Monday, May 17, 2010

Sim City and "sick ambitions"

The Totalitarian Buddhist Who Beat Sim City

But it wouldn’t be the same as doing it in the game, for the reason that I wanted to magnify the unbelievably sick ambitions of egotistical political dictators, ruling elites and downright insane architects, urban planners and social engineers.

I took an American Anthropology course when i was an undergraduate at Towson, and one of our assignments was to construct a city in SimCity 2000. I'd been playing these games for years, so it wasn't even a challenge. But what you quickly learn is how a game can walk the line between very realistic and totally arbitrary. And, perhaps most interestingly, how we respond (as moral agents) to these distinctions.

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