Chapter 68 13.2 Theory with Interfaces

To play the game "God Is Crazy" well, you have to think like a god.You can't expect to win by going through the lives of these villains one by one.You also can't hope to stay sane while controlling every villain at the same time.Control must be entrusted to a large group. Individuals in "God Is Crazy" are not just a few pieces of code, they also have a certain degree of autonomy and anonymity.Their chaotic state must be subtly restrained in a collective way.And that's your job. As a god, you can only control the world through indirect means: you can provide incentives, deal with global events, run deals with a pinch of salt, or hope to put them in order so that the little things under your wing will come after you.In this game, there is a co-evolutionary relationship between cause and effect, and the chain of cause and effect is quite vague, often affecting the whole body.The evolution of cause and effect is often going in the direction you least want to see, and all management work is carried out in parallel.

There are other god-like games on sale in the software store: "Railway Tycoon", "Moon Base".These games allow you, the new god, to guide your people into building a self-sufficient empire.In Spread the Power, you are one of four god-like kings seeking supremacy over a large area of ​​a planet.And the hundreds of people you rule over are not uniform and impersonal.Every citizen has his own name, occupation, and his own life.As a god, your task is to encourage these people to open up wasteland, dig mines, make farm tools, or forge them into swords.All you can do is adjust the parameters of this society and then let them do their thing.For God, it is difficult to predict what will happen next.You win if your people eventually manage to rule the most lands.

In the short history of classic God games, Civilization ranks pretty high.In this game, your task is to lead your unknown group to develop their own civilization.You can't tell them how to build a car, but you can arrange for them to make the "discoveries" they need to make a car.If they invent the wheel, they can build chariots.And if they acquire the skill of a bricklayer, they can do math.Electricity requires metallurgy and magnetism, while business requires banking skills first. This is a new game mode.Straightforward strategies can often backfire.Citizens of civilized empires can revolt at any time, and from time to time they do.You are always in deadly competition with other cultures controlled by rivals.One-sided competition is not uncommon.I once heard an avid Civ player brag that he used stealth bombers to ravage other civs still working on chariots.

It's just a game, but God Is Crazy embodies the subtle changes that take place as we interact with all computers and machines.Artifacts no longer have to be big, motionless, stereotyped goofy ones.They may be fluid, adaptive, changing networks.These conglomerate machines run on myriad micro-agents that interact in ways we cannot fully understand, producing outcomes that we can only indirectly control.However, in order to achieve a favorable result, it will inevitably bring great challenges to the coordination ability.It felt like herding sheep, tending an orchard, and raising children. In the development of computers, people first come into contact with games, and then work.If a child can get along with the machine and cooperate with it tacitly, then he will be equally comfortable working with the machine when he grows up.MIT psychologist Shirley Turk believes that children's curiosity about complex devices is as natural as the attraction between similar people, a behavior that projects the self onto the machine.And the toy world definitely encourages this anthropomorphic trend.

And another God game "Simulation Earth" advertises that it can allow players to get the "ultimate planet management" experience, but this does not have to be taken seriously.An acquaintance of mine once told a story of a time when he was driving a long distance with three young boys aged 10 or 12.The three of them sat in the back seat, playing SimEarth on a laptop.While driving, he eavesdropped on the conversations of these children.After listening for a while, he deduced that the goal of these children was to evolve a smart snake.kids say: "Do you think we can start making reptiles now?"

"Bullshit, mammals are taking over." "We'd better get a little more sunshine." "How can we make snakes a little bit smarter?" With no storyline or set goals, SimEarth was considered a dead-end game by many adults.But little ones fall in love with the game without hesitation and without guidance. "We're like gods, and probably just as good at it." In 1968, Stewart Brand claimed so.And when he said that, he had in mind personal computers (a term he would later coin) and other living systems. All secondary motivations aside, there is really only one reason why computer games are addictive: creating a world of our own.I can't think of anything more addictive than being a god.In the next hundred years, we can buy cassettes that simulate the artificial universe, access a certain "world", and see the species in it come alive and interact spontaneously.Godhood is an irresistible temptation - not even with another hero's blood to pay.We spend hours every day immersed in the interactive adventures of our characters, and the creators of this world can ask us anything they want in order to keep our world going.Organized crime will rake in billions by selling brutal man-made disasters — top hurricanes and pricey tornadoes — to gaming addicts.Over time, these patrons of the gods will evolve a hardy and likable colony that can't wait to test them with another well-rendered natural disaster.And for the poor, there is sure to be an underground trade in mutants and stolen goods.The momentary ecstasy of taking Yahweh's place, and the sheer, overwhelming devotion to one's own personal world, will consume everything near it.

