作者：Christian Nutt

Ocean Quigley自1995年起就于Maxis任职。当时他担任的是美工和艺术总监职位，目前他是公司最新“SimCity”项目的创意总监——这款作品将于明年推出，基于“SimCity”商标。

这款游戏给这系列的作品扩宽新天地：运算能力首次提高到这样的程度：模拟可以从头构建，个人模拟元素可以相互回应，创造完整城市模拟景象。之前的系列作品都是仿制颗粒细节。

作为美工，Quigley希望游戏能够尽可能从视觉上向玩家描绘信息——能够立即描绘空间中的决策，而非要求玩家查看图表和菜单。

Quigley日期在采访中谈及自己和工作室成员为实现这一目标所采取的举措，以及团队如何做出创意决策，让它们不仅影响模拟效果，同时给玩家带来满意的决策，而且还准确反映这些机制在现实世界的互动方式。

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你谈到说移轴模式是这款新游戏的视觉特色，以及美学元素如何传递信息。通过游戏美学决策向玩家传递信息的意义何在？

下面我基于不同方式来回答这一问题。一个答案就是，在《SimCity 4》等早先作品中，我们融入密集细节的美学效果，无需赋予其含义或语境。在这款“SimCity”新作中，模拟内容非常复杂，因此如果我们没有不失时机地告诉玩家城市的进展情况，那么美术内容就没有达到预期目标。模拟情景将很难被理解。

所以我整理一个详尽列表，陈述所有游戏视觉画面的美学戒律：若我们能够赋予某内容特定含义，那我们就会这么做。我们尽量避开无法充当UI功能，告知玩家游戏进展情况的内容。

所以看到游戏后，你会有这样的感觉，“这是座城市。”你看到的是城市，是建筑，是房屋，这些都真的，但你其实是在查看告知你模拟状态的UI。UI被赋予美学风格，看起来像座城市。

下面就来谈谈含义理念，你通过游戏传递的所有信息是否仅仅围绕空间状态？换而言之，所有含义是否都来自于玩家？

当然玩家会投射他们自己的故事，施加自己的想象。我对于玩家心中所想了解不多，因此无法进行预测。我所能够做的就是如实呈现游戏空间在特定时刻的状态。

所以若你看到一辆汽车停在建筑前方，这是因为建筑里面有人。如果建筑里面没人，汽车就不会出现在此位置。如果建筑灯火通明，那就意味着电源处于开启状态，房子里有人。若你看到绿色地带，那是因为这一地带得到浇灌。或者若你看到房子上有涂鸦，那时因为这里刚刚发生犯罪活动等等。是吧？

所以我主要通过活动、行为和模拟状态突出游戏的含义。这是表面所要呈现的内容。

当然，关于模拟器的操作内容（游戏邦注：这基于深层次层面），我们有很多选择，其中也涉及美学元素。但假设你主要围绕视觉美学，那么它们就旨在告知玩家其所创造的游戏世界的状态。

是否真的有模拟美学这东西？

是的，当然有。这主要围绕事物间的因果关系，以及你期望这些因果关系如何绑定。

所以，例如，我们可以让屋子里的人无缘无故患病。他们会去医院，得到治疗，但这有些无法令人感到满足。你更愿意绑定这样的事实：他们因某些能够理解的原因而生病，是吧？

他们生病，也许是因为“零号患者”来到这座城市，身上带有某种疾病，也许是因为喝了污水，或是因为他们居住在工厂所排放的有毒化学物质的下游。

所以模拟美学就是绘制这些事物的因果关系，赋予玩家能够理解的完整关系，而不仅仅只是欲盖弥彰，相反它像个手表，在此所有齿轮都显而易见地推进其他齿轮，整个事情具有完整性——所有零件都具有机制完整性，它们相互叠加，以玩家能够理解的方式相互移动。

作为游戏设计师，要如何运作这些关系完全取决于你。你希望犯罪活动和教育建立关系，或是由于缺乏教育，或是和环境污染有关，你是否希望犯罪成为人类的固有属性，是否想要将犯罪同阶级绑定？这些都是你作为模拟设计师所要做出的各种模拟美学决策。

然后你会试着判断这是否具有可行性，这是否具有连贯性和完整性，这是否是我能够向玩家表达的内容？所以这些就是所谓的模拟美学。美工有责任向玩家传递这些内容。当然，这里存在反馈循环，因为如果你想要表达无法向玩家具体化的抽象内容，那么这么做就没有意义。所以你在模拟情景中制作的美学内容存在局限性，不是完全受限，但存在一定限制，你可以直接呈现给玩家的内容有限。

这带来若干问题。首先是：当你想到前面提到的构思时（游戏邦注：是否要将犯罪同阶级、教育或其他内容绑定），你是否进行社会学研究，然后再做出决策？

是的，我有仔细研究这块内容。我的意思是，我们没有进行详尽的学术型研究，但我们有进行严格评估，了解普遍接受的原因——若原因非常模糊，我们会进行适当调查。我们会进行仔细研究。

这其实也意味着我们需要做出决策。当我们做出有关什么影响事件的决策时，我们需要确保玩家能够做些什么，玩家需要在模拟情景中享有决策权。

令此记录时光流逝的钟表装置跳脱玩家的控制范围运远不够。重点在于，玩家能够进行推进、移除和探查，转变模拟状态。所以另一限制或决策输入内容就是，玩家如何看待内容，将采取什么举措？

所以例如，我们不想绑定的一个内容是犯罪和社会阶级，因为这在玩家的控制范围之外。不同财富模拟情境进入你的城市中。所以忽略我们所给出的社会学声明，只是将其看作游戏机制，将令人感到不快，因为玩家能够在此采取什么举措？

