular goal.

On the other end of the spectrum, there are the “creative players” who are not trying to win — they are trying to tell a story. They are just trying to create something beautiful. For instance, when my wife plays, she wants lots of schools and parks and she’s not at all concerned with trying to make the most money or have the most people. She just wants to build that idealized little town that she thinks would be the perfect place to live.

A regional view of a SimCity game, showing different cities and their painfully small footprints.

So, getting back to your question, because player types cover such a big spectrum, it’s really hard for us to look at the raw data and pull out things like: “This is the kind of place that people want to live in.” That said, we do have a lot of data and we can look at it and see things, like how many people put down a park and how many people put in a tram system. We can measure those
things in the aggregate, but I don’t think they would say much about real city planning.

Twilley: Building on that idea of different sorts of players and ways of playing, are there a variety of ways of “winning” at SimCity? Have you personally built cities that you would define as particularly successful within the game, and, if so, what made them “winners”?

Librande: For sure, there is no way to win at SimCity other then what you decide to put into the game. If you come in with a certain goal in mind — perhaps, say, that you want a high approval rating and everyone should be happy all the time — then you would play very differently than if you went in wanting to make a million dollars or have a city with a million people in it.

As far as my personal city planning goes, it has varied. I’ve played the game so much, because early on I just had to play every system at least once to understand it. I tried to build a power city, a casino city, a mining city — I tried to build one of everything.

Now that I’m done with that phase, and I’m just playing for fun at home, I’ve learned that I enjoy mid-density cities much more then high-density cities. To me, high-density cities are just a nightmare to run and operate. I don’t want to be the mayor of New York; I want to be the mayor of a small town. The job is a lot easier!

Basically, I build in such a way as to not make skyscrapers. At the most, I might have just one or two because they look cool — but that’s it.

Manaugh: I’m curious how you dealt with previous versions of SimCity, and whether there was any anxiety about following that legacy or changing things. What are the major innovations or changes in this version of the game, and what kinds of things did you think were too iconic to get rid of?

Librande: First of all, when we started the project, and there were just a few people on the team, we all agreed that we didn’t want this game to be called SimCity 5. We just wanted to call it

SimCity, because if we had a 5 on the box, everybody would think it had to be SimCity 4 with more stuff thrown in. That had the potential to be quite alienating, because SimCity 4 was already too complicated for a lot of people. That was the feedback we had gotten.

Once we made that title decision, it was very liberating — we felt like, “OK, now we can reimagine what the brand might be and how cities are built, almost from scratch.”

Technically, the big difference is the “GlassBox” engine that we have, in which all the agents promote a bottom-up simulation. All the previous SimCity games were literally built on spreadsheets where you would type a number into a grid cell, and then it propagated out into adjacent grid cells, and the whole city was a formula.

SimCity 4 was literally prototyped in Excel. There were no graphics — it was just a bunch of numbers — but you could type a code that represented a particular type of building and the formulae built into the spreadsheet would then decide how much power it had and how many people would work there. It just statically calculated the city as if it were a bunch of snapshots.

A fire breaks out in the city designed by We Are The Champignons.

Because our SimCity — the new SimCity — is really about getting these agents to move around, it’s much more about flows. Things have to be in motion. I can’t look at anybody’s city as a
screenshot and tell you what’s going on; I have to see it live and moving before I can fully understand if your roads are OK, if your power is flowing, if your water is flowing, if your sewage is getting dumped out, if your garbage is getting picked up, and so on. All that stuff depends on trucks actually getting to the garbage cans, for example, and there’s no way to tell that through a
snapshot.

Sims queue for the bus at dawn.

Once we made that decision — to go with an agent-driven simulation and make it work from the bottom up — then all the design has to work around that. The largest part of the design work was to say: “Now that we know agents are going to run this, how do schools work with those agents? How do fire and police systems work with these agents? How do time systems work?” All the previous editions of SimCity never had to deal with that question — they could just make a little table of crimes per capita and run those equations.

Manaugh: When you turned things over to the agents, did that have any kind of spatial effect on game play that you weren’t expecting?

Librande: It had an effect, but it was one that we were expecting. Because everything has to be in motion, we had to have good calculations about how distance and time are tied together. We had to do a lot of measurements about how long it would really take for one guy to walk from one side of the city to the other, in real time, and then what that should be in game time — including how fast the cars needed to move in relationship to the people walking in order to make it look right, compared to how fast would they really be moving, both in game time and real time. We had all these issues where the cars would be moving at eighty miles an hour in real time, but they looked really slow in the game, or where the people were walking way, way too fast, but actually they were only walking at two miles an hour.

