User:Pawelkas

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SimCity, Simulators, and the Black Box

  • The Game

As far as simulators go, SimCity, is the one that started them all by becoming one of the most popular simulators of its time. It is the original city-building game in which players have to manage cities that they build. The game was created by Will Wright, and published in 1989 by Maxis. In my opinion, the popularity of the game was created by the originality of the concepts in it such as the different "zones": residential, commercial, industrial, all of which the player had to maintain, build and keep in constant balance. The original game was so popular that it created many spin-off series' such as The Sims, which was the best selling computer game until 2012 (Walker) in which players control the lives on individual people, instead of entire cities.

  • Summary of Seeing Like SimCity

In the article by Rob Macdougall, the main argument is that one should embrace the other side of simulator games such as SimCity and Sid Meyer's Civilization. By other side, the author explains that many, if not all, simulators butcher actual history and make assumptions for the user such as in SimCity; when there is a spike in crime, the player has only one option, to quash it with more police stations. Where in real life, a spike in crime can be solved in ways other than increased police presense, the game only presents one solution. The author questions if Civilizaton just turns history into "a linear saga of of technical progress and linear expansion (Macdougall)". He states that we should embrace the black box of the simulator games by discussing and agruing about the choices the player must make and the way the game influences actual history. In the end, an argument is made that even when one teaches themselves and others to discuss the flaws of the games and also to manipulate the simulations into being more historically accurate and giving more choices in a situation, the player is still consuming history as a rigid code. The point that I get out of this article is how simulation games are no more than a path full of assumptions that leads to a singular ending that the player discovers whether he likes it or not.

  • Social Importance

Macdougall illustrates the social importance of the game by discussing how simulation games potentially influence minds, and especially young minds, by making the games sound very rigid and inaccurate at simulation actual real life events and problems. A problem with this rigidity is that the game will influence the social and political decsion-making of the child who is playing these simulators. When this game gets into the hands of impressionable children (as it will because EA has given free copies with every laptop used in the One Laptop Per Child Project) the child will assume that adding more police is the only way to deal with crime, even though it is not. This assumption will lead the child to many more assumptions about society and social issues as a whole.


  • Comments

The comments on this article provide a lot of debate and comparisons of MacDougall's overall point of how simulation games really have just one predestined path for the player to discover about history and social issues. One comment that really sticks in my head is by Trevor Owens, in which he says "do we consume the model, or does the model consume us?". Regarding the assumptions of his comment, I think that Owens believes that we as consumers and players can judge when the model is presenting us with non-real life situations and we as adults can use our discretion to realize this and not base our daily behavior on these actions. There are also mentions of how, in a basic way, history is up to the historians interpretations, predispositions, and beliefs. The post I am referring to is by John Theibault, who argues how it seems to him that no historians are alike in how they believe some events in history actually happened. This point is a very broad one but it is meant to make us realize that even when consuming history, much like simulators, we are left to the opinions and beliefs of the author.

In my spare time, I have experienced both SimCity and Civilization. When I think about it, all of the points mentioned by the author and the commentors have validity in them. Civilization is definitely a bastardization of history as we know it. For example, pitting the French King, Napoleon Bonaparte against Montezuma who may be allied with Boudika of the ancient Celts. All of these leaders and their civilizations are from different times. The game creates these impossible situations, but does not claim to be historically accurate. The Tech Trees are perhaps the only viable part of the game, as they are somewhat unique to each civilization and have some historical background. SimCity is a fun game but I do now realize that the choices you have to deal with the problems arising in your city are extremely limited and rigid.

These games need to be "taken with a grain of salt" and one needs to realize when they play that they were created for pure entertainment value.


Wiki Post #2

  • Anon, SOPA, and PIPA

Anonymous (Anon) can change the outcome of events, Anon can hack even some of the most secure websites on the web, and Anon can bring humor into almost any situation. Anonymous are heroes to some, and villains to others; something that we find out from the Wired Article by Quinn Norton.

On the technical side, Anon is a varying group of internet users who use something called Internet Relay Chat (IRC) to communicate and plan out their next move, whether it is in cyberspace or in the physical world. IRC is something that I (and probably many of you) have been using, in some form or another, since our pre-teen days of AOL Instant Messenger, which means that IRC channels are essentially a chat room in which people can join or leave as they please. This is important because the reason Anon is called Anonymous is exactly that. The users who are active on the channels have the option to remain anonymous as they comment, which gives them the freedom to say and organize whatever they want, with little risk of being found by the people who their actions may effect. The IRC uses different channels, each of which concerns a different topic ranging from funny jokes to important social uprisings, which we hear about in Norton's article. The power of these cyber heroes comes from the anonymity of the internet, which we find helps very much to make a point in many different social and political situations.

