That's nothing. This architecture student spent four years making charts and graphs to "beat" Sim City 3000. Four years to design and build this thing.
Not to presume you didn?t have fun building and developing Magnasanti, but your approach to Sim City doesn?t seem like you really treat it as a game anymore.
For me, SimCity 3000 is more than just a game. It has evolved to become a tool or medium for artistic self-expression. While most games today are focused on destroying things and killing other players, Sim City instead allows one to exercise the imagination to create, and express. Many people say, ?Oh, it?s just a game!? But they are mistaken.
I?ve a quote from one of your Facebook status updates here: ?The economic slave never realizes he is kept in a cage going round and round basically nowhere with millions of others.? Do you feel that sums up the lives of the citizens of Magnasanti? (And you might want to set your Facebook to private by the way.)
Precisely that. Technically, no one is leaving or coming into the city. Population growth is stagnant. Sims don?t need to travel long distances, because their workplace is just within walking distance. In fact they do not even need to leave their own block. Wherever they go it?s like going to the same place.
Heavy.
There are a lot of other problems in the city hidden under the illusion of order and greatness--suffocating air pollution, high unemployment, no fire stations, schools, or hospitals, a regimented lifestyle--this is the price that these sims pay for living in the city with the highest population. It?s a sick and twisted goal to strive towards. The ironic thing about it is the sims in Magnasanti tolerate it. They don?t rebel, or cause revolutions and social chaos. No one considers challenging the system by physical means since a hyper-efficient police state keeps them in line. They have all been successfully dumbed down, sickened with poor health, enslaved and mind-controlled just enough to keep this system going for thousands of years. 50,000 years to be exact. They are all imprisoned in space and time.
Why did it take a year-and-a-half just to complete the theory behind Magnasanti?
During the planning stage of the city I was also busy constructing other large-scale cities, which laid out much of the theory for Magnasanti. New ways of doing things were not yet developed until experiments were done within the game to verify ideas, and notes had to be taken down in conjunction with each new experiment, as well as devising new experiments to find out if there were better ways of solving the problem. Building cities and doing in-game experiments to obtain the results desired takes time. Additionally, I had other things to do, and only worked on it in my spare time, so it was a gradual development, not something I was working on 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
http://www.vice.com/read/the-totalit...-beat-sim-city