或者相比之下，如果我们假设犯罪是缺乏教育所带来的后果，那么玩家可以选择处理自己的犯罪问题，或通过制止各种监禁和监管，将其看作一种疾病，或者玩家可以选择通过提高人口的教育水平进行解决。所以这赋予玩家更有趣的选择（游戏邦注：从模拟美学视角而言）。玩家享有控制权和各种解决问题方式。每个方式都有自己的影响，这也非常有趣。

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你如何避开问题的正确答案？尤其是当这是款开放式游戏。你如何避免遵循这些路线？

这主要体现在游戏设计。通过弄清“作为玩家，我为什么不进行这样的操作？如果犯罪由缺乏教育造成，为什么我不简单在教育中投入大笔资金，让教育成为正确答案？”教育的回报也许非常缓慢，是吧？所以通常，如果你的城市目前遇到一个糟糕犯罪问题，它多半会在教育发挥作用前就衰败。所以就所有这些游戏元素来说，你多半会想要将它们设置成玩家能够穿过的表面，而非通道。所以你不希望将它们变成玩家必须遵循的铁轨。你希望将它们变成供玩家探索的景观。

模拟景观中的有些地点暂时会是最佳去处，但整个区域总是处在持续变化中。即便是像教育这样简单的事情，你也许能够在某一时刻进行完善，你随后也许还需要采取些许举措，但你负担不起。你需要处理你的火灾问题，或者你陷入经济奔溃中。所以你所探索的是切换中的多国风景，没有所谓的“进行这一操作就完事大吉”方案。

你们处于独特位置，你们的用户非常广泛，所以你们瞄准的是企图创建理想城市的理想主义用户，是基于最大最小原则的用户。

完全没错。这些用户基于国家视角思考问题，他们优化城市矿产量，或发电量，或者只是资金筹集。是的，毫无疑问。

这是我们需要尽量将模拟情景变得通俗易懂的一个原因，所以游戏不存在众多隐藏秘密。我们将它们全部呈现给玩家，将它们放置在美术内容的前端和中心位置，这样玩家就能够立即看到——对于有些内容，你需要进行数据查看，但你能够直接看到城市状态和决策后果。信息会立即释放出来或是在几分钟的玩法体验过程中逐步呈现。

当你想到通过游戏图像将所有内容变得直观时，你是否陷入许多死胡同中？你是否不得不进行许多测试工作，进而确保用户能够认知和收集到这一信息？或者作为创意过程，对你来说，这是否凭直觉获悉？

我们并不将此看作单一问题。这更多是，每次当我们想要植入些许内容时，我们会问自己：“这一内容想要传递什么？”每当我们在游戏中植入内容时，我们从来不会只是单纯进行植入。没有内容会被直接植入，因为我们需要进行过滤。每个内容都有其存在理由。如果存在必须向玩家呈现的内容（游戏邦注：即模拟情景向玩家呈现的内容），我们会判断应通过哪种类型的内容进行表达。

所以这是个重复的递增过程。它并未以完成项目形式呈现，相反我们有条不紊地逐一添加内容，同时还会进行这样的思考：“这一内容要素背后的动机是什么？作为玩家，房子需要告诉你些什么信息？移动卡车需要告诉你些什么？草地需要传递些什么信息？汽车的颜色传递什么信息？”

你可以沿着各游戏要素向前迈进，把握这些内容的目标。将其放置在玩家面前的模拟动机是什么？如果这里不存在模拟动机，或进一步探索，将其同某些模拟含义绑定，或将其移除。

所以众多这些决策意味着，我们努力将游戏要素以普通城市现实视角呈现。我们需要将其中若干内容植入覆盖城市的柱状图。但这意味着，其中没有什么内容是多余的。所有内容都发挥UI作用，告知玩家进展情况。

谈到设计，这是否是美术和设计需要进行合作或来往频繁的地方？这如何运作？

当Andrew Willmott和我初次草拟和建模游戏，思考植入什么内容时，我们就着手处理这部分的问题。我们从一开始就将此设定成规则。这是项目前6-8个月的核心问题，探究游戏的视觉美学及其原因和作用。

Andrew Willmott除编写模拟情景和潜在GlassBox模拟引擎外，还是位图像工程师。他获得卡内基梅隆大学的全局光照博士学位。所以我和他（游戏邦注：一位是美工，一位是工程师）能够反复进行斟酌：“这个怎么样？”“我们不能这么做。”“这个怎么样？”“好吧。”我会基于Maya在游戏中给内容建模，然后说：“这就是我所想的东西。”他会说：“我们如何将此同模拟情景联系起来？这么做的原理何在？”这不过是运作游戏的一个核心部分。

我的意思是，游戏可以呈现任何外观，是吧？这是《SimCity》；你可以随意设定其风格。美学决策必须有其原因，这是我们设定的基本美学原则，这决定所有内容。我们反复进行更新。现在这变成我们的做事方式，已经根深蒂固。

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就让整个团队参与其中而言，这不仅只是基于主要原型设计层面，是吧？这也是我所好奇的内容。

没错。我们处理这一内容的方式是——多年来我一直担任生产美工的角色。我也是位技术型的生产美工。所以我通常——首先，我制作预期内容的原型，然后我建立若干例子，解决其中漏洞和缺陷，然后我会跳过完成这类工作的工程流程。

然后我会培养一位带头美工，负责工作流程方法和制作动机。然后他们会将此呈现给美工团队，进行大规模制作。这实际上意味着，我和外部人员联系，对于每个我们想要植入的内容要素，要思考具体内容、操作方式、作用和工作流程，然后将其移交给生产美工，进行大规模制作。我们缓慢制作这个项目，算是少有的奢侈。

