2024sep4: I started playing a new game of Simcity 2000 in my browser, mainly out of nostalgia and curiosity. I never really understood how to play it as a kid. I would level the map to make it look like a nice pristine slab of flat ground, and then spend all of my budget building roads circling a non-existent city. I’d then run up a massive deficit in road maintenance fees, not have any tax revenue to pay for them, and then get fired as mayor. And yet, I would start over again, doing roughly the exact same thing, and somehow I found that to be a fun experience. I think when I was a kid– I must have been about 7 years old– it was fun simply to click on things and see things happen, to see the roads getting built, to hear the construction sounds. I was failing miserably at the ‘actual’ objective of the game, but I was satisfied with just the lights and sounds. You could say that I was playing a smaller game within the larger gameworld that was available to me.

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About a month before our son was born, my wife went to get her hair done at a salon. I accompanied her, and got myself a haircut and a wash too. I’m guessing most men, like me, never really experience getting your hair shampooed and washed by a professional. I found it to be a luxurious, deeply relaxing, meditative experience. And it didn’t even cost that much!

But what really stuck with me was the following realization: I’ve shampooed my own hair regularly all my life, and yet I had never thought of it as something that could be done pleasurably. It was always just a mundane task, to be done with, for the sake of hygiene. The next time I shampooed my hair in the shower, I made a deliberate effort to recreate the salon experience on my own, and that alone gave me probably 80% of the same effect. (If I were to guess, I could probably get to 90% with practice, whereas the last 10% comes from the pleasure of having someone else do it. I’d also guess that my chosen hairstylist wasn’t a grandmaster at shampooing.

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I can’t remember how I got my first copy of Simcity 2000; it feels like I always had it. Nobody else in my family was interested in the city simulation game. I liked everything about it– I liked the soundtrack, I liked the newspapers with the strange and silly headlines, I liked the “bzzzt” sound when you laid down power lines. I like how, despite the somewhat limited technology of the time, the game felt alive. The cars (little blue squares) were moving on the roads, the train moved along the rails, the smoke came out of the factories, the planes fly in the sky, the water pumps are alive. Buildings go up. A cargo ship leaves the seaport. A voice radios in to say, “SimCopter One, reporting heavy traffic.” The annual budget comes up, and the police chief tells me we need more police stations. All of this is done with a remarkably small number of pixels, frames, text. It is, after all, a simulation, and one that was developed in 1993.

I’m replaying the game right now in a web browser. I thought I would play it for a few minutes for nostalgia’s sake, but I’ve kept that browser tab open for over a week now. There’s just something about this game that really draws me in, and I’d like to think about it for a bit. Before that, first some observations from my earliest playthroughs vs my latest one.

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while researching some details about simcity for this post I learned some funny things. I already knew that SimCity 2000 was a sequel to a simpler SimCity (1989)

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As a child I remember being obsessed with trying to smooth out shapes. I would actually spend hours using the editor tool to modify a somewhat organic looking landscape into

there was something about the sense of possibility that these games gave me. you could inspect on every building~

i dont think its an exaggeration to say that i kind of think of my body of work as a city. i even think of my friends’ work as part of a wider ‘mindcity’ that we all share and inhabit together. (quote lewis thomas?)

i remember being mindblown watching a video by jason silva titled “to understand is to perceive patterns”

there’s an incredible reading list courtesy of will wright and team, the booklets, so much love and care put into the products, so much thinking. i find it very compelling how they had such wide-ranging interests, they weren’t just game devs who were inspired solely by other games. they tried to bring in other influences, which is likely why the games feel so fresh. which makes me think about essays. sometimes i feel like it’s a bit wrong of me to think of myself as an essayist if i’m not reading tonnes of essays from other people

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mainly this post is to be a love letter to the game,

but also i think i want to reflect on how my approach to playing twitter, playing computer, playing the internet feels different…

• i feel compelled to write something like a memoir of my relationship with the computer. i was wondering if i ought to write it as ‘internet habits’ instead. might still change it halfway maybe, depending on how it feels. (i dont have the time or energy to do the really comprehensive thing that i have in mind. i’m putting this as a footnote because it feels like something that is going to be true for all of my substack essays and i should just make my peace with it. sometimes i need to repeat a thing multiple times before i eventually omit it. ) how should i start? chronological is usually a decent way to go. i find myself drawn to a particular anecdote though: the way my parents would say “visakan is always playing computer / stop playing computer”. it might not seem exactly grammatical, but ‘computer’ here is a noun the way ‘basketball’ is. the interesting thing is that they noted that i was ‘playing computer’ even when i wasn’t necessarily playing computer games. i was playing computer when i was chatting with my friends. i was playing computer when i was downloading music (painstakingly, one song at a time), and effortfully sorting them into albums and playlists. and yes, i did love a lot of computer games, which i will probably spend several essays discussing. one of my big fantasies as a kid was to someday work at a computer games company, or write for a magazine like Computer Gaming World, which I am now learning was shut down in 2006, RIP.
• cybercafes
• another big fantasy was to work at a cybercafe or a LAN shop– I remember being quite envious of a friend who actually did– and maybe even run my own someday. the idea of spending several hours a day sitting in a large dark room full of computers, helping people troubleshoot their computer issues, surfing the web, blogging, drinking coke and eating cup noodles, all of that seemed wonderful to me. today cybercafes seem like a quaint antiquity – there are still a few around here and there, but their golden era obviously ended sometime after the emergence and dominance of smartphones. right before the covid19 panini happened i remember seeing a bunch of young guys sitting around a table at a local kopitiam playing mobile games together, and thinking, hmm, that’s sort of the contemporary version of what me and my buddies did when we were their age. the environment is different, some things get lost in that, but it’s kinda cool that they can do it basically anywhere, anytime. which makes it less of an event… but everything is less of an event now, isn’t it? smartphones and groupchats allow us to communicate instantaneously with all of our friends; we can update each other if we’re running late or changing venues, and all of that allows for a level of previously unimaginable flexibility, which has both pros and cons.
• i’m still freestyling for now, i might restructure things later. what else is it that i want to say in a post about computer habits? sometime between the ages of 7-14 or so, i was really into collecting images and gifs. do I have this on a draft somewhere else? my floppy disks…