Because the simulated world mimics the behavior of the real biological world to a small but measurable degree, the survivors will grow in complexity and numbers accordingly.Despite the existence of an alter ego projected upon it, the organic environment of this distributed, parallel sim world game is not simply a manifestation of the will of the gods. SimEarth was meant to be a model of Lovelock and Marquilis's Gaia hypothesis, and it's achieved no small amount of success.In this simulated Earth atmosphere and geography, all major changes are compensated through the system's own complex feedback loops.For example, an overheated planet would increase biomass production, which in turn would lower carbon dioxide levels and cool the planet.

There is already evidence in geochemistry of the Earth's self-correcting cohesion, but whether this proves that the Earth itself is a giant organism (Gaia) or that it is nothing more than a large living system has been debated in the scientific community . "Earth Simulator" also conducts the same test, from which we get a more definite answer: in the "Earth Simulator" game, the earth is not an organism.But it's a step closer to being organic.By playing SimEarth and other God games, we can experience what it's like to dance with autonomous living systems. In SimEarth, all kinds of factors are intertwined to form a mind-boggling web of influences, making it impossible to understand what does what.At times, players complain that SimEarth operates as if it doesn't care about human control.It's as if the game has an agenda of its own and the player is just watching from the sidelines.

Johnny Wilson is a game expert and author of the SimEarth manual.According to him, the only way to destroy Gaia (simulated Earth) is to initiate a catastrophic change, such as tilting the earth's axis to a horizontal direction.He said that "Earth Simulator" has a "routine" composed of various limits. Within this routine, "Earth Simulator" will always recover quickly; when you hit the system, you must exceed the limit of the routine to crash it.As long as the "simulated earth" system is still operating within the routine, it will operate according to its own rhythm.Once out of this routine, its operation will have no rhythm at all.As a comparison, Wilson points out that SimCity, SimEarth's sister game, "is much more satisfying as a game because you get more immediate and explicit feedback on changes, and you also It feels like you have more control."

Unlike SimEarth, SimCity is the foremost classic of the citizen-driven god games.The award-winning game simulates cities so convincingly that professional urban planners use it to demonstrate the dynamics of real cities - also driven by their inhabitants.In my opinion, the reason why SimCity is successful is that it is based on groups. Its basis, like all living systems, is a collection of highly connected and independent local factors, and each local factor can be independent of each other. operate intrusively.In SimCity, a functioning city is created by hundreds of ignorant sims (or sims) doing modest jobs.

