Meet the Architecht…of Sim City 3000 Totalitarianism

Posted By: Rob James

When I think of the Sim City franchise, I don’t usually think of a game I set out to beat.  Frankly, it’s not designed to be beaten.  It’s designed to be played over and over again with the goal of improving upon ones design with each iteration of a city.  Unfortunately for me, I’ve always been crap at the game.  My citizens never stick around long, the zones always end up becoming abandoned or too crowded, transportation gets bogged down, streets congested, air pollution horrid, and rioters usually end up flooding the sidewalks and streets.  It’s usually at this point when I resort to the extremely rewarding tactic of sending down a giant tornado or alien craft to deliver a healthy dose of “shut-the-hell-up” to my sims.

This is the way most people approach Sim City as a whole.  But not Vincent Ocasla.  He approached the game with one goal in mind: create an environment of absolute efficiency under a strict set of totalitarianism.  Now just think about that for a second.  His goal was to build a city that ran at the highest rate of efficiency, with the highest population rate, but with the highest amount of government and state control possible.  That means the citizens of his anti-utopia are complete and utter slaves to the state and have only one purpose in life: wake up, walk to work, come home, breed, sleep, repeat.  But by focusing his city according to such strict guidelines and a very exact set of zoning standards, Ocasla discovered he could keep his cities functioning at the highest level possible almost indefinitely (in this case, that would be 50,000 in-game years).

After 3+ years of work across multiple sheets of graph paper, each sheet containing loads of diagrams, equations, postulations, theories, zoning techniques, city layouts, and so on, Ocasla finished his third and final take on his vision in late 2009 nine.  He named the city Magnasanti, a name he derived from the word ‘maximum’.  It’s a city of 6 million sims, zero abandoned zones, zero crime, zero water pollution, zero conjestion, and a geometrical layout inspired by the Buddhist Wheel of Life and Death.  To Ocasla it’s a perfect illustration of what he sees as societal aspirations run amok, due mostly in part to how people treat other people in order to achieve increasingly selfish goals through brutal regimentation. He also cites the political art film Koyaanisqatsi as one of the biggest inspirations for starting this very large and time-consuming project.

While Ocasla, in an article conducted by Viceland.com, states he’s not a savant or anything like that, there’s something very stunning about this whole endeavor in the kind of way that the Matrix, the first time I saw it, kind of blew my mind wide open.  On one level, this is just a game where someone took the framework it was built upon and achieved the maximum possible result through repeatedly looking for the holes in the system and exploiting them to the fullest effect.  On the other hand, this result is, on some level, exactly what it sounds like, a reflection of what our own world could look like some day.  It’s art and video game in one.  And while it’s an extreme take on a theory that, at its root, is based in a video game that does not account for individuality or deviation, freedom of speech, a bill of rights, or a constitution, it does make one thing perfectly clear: this is a city where the people at the top hold all the power and people at the bottom have nothing.

“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.  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.”

I think what I love, and fear, most about this story is that Ocasla used something we all take as a simple game and completely warped it to simulate an “artistic” representation of the worst in what humans can achieve.  Even he states the game is so much more than a game.  It’s a forum of expression.  And so, too, is his little experiment. Magnasanti is a frightening and fascinating look at life as an equation and a game that goes to a far deeper and darker place than you or I ever imagined it could.  And when we all think back to the first time we sat down an wanted the make the best, biggest, grandest, most powerful cities…I don’t dare to assume that any one of us ever thought of designing a city quite like this: frighteningly efficient, ruthlessly protected, and meticulously crafted in such a way that it can never fail.  You might call it “imperfect perfection”; something that is so flawed in theory, but sustains in practice because the alternative (read: anarchy) would just be too much to bare.  In a way, it really does sound like something out of the Matrix.

Source: RockPaperShotgun
Interview: Viceland.com