Andrew和我在推出《Spore》后就开始着手这一项目。这是几年前的事情，所以我们能够组建3-4人的团队，缓慢处理所有这些内容，收集所有这些答案，然后大规模向团队成员呈现。当项目获得许可时，我们就能够通过庞大团队认真进行制作，这和我们的小型秘密项目和业余项目截然不同。

我想要和你谈谈传递某种视角的美学选择。例如，我记得我在演示内容中看到燃煤发电厂。首先，这很漂亮，但同时也有些老气。你希望通过次元素传递什么含义？其中是否存在价值判断？

是的，其中存在些许价值判断。游戏试图通过燃煤发电厂呈现20世纪40-50年代的技术，是吧？基础煤炭发电厂吸收廉价煤炭，进行燃烧，然后发电，同时带来许多污染，采煤过程也非常肮脏。所以，整个就像是肮脏的原始机器，就是烧煤发电厂。

环顾四周你会发现，我们已不再建造新的燃煤发电厂。也许，中国依然有在建造，但西方国家已不再这么做。所以我决定再次突出各基础要素的美学技术复杂性。

所以燃煤发电厂的外观是50-60年代风格，燃油发电厂则呈现更现代化的美学外观，看起来像是基于60-70年代。燃气发电厂则更现代，外观是80-90年代风格。

至于核电站，大家都知道它们的外观，是吧？我们采用典型的庞大冷却塔外观，然后你会接触到更多稀奇的电源。

我们不打算融入聚变类型。至少，我们还没有这么做，发电站越现代，美学效果就要越精致，越吸引眼球，越现代。所以我们试图基于单个美学效果呈现特定基础元素的技术水平。

同样，如果你的城市教育水平不高，那么就在其中融入所有这些低技术的工业建筑。所有这些低技术工业建筑都呈20世纪上半年的风格。它们就像是1890年或1900年的Lowell和Massachusetts，看起来就像是古老的工厂。

然后随着你逐步提高当地人口的教育水平，例如达到中等教育水平，城市工业建筑就会开始变得更加现代化。或者也许并不那么现代化，更像是70-80年代风格。然后你的人口上升至高技术水平，这些群体受到良好教育，其中的工业建筑就会看起来更像是硅谷办公园。至于未来，建筑将呈现……

类似于预期的苹果大楼？这之类的外观？

并非如此，因为这看起来不像工业园，太像办公园。我觉得这更多像是大型的生物技术制药工厂，在此你会看到庞大的银容器制品。你会看到管路和导管。你不清楚那里在做什么，但这和30年代的蒸汽作坊截然不同。所以，概括来说，玩具、泡泡和工业建筑的美学效果将成为当时技术水平的缩影。

我们并没有基于相同方式追踪时间。例如在2000年的《SimCity》中，你会接触到2050年的聚变发电厂。但在我们看来，这包含更多内容——你在教育中投资，创建高教育水平的城市，然后运行复杂的发电厂，创造高科技产业。

所以，你可以让教育水平停滞不前，这样出现在城市中的新工厂都将是低技术水平类型，如果你完全去除学校，你的城市就会回到作坊风格的外观。所以我们在美学效果中运用的不是线性时间推移。相反，我们追踪教育水平和城市的技术复杂性，这些可能会出现起伏。

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《SimCity》游戏的制作包含特定政治理念，这先于这款游戏的制作。我们谈论Will Wright的政治理念，这体现在运作SimCity城市的最佳方式中。EA GDC Game Changers活动传递出的明显政治信息主要围绕人为的全球变暖问题。你们是否创造这些政治抉择？你们对于这些问题持什么看法？

我觉得这里的意图是，制作包含足够内部完整性的模拟情景，这样玩家就能够探索各种选择，查看发生什么情况。就我而言，主要目标就是制作足够稳固的内容，进行多方向的延伸，从中获得看似合理的结果。所以我并非想要通过制作这款游戏提供些许自以为是的经验，而是要呈现高度逼真的现实画面，在此你可以进行各种操作，不存在所谓的合理方式。

你可以创建绵延不绝的城市，一个宽阔肩膀风格的工业城市（游戏邦注：就像Carl Sandburg描述的芝加哥）。如果这里都是工厂和工业，带来很多收益，发展迅速，污染非常严重，居民的平均寿命很低，也完全没有关系，就应该是这个样子。

或者你可以创建采掘型的工业城市，它从地面挖掘煤矿，然后进行燃烧，将些许煤炭运送给其他人，将电运送给临近社区等。这也非常合理。

所以这里我的核心目标是，创建供玩家探索的模拟情景，这是比喻性的风景——你可以将其向前推进，查看发生什么情况。这完全不是制作意识形态上的衔接体验，在此你需要尽力制作正确的制胜环境决策，因为就玩法体验来说，这将非常荒谬。这变成一个宣传活动，和赋予供你探索的模拟情景不同。

就如我之前提到的，我们常常会基于因果关系做出抉择。同样，我们需要将犯罪同某些内容绑定。人类实施犯罪活动。你知道为什么吗？我们不得不通过因果关系进行分析。所以我们说，“可以合理推断，犯罪是失业和低教育水平共同造成。”也许事实并非如此。大家认为犯罪属于文化层面——犯罪是由周围其他罪犯的滚雪球效应引起的。

关于什么引发犯罪，你还可以有很多其他想法，因此我们声称犯罪由事业和糟糕教育共同造成算是政治主张，是吧？但我们做出这一论断是因为玩家能够在此做些什么，因为它至少能够被理解，至少具有可行性。

