Thumbnail of the SimRefinery title screen.1
SimCity wasn’t meant to be taken seriously.
The game was inspired by research on real-world urban planning concepts,2,3 and although it was created as a way for players to experiment running a city, the goal was to be fun rather than accurate. “I realized early on, because of chaos theory and a lot of other things,” said designer Will Wright, “that it’s kind of hopeless to approach simulations like that, as predictive endeavors. But we’ve kind of caricatured our systems. SimCity was always meant to be a caricature of the way a city works, not a realistic model of the way a city works.”4
“I think if we tried to make it realistic, we would be doing something that we wouldn’t want to do,” Wright said in an interview in 1999.5 But that didn’t stop companies from believing Maxis could design realistic simulations. Will Wright didn’t believe that was even possible. “Many people come to us and say, ‘You should do the professional version,'” he continued. “That really scares me because I know how pathetic the simulations are, really, compared to reality. The last thing I want people to come away with is that we’re on the verge of being able to simulate the way that a city really develops, because we’re not.”5
Maxis didn’t want to make professional simulation games. But for two brief, strange years, they did.
From 1992 to 1994, a division called Maxis Business Simulations was responsible for making serious professional simulations that looked and played like Maxis games. After Maxis cut the division loose, the company continued to operate independently, taking the simulation game genre in their own direction. Their games found their way into in corporate training rooms and even went as far as the White House
Almost nothing they developed was ever released to the public. But their software raises questions about the role we want games to play in society.
Over the past few years, I’ve spoken with employees from Maxis and the Business Simulations team to learn more about their company. For the first time, this is their story.
. . .
The history of Maxis Business Simulations is really a biography of John Hiles.
Hiles had just left the Peace Corps in the 1970s when he decided to teach himself programming. He was interested in astronomy,6 and so he started off his programming career with the aerospace industry, working on the Skylab space station that launched in 1973. He quickly made his way into the nascent Silicon Valley tech industry.7
By the mid-80s, he had become the senior vice president of product development at Digital Research in Monterey, California.8 Digital Research was a company that arguably had their biggest days behind them. They had designed the operating system CP/M, which powered most computers in the United States until IBM and Microsoft took over the personal computer market; within a decade, they would be out of business. But it was here, and in other jobs in the early tech industry, that Hiles started to think about computers differently.
John Hiles got to run his own unit at Digital Research but soon left to start his own company.67
Hiles wanted to learn more about artificial intelligence. Not like trying to make computers smart, because as he put it, “that turned out to be largely be baloney.” Computer technology was nowhere near advanced enough for that yet. “It’s like saying we’re gonna start building a 40-story building on the 14th floor,” Hiles said. He wanted to start lower, at the level of unconscious thinking. He had been reading about cognitive theory, and he was fascinated by how the brain makes it possible for us to do things like speak and interpret language, all without a conscious action on our part, just an instinctive behavior.7
Could you make a computer think like this instead? Could you give a computer program an unconscious mind?