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Seeing Like a Simulation | Los Angeles Review of Books

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Building SimCity: How to Put the World in a Machine by Chaim Gingold. The MIT Press, 2024. 486 pages. WHEN I WAS 20, I believed dogmatically in mass transit, dense urbanization, and a nine percent tax rate. These were not political beliefs. They were gameplay beliefs that I had picked up—through online strategy guides and in-game experimentation—to build the metropolis of my dreams in SimCity. For many years, the popular imagination has equated video games with competition and violence, thanks to game franchises like the first-person shooter Call of Duty series, or the open-world criminal adventures of Grand Theft Auto. But other genres have always existed, including hero’s journeys through the Japanese countryside to collect anthropomorphic flora and fauna (Pokémon), or multiplayer spacefaring games that publish monthly in-game economic reports (EVE Online). For gamers who eschewed direct combat and explicit goals for more self-directed play, though, one genre stood out: simulation ga

Seeing Like a Simulation Reviewing Chaim Gingold’s “Building SimCity,” Celine Nguyen finds similarities between tech billionaires’ attempts to build a utopian city in Solano, California, and being a godlike player in “SimCity.” By Celine Nguyen October 5, 2024 Science & Technology Art & Architecture Cultural Studies Building SimCity: How to Put the World in a Machine by Chaim Gingold . , 2024. 486 pages. Buy on Bookshop.org Did you know LARB is a reader-supported nonprofit? LARB publishes daily without a paywall as part of our mission to make rigorous, incisive, and engaging writing on every a

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