但除此之外，我们并不打算将我们的思想意识转化成编码植入游戏中，迫使玩家相信我们希望他们相信的东西，以便在游戏中胜出。这是供他们探索的区域。这是供他们在此前行及查看其中反应的小小模型世界。我们不会向玩家说教。

你谈到模拟Sims及所有源自其中的内容，而不是将此打造成一款自上而下的模拟游戏。

的确如此，是基于自下而上模式。值得一提的是，不仅只有Sims是模拟元素，建筑也是，交通工具也是，还有地图。重点是，这款游戏即将问世。这是由互动元素构成的模拟情景，而不是模式化的自上而下模拟情景。

在介绍会上，有人提到《Dwarf Fortress》之类的作品。这种思维是否具有深远影响？这属于基础影响，还是改变内容的运作方式，就能够让玩家清楚把握内容的方式而言？

最主要的是，它让我们描述更大的模拟景观，供玩家进行探索。如果你事先进行“整体”或自上而下的模拟，那么你就预先定义玩家活动的模拟区域界限。你将不会进行非预先定义的操作内容。

但通过这一方式，这一基于物件的方式，或是自下而上的方式，当你添加新元素时，你就会接触新内容。所以模拟区域多半不受限制。添加更多元素，你就会得到更多内容。

乐高积木在此是个绝佳比喻。所以想想七巧板和乐高积木之间的差异（游戏邦注：在七巧板中，你需要将所有零件以特定方式进行组合；而在乐高积分中，你可以基于无数种方式拼凑这些积木，新积分能够顺利和既有积木配合，将活动变得更丰富）。

所以我们不知不觉就遵循这一自下而上、基于物件的模拟方式——不仅仅是因为这带给你更多模拟完整性，不仅仅是因为模拟其实锁定在关键点位置，各个房屋、各个交通工具或各个Sim等，还因为它让你能够重新进行配置。它让你能够通过添加新物件在模拟情景中添加内容。所以我认为这是定义模拟世界更有趣的开放式方式。新物件出现在空间中，空间因此发生相应改变。

quigley simcity 4 from gamasutra.com

这是否是这款游戏的设计灵感？认为这会令游戏变得更开放、更多变？

这旨在希望内容变得更开放，这样你就能够结合内容，获得新行为，同时也是希望得到存在更多小范围完整性的内容。通过和《SimCity 4》进行对比，因为这是个自上而下的模拟模型，我们希望告知你特定建筑、街区、街道或车辆具体发生什么情况。我们进行修饰，采用烟雾和映射技巧，这样我们就不会自相矛盾。因为那里没有数据。

但在这一新模拟情境中，模拟活动发生在建筑中，和这一建筑的实际发生情况存在足够完整性，无论我们如何向你呈现数据，都不会自相矛盾，因为事实就是如此。这就像是问为什么说实话比说谎容易。若你说实话，你只是在陈述情况，无论基于什么角度，它们都紧密联系，因为这就是事实。但如果你说谎，你就需要在脑中理顺所有事实，是吧？

所以在这些更简单、更不复杂的模拟情景（游戏邦注：过去我们需要进行的这些模拟是受限于CPU资源）中，我们需要理顺所有故事，关于特定建筑、街区或社区的具体发生情况。而在这一新模拟情景中，当我们想要告知你特定区域、建筑、Sim或汽车所发生情况的相关数据时，我们只需呈现具体模拟内容。所以我们的问题更多涉及UI，主要向你呈现数据，而非游戏设计问题：“这次我们要告诉他们什么？”

当你们进行关于这款游戏的创意决策时，是否主要围绕创建包含完整性和易读性的模拟情景，这会自然让玩家感到满意？或者这主要围绕玩家满足感，然后反向进行制作？你们是如何操作的？

我们着眼于操作起来将非常有趣的内容。我们知道，在之前的《SimCity》游戏中，有些内容操作起来颇为有趣。我们知道划分区域和看到内容复苏非常有趣。我们清楚目睹车辆四处转动非常有趣。《SimCity》游戏包含众多既有满足感。

所以首先，我们需要确保我们能够实现这些满足感，我们围绕游戏的基本满足感进行设计。放大城市，查看交通拥堵情况。解决交通拥堵问题。

然后关于所植入的新元素，我们是基于这样的考虑：“这是跳脱模拟情景，我们所能够进行操作的内容。在此我们能够进行什么有趣的活动？这里我们能够进行哪些令人满意和兴奋的操作？”这有点同时兼容自上而下和自下而上模式。我们运行这一模拟内容，然后进行更新。“这会把我们带向何处？这非常有趣。如果我们进行这一操作会不会很棒？”然后我们将模拟内容瞄准这一方向。

所以在诸如《SimCity》这类的复杂内容中，我们融合自下而上的发现过程。你制作内容，然后查看什么内容具有满足感、有趣且令人感到兴奋。这同时也有点像是更大范围里的自上而下视角，主要围绕你期望玩家进行哪些操作，你如何将模拟情景的特点瞄准这一目的。这个项目很庞大，我们无法简要概括这个问题的答案。（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）

How Do You Put the Sim in SimCity?

by Christian Nutt

Ocean Quigley has been at Maxis since 1995. In that time, he’s been an artist and art director, and now serves as creative director on the company’s newest SimCity title — which is due to be released next year, simply under the title SimCity.

This game marks a new horizon for the series: For the first time, computing power has increased to the point where the simulation can be built from the ground up, with individual simulation elements (Sim citizens, buildings, vehicles) able to react to one another to produce a full city simulation. Previous games in the series faked granular detail.

