What if Spore (2008) hadn’t been a complete and total letdown? What if Sim City took to the stars, with colorful aesthetics a la Kerbal Space Program (2015) and a friendlier, simplified interface? What if a smart, streamlined game could offer you all of that and more? Along Came Humans, created by T
I don’t remember much from Jeen-Shang Lin’s Soil Mechanics class. Beyond a vague inkling of his whiteboard doodles and that time he paused mid-lecture to remark on my unexpected presence, most of it remains a formula-laden blur. Except for the one time he mentioned Pittsburgh’s North Shore Connector
Sign up to receive each week’s Playlist e-mail here! Also check out our full, interactive Playlist section. Mini Metro (PC, Mac) BY Dinosaur Polo Club New York City admits now that it made a mistake when first rejecting Massimo Vignelli’s subway map back in 1972. It had a modernist design that favo
The workings of a democracy are never pretty, but in 1994 the process of governmental sausage making couldn’t even be cloaked in a sleek interface. In the spirit of remembering those halcyon days, feast your eyes on the 1994 Texas Budget Simulator created by the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public A
We are all low-poly before God and the free market. Polynomics is about the latter case, though the distinction is far from precise. Slated for an initial release in early 2016, Polynomics is an economic simulator. You play as the federal government of an unnamed area, issuing a currency, collecting
After nearly a year, Electronic Arts is now allowing SimCity to be modded, so players can tweak, twist, rejigger, and reinvent the metropolis-building game free of legal concerns. Yes, there are some stipulations, such as that modders can’t sell their mods, although asking for a donation is OK. Also
When I was growing up, games were demonized as the harbingers of bad grades. But games such as SimCityEDU, recently released at schools, are now seen by grownups as compelling ways to teach middle-schoolers complex systems. SimCityEDU is a mod of SimCity, the re-imagining of Will Wright’s world-fam
People often ask why games aren’t more ambition with in terms of scope. The reason is because things break. A lot. – – – Even with games that give you a good deal of agency, like Mass Effect or The Walking Dead, your path always pivots back into an overarching throughline. And when I profiled Ivan