"Sim City" follows the usual logic of the God game that bites the tail and forms a trap.Unless your city has factories, Sims won't come to settle at all, but factories create pollution, which in turn drives Sims away.Roads make it easy for people to commute, but they add to the tax burden, which tends to lower your approval ratings as mayor, which is what you need to survive politically.For a simulated city to be sustainable, the factors required are interrelated and intricate.I have a friend who is a huge Simcity player.We can get a glimpse of that maze from his quote: "I once got a 93% approval rating in a city that I spent several simulation years building. That's pretty cool! I A good balance between businesses that generate tax revenue and a perfect cityscape that retains citizens. To reduce pollution in my metropolis, I ordered an atomic power station. Unfortunately, I neglected to cover it in on the runway of my airfield. One day a plane crashed into a power plant and the result was a catastrophe, starting a fire in the city. But since I did not build a sufficient number of fire stations nearby (too expensive), the fire It spread and ended up burning the whole city down. I'm rebuilding it now, and this time it's going to be completely different." Will Wright is the author of SimCity and co-author of SimEarth.A bookish man in his mid-thirties, he is undoubtedly one of the most creative programmers working.He likes to refer to the "Sim" series of games as software toys because they are so difficult to control.That is, you need to play with it, play with it, experiment with your wild ideas, and learn from them.You can win or lose a game like this, just as you can win or lose gardening.Wright sees his powerful analog toys as a newborn baby's first steps toward "adaptive technology."These technologies were not designed by a single creator, and no one can improve or adjust them, they adapt, learn, and evolve at their own pace.This shifts the power a bit from the user to the used. And the origin of "Sim City" followed Will's own path to form what it is now. In 1985, Weir wrote what he called "a really silly, and I mean really silly, video game" called Raid on Stupid Bay.This is a typical "kill all" shooting game, the protagonist is a helicopter, and its mission is to blow up everything in sight. "In order to make the game, I had to draw all the islands that were being bombed by helicopters," Will recalls.Usually, to accomplish this kind of task, the artist/writer will model these things that are completely imaginary with fine-grained pixel details.But Will was getting annoyed. "I didn't do that," Will says, "instead, I wrote a separate program, a little tool that allowed me to walk around and draw the islands very easily. Also , I also wrote some code to make the islands automatically generate roads." With his module that can generate land and roads, the whole program should be able to fill the land and roads in the simulated world by itself.Will recalls, "Eventually I finished the 'Knockout' part of the game, but for some reason, I kept coming back to the damn thing and making the utility buildings more and more gimmicky. I wanted to Automate the road-making function. I made it so that when you add a connected part to the island, the road-making component can automatically connect with it to form an uninterrupted road. Then I plan to automatically Razed buildings, so I made a small selection menu just for buildings." "Then I started asking myself, why am I doing these things when the game is already designed? The answer is, I found that I got far more enjoyment from building these islands than destroying them. ...very soon I realized that I was fascinated by bringing a city to life. At first all I wanted to do was simulate a traffic system. But then I realized that unless you have a place that people can drive to , otherwise this traffic line is worth nothing... From this, one layer after another is derived, until it leads to a complete city—a simulated city." A Simcity player summed up the sequence in which Will invented the game.In the beginning, he established a relatively low geographic base with land and water, which supported road traffic and telephone infrastructure, which in turn supported settler housing, which in turn Supports the residents of SimCity, which supports the Mayor. To get some feel for the dynamics of a city, Wright studied a simulation of an average city made by MIT's Jay Forrester in the 1960s.Forrest summed up city life as quantitative relationships written in mathematical equations.They're basically rules of thumb: How many residents do you need to support a firefighter; or, how much parking space do you need for each car.Forrester published a book of his research under the title "Urban Dynamics".This book has influenced a wide range of aspiring computer modelers.Forrester's own computer simulation work is entirely digital, without a graphical interface.After he ran the simulation program, he got a lot of data printed on lined paper. Will Wright fleshed out Jay Forrester's equations and gave them a decentralized, bottom-up entity.The city assembled itself on the computer screen (according to the rules and theories set by the god Will Wright).Essentially, SimCity is a theory of the city imbued with a user interface.In the same way, a dollhouse is a theory about housekeeping.A novel is a theory told as a story.Flight simulators are the interactive theory of aviation.Simulated life is the biological theory of taking care of itself. Theory abstracts the complex pattern of real things into some kind of copy pattern, that is, model or simulation.If done well, this small copy can hold a certain integrity of the larger whole.For example, Einstein, the most gifted of human geniuses, reduced the complex state of the universe to five symbols.His theory, or simulation, does work. — If done well, abstraction becomes creation. The reasons for creation are varied.But what we create is always a world.I believe we could not have created less.Our creations may be hasty, fragmented, unremarkable, or even just subconscious flashes, but we are always filling ourselves with a world to be done.Of course we just doodle sometimes - both literally and in a deeper sense.But we can see through it for what it is at random: nonsense without theory, shapeless nonsense.In fact, every act of creation, no more, no less, is exactly the reenactment of creation.