As an artist, Quigley wants the game to visually portray information to the player as much as possible — to instantly represent decisions in the world itself, rather than forcing the player to look at charts, graphs, and menus.

Quigley explains the work he and others at Maxis have done to achieve this, and how the team makes creative decisions that impact not only the simulation, but also bring forth satisfying decisions for players and also accurately reflect the ways in which these systems interact in the real world.

You’ve talked about tilt-shift as a visual trademark for the new game, and how aesthetics can convey information. How important is it that the aesthetic choices you make in the game also convey information to the player?

Ocean Quigley: Let me answer that a couple different ways. One answer is that in previous games like SimCity 4, for example, we had an aesthetic of piled-on detail, without necessarily giving it meaning or giving it context. So, for this SimCity, basically, the simulation is sophisticated enough and complex enough that if we don’t take every moment, if we don’t take every opportunity to tell the player what’s going on in their city, then, basically, the art’s not doing its job. The simulation would be difficult to parse.

So, I’ve got a big slide, aesthetic commandment for all the visuals in the game: that if we can assign meaning to something, then we assign meaning to it. We really try not to put anything in the game at all that doesn’t serve as a UI function to tell the player what’s going on in their world.

So, you look at it and you think, “This is a city.” You’re looking at a city, you’re looking at architecture, you’re looking at buildings, and all that is true but what you’re really doing is you’re looking at UI that’s telling you the state of the simulation. The UI is just aesthetically stylized to look like the city.

To quickly touch on this idea of meaning, is all the information you convey via the game just about the state of the world? In other words, is all the meaning that comes — other shades of meaning — does that all come from the player?

OQ: So, of course the player is going to be projecting their own story and their own imagination on it. I don’t know enough about what the player is thinking to anticipate that. All I can do with integrity, or all I can do with legitimacy, is faithfully represent the state of the world at any given moment.

So, for example, if you see a car parked in front of a building, it’s because there’s somebody inside that building. And if there wasn’t anybody inside that building, the car wouldn’t be there. Or if the lights are on in the building, it means that the power is on, and that there’s somebody inside that building. Or if you see green terrain, it’s because that terrain is watered. Or if you see a house with graffiti on it, it’s because a crime has occurred there, and so forth. Right?

So, what I’ve got to drive the meaning in the game is the actions, the behavior, the state of the simulation. That’s what has to come out in the surface.

Of course, there are a lot of choices about what the simulator is doing that are happening at a deeper level, and there are aesthetics to that as well. But assuming you’re primarily talking about the visual aesthetics, they’re there to communicate to a player the state of the world that they’re creating.

Is there such a thing as a simulation aesthetic, or an aesthetic of simulation?

OQ: Yeah, yeah. Of course. It’s really about the cause-and-effect relationships between things and how you want to bind it together, those causes and effects.

So, for example, we could have people in a house get sick for no reason. They go to the hospital and get cured, but that’s kind of unsatisfying. You’d rather bind the fact that they got sick to something that is in principle, and hopefully in practice, understandable and parse-able by the player, right?

If they got sick, maybe they got sick because a patient zero came into the city and carried a disease with them. Or maybe they got sick because they drank polluted water. Or maybe they got sick because they lived downwind from the toxic chemicals of an industrial plant.

And so the simulation aesthetic is about drawing the cause-and-effect relationships between things and giving them integrity the player can understand, and not just doing things as smoke-and-mirrors, but having it be like a watch, where all the gears visibly move the other gears forward and the whole thing has got an integrity — almost a mechanical integrity of all the pieces stacking into each other and moving each other in a way that the player can understand.

And then, of course, it’s up to you as the designer of the game to figure out how you want to make those relationships work. You want to have crime be a function of education, or lack of education, or crime be a function of employment, or do you want crime to be a function of pollution of the environment, do you want crime to be intrinsic to people, do you want tie crime to class? Those are all the sorts of simulation aesthetic decisions that you make as a designer of a simulation.

And then you try to decide if it makes sense, if it has coherence and integrity, and is it something I can express to the player? And so that’s kind of what simulation aesthetics is. It’s the art’s job to express that to the player. Of course, there’s a feedback loop there, because, if you want to express something that’s so abstract that you can’t surface to the player, then there’s really not a whole lot of point to do it. So the aesthetics that you make in the simulation are constrained, let’s say, and not entirely bound, but constrained, by what you can transparently present to the player.

That opens up a few more questions. First of all, I want to ask: When you come up with these ideas like you talked about, whether you want to tie crime to class, or to education, or whatever, do you do sociological research and then determine this?

OQ: Yes, we read up on it. I mean, we don’t do exhaustive academic-level research, but we do due diligence to get a sense of what the commonly accepted reasons — for something which the causes are as nebulous as that, we’ll do proper diligence. We’ll read up on it.

And then it also comes down to [the fact that] we have to make decisions… When we make decisions about what affects things, we have to make them in such a way that the player can do something about it, that the player needs to have agency into the simulation.

It’s not enough for us to make this clockwork that ticks away out of the player’s control. The whole point is that the player can push it, and pull it, and pry it, and transform the state of the simulation. So, another constraint or a big input into the decisions we make is, how is the player going to see it, and what is the player going to get to do about it?

So, for example, something we would not want to bind is crime to social class, because that’s outside of the player’s control. Sims of different wealth move into your city. So, ignoring the sociological statement we’re making with that, but just looking at is as a game mechanic, that’d be a sucky thing to do, because what can the player do about it?

