At first, this field focused on creating computer simulations of production and distribution problems in industrial firms. From the unlikely setting of the MIT Sloan School of Management, he founded a discipline called “industrial dynamics” (later rechristened “system dynamics”). In 1956, with the SAGE system not yet finished, Forrester abruptly changed careers, shifting his gaze from electronic systems to human ones. Air Force’s response to a Soviet nuclear attack by streamlining the detection of incoming bombers and automatically deploying fighters to intercept them. This machine, after humble beginnings as a flight simulator, morphed into a general-purpose computer which stood at the heart of the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE), a multibillion-dollar network of computers and radars that promised to computerize the U.S. After the war, he led the development of the Whirlwind computer, arguably the most important computer project of the early postwar period. He trained at Gordon Brown’s Servomechanisms Laboratory at MIT, spending World War II designing automatic stabilizers for the U.S. Jay Wright Forrester was one of the most important figures in the history of computing, but he is also one of the least understood. This outlook, supposedly backed up by computer models, remains highly influential among establishment pundits and policymakers today. Forrester’s message proved popular among conservative and libertarian writers, Nixon Administration officials, and other critics of the Great Society for its hands-off approach to urban policy. In place of Great Society-style welfare programs, Forrester argued that cities should take a less interventionist approach to the problems of urban poverty and blight, and instead encourage revitalization indirectly through incentives for businesses and for the professional class. Largely forgotten now, Jay Forrester’s Urban Dynamics put forth the controversial claim that the overwhelming majority of American urban policy was not only misguided but that these policies aggravated the very problems that they were intended to solve. “All I wanted was for my city to grow, grow, grow.”ĭespite all this attention, few writers looked closely at the work which sparked Wright’s interest in urban simulation in the first place. ![]() ![]() “I became a total Republican playing this game,” one SimCity fan told the Los Angeles Times in 1992. Commentators like the sociologist Paul Starr worried that the game’s underlying code was an “unreachable black box” which could “seduce” players into accepting its assumptions, like the fact that low taxes promoted growth in this virtual world. Within a few years of its release, instructors at universities across the country began to integrate SimCity into their urban planning and political science curriculums. It was called SimCity.Īlmost as soon as SimCity came out, journalists, academics, and other critics began to speculate on the effects that the game might have on real-world planning and politics. Released in 1989, the game became wildly popular, selling millions of copies, winning dozens of awards, and spawning an entire franchise of successors and dozens of imitators. Eventually, Wright became convinced that his “guinea-pig city” was an entertaining, open-ended video game. Wright used Forrester’s theories to transform the cities he was designing in his level editor from static maps of buildings and roads into vibrant models of a growing metropolis. Forrester was an electrical engineer who had launched a second career as an expert on computer simulation Urban Dynamics deployed his simulation methodology to offer a controversial theory of how cities grew and declined. Looking to understand how real cities worked, Wright came across a 1969 book by Jay Forrester called Urban Dynamics. ![]() He became fascinated with the idea of making these islands behave more like cities, and kept tinkering with ways to make the world “come alive and be more dynamic.” “I found out,” Wright later told the Onion AV Club, “that I was having a lot more fun doing that part than just playing the game and going around bombing stuff.” Enthralled by the islands he was making, Wright kept adding features to his level editor, adding complex elements like cars, people, and houses. ![]() Wright was happy with the game, which was a commercial and critical success, but even after it was released, he continued tinkering with the terrain editor he had used to design Raid’s levels. In it, the player controls a helicopter dropping bombs on enemy targets on a series of islands. In 1984, the developer Will Wright had just finished work on his first video game, a shoot-em-up called Raid on Bungeling Bay.
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