Wiki Assignment One

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Wiki Assignment One: Simulating Detroit, A City with Cars and Crime but No Races

Micropolis: Background History

Development:

  • Inspiration - Who, What, and How: Before Micropolis was to be created, the idea of its creation needed to have first been conjured. Micropolis was just the original working title of the first game that came from a line of SimCity games. SimCity was first developed by game designer Will Wright. Will Wright was first inspired to create SimCity when he played a feature of the game Raid on Bungeling Bay that allowed Wright to develop maps while creating the rest of the game. Wright, who was completely taken with this concept, began to develop SimCity. While making the game, Wright focused on the steps and theories of urban planning. Wright acknowledged the influence of Jay Wright Forrester's book on System Dynamics, which Wright used as a baseline for the foundation of his simulation, and of the book "The Seventh Sally" by Stainslaw Lem, which exposes a plot line where an engineer meets a deposed tyrant who oppresses a miniature city of artificial citizens.
  • Complications with Micropolis: When Wright came out with the first version of his line of SimCity games, he developed it for the Commodore 64 and titled it Micropolis. However, due to its "unusual paradigm" in computer gaming, where the game could not be won or lost, many game publishers did not see its potential and thus could not see the game being sold successfully. Brøderbund declined right away after Wright's proposal of the game, and so did many other publishers. Only Maxis had agreed to publish Wright's game, but when Wright returned to Brøderbund to clear the rights of the game, Brøderbund began to see that Micropolis had potential as it was fun and addicting, so it instead signed Maxis to a distribution deal.

Content:

  1. Objective: The SimCity game was designated for the player to build a city without having too many predetermined goals. The player can choose to mark lands as being zoned, commercial, industrial, residential, can add buildings, can change the tax rate, and can implement many more actions that could be used to enhance the city. The player may also be subjected to weather disasters and monster attacks, and will have to face the consequences of these natural (and not so natural) scenarios accordingly.
  2. Scenarios: There were a broad range of scenarios that the original SimCity game series established, starting from the Swiss capital, Bern, and leading all the way up to Las Vegas, where each city had a preset scenario that needed to be solved strategically. Again, these scenarios included monster attacks as well as natural disasters, and some of these scenarios included political dilemmas, as well.
  3. Micropolis: After many other releases for home computers and other computer platforms, the original working title of the series, Micropolis, was also released under the free software GPL 3 license. (By release, it means that the source code was given out.) The release was related to SimCity's donation of its software to the One Laptop Per Child program. It was not called SimCity because EA Games retained that trademark.

Mark Sample's Intake on Micropolis

Mark Sample, the author of the article, talks about the SimCity game, Micropolis. Micropolis focuses on predetermined cities that overcome disasters in which the player needs to act accordingly to make sure that these cities do not fall over in destruction. Of the few cities that are listed on the game, Sample finds the most relatable scenario "geographically and chronologically" to be that of Detroit, a.k.a. the Motor City. The others are too historical (San Francisco - 1906), too foreign (Tokyo - 1957), or too futuristic (Rio de Janeiro - 2047). However, Sample finds some discrepancies that correlate between the real Detroit and that of the simulation in the game, the biggest being the exclusion of race in the simulation. Sample believes that race is a necessary story to tell when talking about Detroit's own background and history, and the fact that it is completely excluded in the game gets Sample wondering about a couple things socially, culturally, and politically.

Social, Political, and Cultural Importance of Micropolis

One of the crises that the player will encounter at the opening of the Detroit scenario is as such: By 1970, competition from overseas and other economic factors pushed the once "automobile capital of the world" into recession. Plummeting land values and unemployment then increased crime in the inner-city to chronic levels. You have 10 years to reduce crime and rebuild the industrial base of the city.