Or, by contrast, if we make the assumption that crime is a consequence of education, then the player can elect to deal with their crime problem either by putting down lots of jails and lots of policing, and deal with it at a symptomatic level, or the player could elect to deal with it by improving the education level of their population. And so that’s a much more interesting — from a simulation aesthetic perspective — choice that you give the player. The player has agency and multiple ways of dealing with something. Each one of which has its own effects, which are also kind of interesting.

How do you avoid — or do you avoid — a right answer to things? Especially because it’s a very open-ended game. How do you avoid going down those paths?

OQ: That’s really just game design. By figuring out, well, “Why wouldn’t I just do this as a player? If it turns out that crime is caused by education, why wouldn’t I just invest a whole lot in education, and have education be the right answer?” Education might have a really slow payoff, right? So, it could be that if you got a bad crime problem right now in your city that your city’s going to fail before education can do its work. So for all of these components of the game, you want to make them not channels, but surfaces that the player can basically traverse. So you don’t want to make them just like a rail the player has to go down. You want to make them a landscape that they can explore.

And there are certainly places on the simulation landscape that might temporarily be the best place to be, but the whole landscape is always switching around. Even with something as simple as education, you maybe can afford to up it at one point, and you’d still very much like to have a little bit later on, but you just can’t afford it. You’ve got to deal with your fire issues, or you’ve got an economic collapse of whatever sort. So it’s a shifting sort of multistate landscape that you’re exploring and there’s really no — or we’re doing our best to make it so there’s no — “just do this and you’ll be fine” kinda answers.

Also you’ve got the unique position of that your audience is very broad, so you’re designing for people who are idealists trying to create their ideal city, to people who are min-maxers.

OQ: Absolutely. People who are basically thinking like states and optimizing the city for, say, the production of ore, or the generation of power, or just the accumulation of money, for example. Yeah, no question.

That’s one of the reasons that we have to make the simulation as transparent as possible, so we don’t have a lot of hidden secret things that are going on in the game. We’ve surfaced them all to the player, making them front and center in the art content, so the player can directly see — for some of this stuff, sure, you have to go to data views, but you can directly see what the state of your city and the consequence of the choice you just made were. You watch it play out immediately or over the course of minutes of gameplay.

When you came up with this concept of making everything transparently visible through just the game graphics, did you go down a lot of dead ends? Did you have to do a lot of testing to get to a point where people could actually perceive and glean that information? Or was it intuitive for you as a creative process?

OQ: We didn’t approach it as a monolithic problem. It’s more like, every time we wanted to put in some content we asked ourselves, “What is this content trying to say?” Whenever we put something in the game, we never put stuff in the game naively, as it were. No piece of content just goes in because we need some filler. Everything that goes in there goes in there for a reason. And then if there’s something that we really need to show the player — something that the simulation’s showing the player — we’ll figure out what kind of content we can use to express that.

So it’s a very iterative and incremental process. It didn’t just spring forth fully formed as a finished project. It was something where methodically, brick on brick, we put in this content and said, “Well, what’s the motivation behind this piece of content? What does the house really need to tell you as a player? What does the moving truck really need to tell you? What does the lawn need to tell you as a player? What does the driveway need to tell you as a player? What does the color of the car need to tell you as a player?”

Literally you go down the list through every piece of content in the game and figure out what it’s trying to do. What is the simulation motivation for putting it in front of the player? And if there isn’t a simulation motivation for it, either figure out, well, it’s an opportunity to bind it to some simulation meaning or don’t put it in there.

And so an accumulation of those sorts of decisions mean that, sure, there is stuff that we’d like to represent that we’re having a hard time making literally represented in the ordinary realistic view of the city. We’re going to have to put some of that stuff in bar graphs that overlay the city. But that does mean there’s nothing in there that is superfluous. Everything in there is doing a UI job to tell the player what’s going on.

When it comes to designing that, is that something where art and design have to really collaborate, or go back and forth? How does that work?

OQ: That chunk of problem was something [we tackled] when Andrew Willmott and I were first getting this game roughed in and prototyped to think about the stuff we were trying to do with it. We basically made that a rule from the get-go. That was kind of my core problem for the first maybe six, eight months of the project, to figure out what is the visual aesthetic of the game and why, what is it for.

And Andrew Willmott, in addition to writing the simulation, the underlying GlassBox simulation engine, is also a graphics engineer. He got his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon in global illumination. So he and I were able, just between the two of us, I as an artist and Andrew as an engineer, were able to kind of have the volley back and forth of, “How about this?” “Well, we can’t really do that.” “How about this?” “Well, okay.” I would mock up and prototype stuff in Maya and in-game and say, “This is what I’m thinking about.” He’d say, “Well, hmm, how could we hook that up to the simulation? What would be the mechanism for doing so?” That was just a core part of getting the game rolling.

I mean, the game can look like anything, right? It’s SimCity; you can stylize it kind of however you want to. And there has to be some reason for making one aesthetic decision or another, and that is what we sort of settled on as the grounding aesthetic rule that would control everything. We just iterated on it back and forth, and back and forth, and back and forth. And now it’s just become how we do things. It’s ingrained after that.

In terms of getting the whole team on board with it, that was not just at the lead prototyping level, right? That’s what I’m curious about as well.

OQ: Right. The way that we usually work on this stuff is — for years and years and years I was a production artist. I’m a fairly technical production artist as well. So what I tend to do is — first I make a prototype of what it’s supposed to do, and then I’ll build a few examples to work out the bugs and the kinks with it, and then I’ll step out a workflow that lets us do that sort of thing.

