Wednesday, April 12, 2006

From A Whole Lotta Nothing, this pointer to HOWTO present like Lessig from Aigarius Blog. AWLN remarks: Lessig, deconstructed. 4:42:56 PM    comment []

PLAYING WITH URBAN LIFE: How Simcity Influences Planning Culture, by Daniel G. Lobo with reporting by Larry Schooler, in The Next American City. The utopian beginning of SimCity stressed a desire to influence policy, education in particular, through reflections on the nature of “ideal cities.” No other game had been used so widely in many levels of schooling to help illuminate the different elements of local government. For example, David Lublin, professor at the Department of Governance at American University, has used SimCity to teach 20th Century local government. After creating a SimCity of their own, his students had to write a paper analyzing the game’s underlying principles. “A fundamental aspect of the paper was to stress how SimCity reflected real world conditions, and what aspects were ignored or sent to a second plane,” he said. Because of the widespread use of SimCity in schools and homes, it is easy to make a case, as Paul Starr of The American Prospect has, that SimCity provides a more influential introduction to city planning than any book on the subject. Though SimCity is now looking to the crossroads of simulation and action games, as in its new “Rush Hour” expansion pack, the game’s developers still consider the educational market one of its key audiences. Lucy Bradshaw, Maxis General Manager, says that the future success of the game depends upon special events outside the gaming industry like university partnerships, teacher’s guides for the game, and primary and secondary school licenses. Although still significant, the differences between SimCity and a real city seem to be narrowing. The game has evolved to consider more sophisticated real-life issues–Maxis producer Hogan notes that based on feedback from users, the game designers added such features as development on hilly terrain, regional planning, and bedroom communities to resemble features of real-life urbanism. But more importantly, real world planning increasingly resembles SimCity because of the growing use of technology, often in support of a SimCity-like top-down model of local government. 10:11:26 AM    comment []

Ten video sharing services compared - DV Guru [unmediated] 10:11:15 AM    comment []