In the article by Norton, we learn about how Anon helped topple the repressive regimes of Tunisia and Egypt by providing vital (and inflammatory) news and information to a vast range of people, in country and out, which helped unite the general public against these regimes and ultimately remove them. Another social event that Anon helped support was the Occupy Wall Street movement, in which Anon helped by supporting the "boots on the ground" by backing their movement and thus creating a lot of media buzz (Norton). The official Anonymous organization does not exist. It is simply a multitude of people from around the globe who mostly want to help those who do not have a voice.

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA) are two bills that were up for debate in the House and Senate that in my opinion, and in the opinion of Jason Harvey, who wrote a very informative and simple to understand "Technical Examination of SOPA and PROTECT IP", are bills that if passed, would change the internet into something different than the relative "open frontier" that it is today.

I learned from this article what SOPA and PIPA exactly are, according to the personal interpretations of the bills from Mr. Harvey. The two controversial bills that were up for debate were in essence meant to protect individuals and corporations from having what they own, intellectually and otherwise, being stolen from them by users from abroad and domestically. The big problem with the bills is that they have many redundant rules in them, such as one that classifies domain names into foreign and domestic and claims that the bill only targets truly foreign sites, and as explained in the blog, this is almost impossible because many large websites have servers and domain names in the U.S. as well as abroad. Another problem with the bills is that once a foreign site is blocked by the government, networks that provide ads on that site and payment networks such as Paypal that may have a use on that site must comply with the government when the order is issued,but only that one time, which is called "No Duty to Monitor". There are multiple problems with this clause: that these links could show up again on the blocked site, and the ad and payment networks would not be held liable; and that search networks, such as Google, are left out of this clause which means that they would constantly have to monitor their links in order to prevent the blocked site from appearing on any of them.

  • Relation of Anonymous and Online Privacy

I think that groups such as Anon and even less organized groups (if one can consider Anon an organized group) have much to fear from SOPA and PIPA due to their relation the open internet and what they may use it for.

From what I understand, much of the sites they use frequently would have the potential of being shut down by the Federal Government, even if the violation is fabricated by said government. The system is ripe for abuse by those in power, something which Anonymous as a group does not have in a legal sense.

The groups relate to protecting online privacy and keeping the internet free and open to all because of the nature of the contributors and those that participate in the groups, especially groups of hackers and trouble-makers. By nature, I mean that their entire system is based on being anonymous to everyone else around them, which is a preventative measure to protect themselves and those they know because of the potentially illegal and inflammatory actions they could be punished for.

  • Snowden and His Relation to Freedom on the Interwebs

Edward Snowden has become famous in recent years because of what he did to the U.S. Government and governments across the globe. Snowden released government classified information about multiple surviellence programs spread across a few different governments. In his own words, he was trying "to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them. (Greenwald)"

This is probably the largest leak of classified information in modern history, which has many governments trying to explain their actions and why they would spy on everyone. This whole leak by Snowden relates well to privacy and the freedom on the web because of the nature of the information. From what I understand, the information released contained the proof that many surviellance systems existed that only the government knew about. Many of these systems were used for data collection of personal items such as computers, which means that many people have been spyed on through the internet. In a specific example of government spying through the internet, the Squeaky Dolphin program was created by the British Government. This program was used to monitor and collect data on many different people over their usage of the popular social media websites, Facebook and Youtube (Esposito). While this information was not used for anything that would harm the public, it illustrates a very good point about the internet: one can never know when they are being watched.

The internet is a mostly lawless frontier, where one can maintain their physical identity while being someone completely different in cyberspace, and where that same person could be monitored through what they say and do in that same exact cyberspace.




Work Cited


Esposito, Richard, Mark Schone, Glenn Greewald, and Matthew Cole. "Snowden docs reveal British spies snooped on YouTube and Facebook." NBC News. N.p., n.d. Web. 26 June 2014.

Greenwald, Glenn, Ewen MacAskill, and Laura Poitras. "Edward Snowden: the whistleblower behind the NSA surveillance revelations." The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 10 June 2013. Web. 26 June 2014.

Harvey, Jason . "A Technical Examination of SOPA and PROTECT IP." blog.reddit. N.p., 17 Jan. 2012. Web. 24 June 2014.

Norton, Quinn. "2011: The Year Anonymous Took On Cops, Dictators and Existential Dread ." Wired.com. Conde Nast Digital, 12 Jan. 2009. Web. 24 June 2014.