And then I’ll train up a lead artist in the workflow methodology and what the motivation behind that is. And then they take that to their team of artists, and do it at scale. What it kind of means in practice is I go out, and for each bit of content that we want to put in there, think through what it is that it’s supposed to do, how we’re going to make it work, what its job is, what the workflow for it is and then hand it over to a team of production artists to do it at scale. We’ve had the luxury of this project of a relatively slow build-up.

Andrew and I started this after we shipped Spore. That’s a few years back, so we had the luxury of being a team of three or four people to work through this stuff and accumulate all these answers that we could roll out to the team at scale. When the project got green-lighted we could do it for real with a big team as opposed to, say, our little secret project, our little side project.

I wanted to talk to you about the aesthetic choices conveying some sort of perspective. I remember seeing in the demo, the coal plant, for example. First of all, it’s nice looking, but it’s also old looking. What are you trying to communicate with that, if anything, meaning-wise? Is there a value judgment there?

OQ: Yeah, there is a little bit of a value judgment. So, with the coal-power plant, it’s trying to represent 1950s, 1940s-era technology, right? The base coal power plant takes coal in, cheap coal, burns it, and then generates electricity and lots and lots and lots of pollution, and the process of mining that coal is also pretty filthy. So, the whole thing is kind of a dirty and kind of a primitive machine, a coal-fired power plant.

If you look around we’re not really making new coal-fired power plants in the world anymore. Maybe the Chinese are, but by and large in the West we’re not. And so I decided that I’d echo the technological level of sophistication of different infrastructure elements you put down in their aesthetics.

So the coal-power plant looks like it’s from the 1950s, 1960s, and oil-fired power plant is a slightly more modern image aesthetic and maybe it looks like it’s from the ’60s or the ’70s. The gas-fired power plant, more modern still, looks like it could be from the ’80s or the ’90s.

Nuclear power plants, well, everyone knows what they look like, right? So we went with the classic big cooling tower ones, and then as you get into more fanciful power sources.

We’re probably not going to do fusion. At least, we haven’t done it yet, but the more modern power plants are aesthetically more polished and gleaming and modern. And so we’re trying to represent the technological level of a given piece of infrastructure in the individual aesthetics of that piece of infrastructure.

And so, similarly, if you have a poorly educated city that’s got all these low-tech industrial buildings in it. All those low-tech industrial buildings, they look first half of the 20th century. They look like they’re Lowell, Massachusetts in 1890 or 1900. They look like they’re old mills and stuff like that.

And then as you increase the education level of your population to, say, middle education level then the industrial building, the industrial construction of your city starts to look more contemporary. Or maybe not quite contemporary, maybe more like 1970s or 1980s. And then as you got a very high-tech population, a very well education population, the industrial buildings that are populating the landscape wind up looking more like Silicon Valley office parks. Even somewhat more futuristic stuff. It’ll look like –

Like the projected Apple building that’s going to be built? That kinda stuff?

OQ: No, because that one doesn’t look industrial enough. That one looks too much like an office park. The ones I’m thinking of are more like big biotech pharmaceutical factories where you see big silver vats of stuff. And you see piping and tubes. You’re not exactly sure what’s going on there but it doesn’t look like it’s a steam-powered mill from 1930, whatever it is. So, broadly speaking, that aesthetic of the toys, the poppables you put down, and of the industrial buildings are deliberately contracted to convey to you the technology level that’s in them.

And we’re not really tracking time in the same way. Like, in SimCity 2000, for example, you always got the fusion-powered plant in 2050, for example. But for us it’s more — you could invest in education, for example, and have a highly educated city and be able to run highly sophisticated power plants and get high-tech industry going in there.

So, you could let your education standards slack and the only new factories that would come into your city would be lower-tech, and then if you get rid of your schools altogether, then your city reverts to something that looks much more like mill-style factories. So it’s not a linear march of time that we’re binding to the aesthetics. It’s just that we’re tracking the education level and the technological sophistication of your city, which can go up and down.

There’s a certain degree of overt politics which go into the making of a SimCity game, and it predates this game. People have talked about Will Wright’s politics as inferred from what the best way to run a SimCity city is. The clearest and most obvious political message that came out of EA’s Game Changers event at GDC was about anthropogenic global warming. Do you make these political choices? How do you feel about that kind of issue?

OQ: So, I think that the intent is to make a simulation with enough internal integrity to it that the player can explore those sorts of choices and see what happens. As far as I’m concerned, the goal is to make something that’s robust enough that you can push it in all these different directions and get plausible outcomes from it. So, my agenda with this game is absolutely not to make something that’s got kind of a pious, holier-than-thou lesson to it. My goal is to try to represent reality with enough fidelity that you can do all sorts of things and there’s really no proper way to do it.

You can make a sprawling city, a broad shoulders-style industrial city, like Carl Sandburg’s description of Chicago. If it’s all factories and industry, and it is making lots of money, and growing and is polluting like crazy and people have a pretty low life expectancy and so forth, and that’s perfectly fine. That’s exactly as it should be.

Or you can make a city that’s just a fully extractive industrial city that’s just pulling coal right out of the ground and then burning it, and then sending some coal to all the other people and sending electricity to your neighbors, and so forth. And that’s perfectly fine as well.

So that the core agenda that I’ve got with this is to make a simulation that is a landscape that the player can explore, metaphorical landscape — you push on it and see what it happens. It’s absolutely not to make an ideologically channeled experience where you have to get all pious and make the right environmental choices to win because that would be, frankly, absurd, as a gameplay experience. That becomes an exercise in propaganda, as opposed to giving you a simulation to explore.