Sample does not think that this "crisis" is just "uncannily similar" to what had happened just five years prior to the game release in the real Detroit city: the 1967 12th Street Race Riot. Sample instead thinks that there is a much bigger connection between the aforementioned "crisis" and the actual political event. Why? Well, these riots were initiated by a police raid of an after-hours bar where the Black Power Movement activists would sometimes preach and mingle. By the end of the riot, dozens were dead, thousands were arrested, and hundreds of stores and homes were destroyed. Time Magazine even made this event its cover photo, giving the event political significance. The fact that this event, sparked by racial concerns and relations, led to crime and riots is significant in terms of the Micropolis game setup. Why? Well, the game's first moves for punishment are crime and mob scenes, and since the aforementioned crisis description is focused on the same events that happened before, during, and after the 1967 12th Street Race Riot just with the exclusion of race, Sample infers that there are many racial innuendos throughout the game. Simulations are supposed to strive in finding the essence of the system being modeled, in which case is "race" for Detroit, but in Micropolis, race is nowhere to be found. In fact, when Sample played the game, his riots in 1974 were "virtually whitewashed" where it was devoid of race and class tensions that have historically been the root of American civil disturbances. Sample concludes that his riot would be ideal for the American society, as it excludes the one concept that America has been trying to get rid of since it began: race. Only crime is associated abundantly throughout the Detroit scenario. In fact, due to these conflicting terms, Sample believes that "crime" could very well mean "race" throughout the Detroit scenario.


Comments on Mark Sample's Intake

  • Debate:
    • Four comments were posted underneath Sample's post on Micropolis. Each of them gave new insight as they all brought up a different point regarding the race and crime concepts and the simplification of simulations.
  1. One commenter, Rob Macdougall, talked about how race was turned into crime all the time during the 20th century urban politics - not just in game simulations. He then moved onto the simplification of simulations and how this concept was not a flaw, but the objective of the simulations, which I thought almost contradicted Sample's entire article! I mean, Sample's whole article was talking about how the SimCity game tried to manipulate race into its game by disguising it as crime, and this commenter basically said that it was not manipulation, but the actual direct point of the game.
  2. Another commenter, Jeremy Antley, expanded on this concept and brought in the fact that many people with a background history of Detroit can play the game and infer that race is definitely integrated into the criminal actions that relay as punishments in the game. However, the commenter brings up another interesting point, where he says that many people without this background history could not deduce that "crime" is really talking about "race." He concludes that designers assume that players come to the game with some knowledge of background on the larger issues at play.
  3. Trevor Owens, yet another commenter, takes a stab at what Sample's article and asks Sample exactly how Sample would have liked to portray race in the game. He brings up a new point about how just this act in doing so could bring up many other sets of problems, unrelated and related to the game. He brings up another game in which resembles Micropolis called Colonization. Colonization resembles Micropolis as it avoids slavery even though slavery was a major factor in colonizing America. Slavery, although it has ended already, has had an undying effect with the racial problems that still exist today, and because of that, it's a touchy subject - just as race is a touchy subject with Detroit. This commenter concludes that America is OK with many different violent, radical topics, as long as it does not as yet want to include the touchy subjects, such as race, making many of the games "whitewashed."
  4. The last commenter, John Brindle, agrees with most commenters above but also adds in probably the most insightful comment throughout the entire document: Every design decision is also an ideological choice, making none of them ideologically neutral. This means that no matter what way you go about making a game, you are giving your final decision more importance than the rest, and thus; making the game biased in a way. It's almost impossible to avoid this bias and implement neutrality, in other words.
  • My Opinion: I think that Mark Sample's intake on the gameplay and design of Micropolis was very thoughtful, and although critical, still insightful. For me, I know that I usually think of things as more positive than they truly might be, and I would tend to stray from believing that "crime" was associated with "race" in the game, even if I thought of the concept myself. So, after reading Sample's article and seeing the debate aroused by the commenters, I began to think of the game in a little bit less positive perspective. This isn't necessarily bad, however.
In one sense, a person could say that Mark Sample's insights were actually educational, as it means that Americans are striving to still make touchy subjects aware in a less direct (and consequentially less hurtful) way, but another perspective could also mean that Americans are still hung up over these issues and being indirect about it and avoiding the topic could also be taken as being rude.
I do believe that in the end, it's up to the player to decide what he or she wants to get out from the game. To some people, ignorance truly is bliss. For me, I do pick knowledge over ignorance, and seeing these connections that I may have otherwise not seen isn't exactly happy news, but it is definitely eye-opening.

Works Cited

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