Sim City

[Steven McC]

Did anyone play this back in the day? I've been writing some nostalgia articles for a gaming website and Sim City is the subject of the latest one:

http://gamespew.com/2015/08/games-changed-lives-sim-city/

Along with the thread earlier in the week about Minecraft, it got me thinking about the relationship between video games and literature. There were some great stories about the effect Minecraft had on people's lives. Anyone got any stories about Sim City/The Sims? I definitely think this kind of game fuelled my creativity when I was younger...

 

[Nicole Wilson]

I didn't play Sims, but a video game that I played right about the time I was deciding to be serious as a writer was Alan Wake. It's basically a Stephen King novel wrapped up in a game. An author relives a horror manuscript he doesn't remember writing. Fantastic story, great effects. It probably influenced me more than I realized.

 

[Steven McC]

I thought Sim City was one of those games everyone had played - like Sonic or Mario!

I definitely think writing in major games is improving and it's an interesting crossover. Could a game ever be classed as literature? You can definitely get wrapped up in a story since you're playing as the character and have a role in determining events.

 

[David Steele]

I'm with Ian M banks on this. He said something to the extent that he had to delete Sim City and Civilisation from his hard drive because he knew it would mean he'd never get another book finished if he hadn't.

He based his novel "The Player of Games" on his relationship with it them.

 

[Alistair Roberts]

No, never did. 'A-Train', 'SWOTL', Pacific Air War' and 'European Air War', oh and 'Millenium Cruiser' but mostly and still on rare occasions, 'Space Empires IV'

 

[Jason Byrne]

I lived on Sim City 2000 when I was about eight years old. And when I took Urban Planning in college as part of the honors program, we all remembered the game we'd tinkered with as children, patched it so it would even open in XP, and ruled that world for a few solid months, before allowing it to slip back into loving oblivion. It was apropos — an urban planning adjunct to Animation and Video Games Design degrees — I kind of had to know about this game.

"Humans love to create... accumulate, and control." I love this. It makes sense that they had a hard time. You don't win. You just keep on growing, building, and improving.

It's interesting that Maxis just happened to pick it up. Now you can't say Maxis or Sims without referring directly to the other. And I wonder if we would ever have grown our sandbox to MMORPG proportions, if we hadn't first played in the quaint little one of the Sims?

 

[Steven McC]

This type of game is definitely scary addictive. There's a game in the UK called Football Manager I've literally spent weeks of my life playing (the game "kindly" keeps track of this for you).

It definitely affected my writing negatively - in that I was putting so much of my creative energy and desire to "build" things into this game that I had little energy and even less time left for a book. The game was deleted from the hard drive several times! Then reinstalled...

MMORPGs interest me but I haven't yet played one. They offer you a chance to create shared stories, don't they? Again, that's interesting from a writing perspective...

 

[Jennifer Stone]

I was never really a fan of Sims or Sim City, but I have invested too much time in Zoo Tycoon and Emperor;Rise of the Middle Kingdom. I love building cities and empires, but not too much micro management for me. Sims lost me when I had to tell the characters to eat or use the bathroom