Like I mentioned earlier, we can’t help but make some choices for the cause-and-effect stuff towards. Like, we have to bind crime to something. People cause crime. Why, you know? We have to do in some cause-and-effect way. So we say, well, “We could make the plausible argument that crime is caused by a combination of unemployment and poor education, for example.” Maybe that’s not the case. People have argued that crime is cultural — that crime is caused by snowballing effects of other criminals around them.

There are lots of other arguments that you could make about what causes crime, and so our decision that crime is caused by a combination of unemployment and poor education is ultimately a political assertion, right? But we’re making it because the player can do something about it and because it’s at least parse-able. It at least makes sense.

But beyond that we are not attempting to encode our ideology into the game and force people to believe what we want them to believe in order to succeed at it. It’s a landscape for them to explore. It’s a little model world for them to push on and see how it responds. We’re not preaching to anybody.

You talked about simulating the Sims, and everything coming from that, rather than necessarily being a top-down simulation.

OQ: Definitely. The bottom-up. It’s worth pointing out that it’s not just the Sims who are simulation elements. The buildings are simulation elements as well as are, say, the vehicles, as are the map. The important point there is that it’s coming up. It’s a simulation that’s built of interacting parts as opposed to a modeled, top-down simulation.

At the presentation, someone did you ask about Dwarf Fortress and things like that. Has that kind of thinking had a profound effect? And it is an under-the-hood effect, or is it a paradigm shift for how things operate, in terms of the ways the players will perceive really clearly?

OQ: The main thing that it lets us do is describe a much larger simulation landscape for players to explore. If you’re doing — I’m going to call it a “monolithic”, or top-down simulation in advance, you define the bounds of that simulation landscape of what the player gets to do up front. You’re really not going to do anything that’s not pre-defined in that.

But with this approach, essentially an object-based approach, or a bottom-up approach, as you add new components you get to do new things. You as the player get to do new things. So the simulation landscape is potentially unbounded. You just add more components and you get more things.

Lego is a good metaphor for that. So, think of the difference between, like, a jigsaw puzzle, where you’ve got all those pieces and they snap together in that way and you’re kinda done, versus Lego, where you can reconfigure those Lego pieces in a bazillion different ways and new Lego pieces all work with your existing Lego set and extend the things that you get to do with it.

So we’ve been kinda self-consciously going with this bottom-up, object-based simulation — not just because it gives you more simulation integrity. Not just because the simulation is actually localized at a sticking place, and each house or each vehicle or each Sim or whatnot. But it’s also because it lets you reconfigure it. It lets you add stuff to the simulation by adding new objects. And so I just think that’s just a more exciting open-ended way of defining a simulated world. New objects come into the world and the world changes as a consequence.

Is that what inspired you to do it? The sense that it would make the game more open-ended, or more variable?

OQ: It’s the combination of having it be more open-ended, so that you combine things and get new behavior, and it’s also the desire to have something that’s got more close-in integrity. You know, by way of contrast with SimCity 4, because it was a model with top-down simulation, we wanted to tell you details about what was going in a given building or on a given block or on a given street or in a given car. We essentially had to make it up, and we had to do some smoke and mirrors tricks to try and make it so we weren’t contradicting ourselves. Because that data wasn’t really there.

But with this new simulation — the simulation’s taking place in a building, and there’s enough integrity to what’s actually going on inside that particular building that no matter how we show you the data, we’re not contradicting ourselves, because it’s really there. It’s like the joke about why it’s easier to tell the truth than be a liar. If you’re telling the truth, you just tell the story, and tell it from this angle and tell it from that angle and tell it from the other angle, and it all lines up because it’s fundamentally the truth. But if you’re a liar, you have to keep all your facts straight in your head, right?

So, with these much, much simpler, less-sophisticated simulations that we had to make due to limited CPU resources in the past, we had to struggle to keep our stories straight about what was going on in a given building or on a given block or on a given part of the neighborhood. With this new one, any way that we want to expose the data to you as the player about what’s going on in a given area on a given building with a given Sim, with a given car, we’re just surfacing what the simulation’s actually doing. So our problem is more a UI problem of getting the data to you rather than a game-design problem of, “Well, what do we tell them this time?” If that makes sense to you.

When you make creative decisions on this game is it about creating, as you say, a simulation with integrity and readability, and that will automatically be satisfying to the player? Or is it about player satisfaction and then working backwards from that? How do you do that?

OQ: So, we think about things that would be a lot of fun to do. Like, we know there are things that are fun to do from previous SimCitys. We know it’s fun to zone and see stuff come to life. We know it’s fun to see cars drive around. There’s a bunch of proven, as it were, SimCity satisfactions.

So, for starters, we need to make sure that we hit those satisfactions and we design towards those basic fundamental satisfactions that come with the game. Blowing up buildings, seeing traffic jams form. Solving traffic jams.

And then for the new stuff that we’re doing, we think about, well, “This is stuff that we could do that naturally grows out of what the simulation is doing. What would be some fun things to do with this? What would be some satisfying, exciting things to do with it?” That’s kind of the simultaneously top-down and bottom-up thing. We get this simulation running and then we iterate on it. “Where is this taking us? This is kinda fun. Wouldn’t it be cool if we did this?” Then we kinda bend the simulation towards that.

So, something as complicated to pull off as SimCity is, as necessarily a kind of combination of those bottom-up discovery processes. You do stuff and see what’s satisfying and fun and exciting to do. And also, kind of a larger top-down vision of what you might want the player to be able to do and then how you bend the capability of the simulation toward that end. So, it’s a “yes, and.” It’s not the crisp answer you’re hoping for but it’s too big a project for it to be one or the other.（Source：gamasutra）