We knew this would happen, but we just had to tweak the real-life metrics so that the motion and flow look real in the game. We worked with the animators, and followed our intuition, and tried to mimic the motion and flow of crowds.

We Are The Champignon’s industrial zone, carefully positioned downwind of the residential areas.

In the end, it’s not one hundred percent based on real-life metrics; it just has to look like real life, and that’s true throughout the game. For example, if we made the airport runways actual size, they would cover up the entire city. Those are the kinds of things where we just had to make a compromise and hope that it looked good.

Twilley: Actually, one of the questions we wanted to ask was about time in the game. I found it quite intriguing that there are different speeds that you can choose to play at, but then there’s also a distinct sense of the phases of building a city and how many days and nights have to pass for certain changes to occur. Did you do any research into how fast cities change and even how the pace of city life is different in different places?

Librande: We found an amazing article about walking speeds in different cities. That was something I found really interesting. In cities like New York, people walk faster, and in medium-sized or small towns, they walk a lot slower. At one point, we had Sims walking faster as the city gets bigger, but we didn’t take it that far in the final version.

I know what you are talking about, though: in the game, bigger cities feel a lot busier and faster moving. But there’s nothing really built into the game to do that; it’s just the cumulative effect of more moving parts, I guess. In kind of a counter-intuitive way, when you start getting big traffic jams, it feels like a bigger, busier city even though nothing is moving — it’s just to do with the way we imagine rush-hour gridlock as being a characteristic of a really big city.

The fact that there’s even a real rush hour shows how important timing is for an agent-based game. We spent a lot of time trying to make the game clock tick, to pull you forward into the experience. In previous SimCities, the day/night cycle was just a graphical effect — you could actually turn it off if you didn’t like it, and it had no effect on the simulation. In our game, there is a rush hour in the morning and one at night, there are school hours, and there are shopping hours. Factories are open twenty-four hours a day, but stores close down at night, so different agents are all working on different schedules.

The result is that you end up getting really interesting cycles — these flows of Sims build up at certain times and then the buses and streets are empty and then they build back up again. There’s something really hypnotic about that when you play the game. I find myself not doing anything but just watching in this mesmerized state — almost hypnotized — where I just want to watch people drive and move around in these flows. At that point, you’re not looking at any one person; you’re looking at the aggregate of them all. It’s like watching waves flow back and forth like on a beach.

For me, that’s one of the most compelling aspects of our game. The timing just pulls you forward. We hear this all the time — people will say, “I sat down to play, and three hours had passed, and I thought, wait, how did that happen?” Part of that is the flow that comes from focusing, but another part of it is the success of our game in pulling you into its time frame and away from the real-world time frame of your desk.

Twilley: Has anything about the way people play or respond to the game surprised you? Is there anything that you already want to change?

Librande: One thing that amazed me is that, even with the issues at the launch, we had the equivalent of nine hundred man-years put into SimCity in less than a week.

Most of the stuff that people are doing, we had hoped or predicted would happen. For example, I anticipated a lot of the story-telling and a lot of the creativity — people making movies in the cities, and so on — and we’re already seeing that. YouTube is already filled with how-to videos and people putting up all these filters, like film noir cities, and it’s just really beautiful.

Screen shot from SimCity player Calvin Chan’s film noir montage of his city at night.

The thing I didn’t predict was that, in the first week, two StarCraft players — that’s a very fast-paced space action game, in case you’re not familiar with it, and it’s fairly common for hardcore players to stream their StarCraft battles out to a big audience — decided to have a live-streamed SimCity battle against each other. They were in a race to be the first to a population of 100,000; they live-streamed their game; and there were twenty thousand people in the chat room, cheering them on and typing in advice — things like “No, don’t build there!” and ” What are you doing — why are you putting down street cars?” and “Come on, dude, turn your oil up!” It was like that, nonstop, for three hours. It was like a spectator sport, with twenty thousand people cheering their favorite on, and, basically, backseat city planning. That really took me by surprise.

I’m not sure where we are going to go with that, though, because we’re not really an eSport, but it seems like the game has the ability to pull that out of people. I started to try to analyze what’s going on there, and it seems that if you watch people play StarCraft and you don’t know a lot about it, your response is going to be something like, “I don’t know what I’m looking at; I don’t know if I should be cheering now; and I don’t know if what I just saw was exciting or not.”

But, if you watch someone build a city, you just know. I mean, I don’t have to teach you that putting a garbage dump next to people’s houses is going to piss them off or that you need to dump sewage somewhere. I think the reason that the audience got so into it is that everyone intuitively knows the rules of the game when it comes to cities.(source:theatlantic)


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