Tag: simulation

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Ancient Web: A 1994 Princeton Page Asked What SimCity Was Teaching Its Players

In 1994, Paul Starr watched his children play SimCity and started worrying about who had decided what happened when they raised taxes.

That question became a long essay about simulation, public policy, education, and black boxes.

Read “Seductions of Sim”

The Princeton-hosted page preserves Starr’s article from The American Prospect, Spring 1994.

It arrives at an unusually good moment in computer history.

SimCity had already sold millions of copies. SimEarth, SimLife, SimFarm, A-Train, and SimHealth were pushing simulation into homes. Multimedia PCs were becoming powerful enough to make complicated models feel like entertainment rather than spreadsheets.

Starr was fascinated by that—and suspicious of it.

What assumptions are hiding in the toy?

The essay traces simulation from military and planning exercises through academic modeling and into commercial games.

Starr interviews Will Wright and notes that SimCity’s model deliberately exaggerates effects because feedback has to be visible enough to make the game playable. Wright describes the game as a caricature rather than a prediction system.

That distinction becomes the essay’s central concern.

A simulation can teach players to think about systems, tradeoffs, feedback loops, budgets, land use, traffic, utilities, and unintended consequences. But the model also makes assumptions about how those systems work.

If the assumptions are hidden, the player can start confusing “the way the game works” with the way reality works.

Starr connects that problem to government policy models, where forecasts can carry enormous authority even when most participants cannot inspect the machinery underneath them.

Thirty-plus years later, this reads less like an old game review than an early warning about algorithmic authority.

CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list includes surviving academic pages because old HTML sometimes preserves arguments that have become newly relevant.

The graphics are not the interesting artifact here.

The question is.

Who wrote the model?

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Ancient Web: Solar System Collisions Lets You Throw Asteroids at Planets for Science

The University of Maryland’s Solar System Collisions page has one of the better educational interfaces ever devised: choose an asteroid, choose a planet, and hit it.

Visit Solar System Collisions

Written by astronomer Douglas P. Hamilton, the tool has recorded millions of simulated collisions since the late 1990s. Users choose a target, projectile composition, diameter, and velocity, then see approximate consequences.

The joke is obvious. The educational design underneath it is not.

Destruction as a variable-controlled experiment

The accompanying classroom material asks students to change one variable at a time and record what happens.

How does increasing projectile diameter change the energy released? What happens when the same-size object is made of rock, ice, or iron? How does a collision on Earth compare with one on Jupiter or Pluto? How large is the crater? How strong is the resulting earthquake? How often would an event of that scale be expected?

The activity packets make students build tables rather than just click until something spectacular happens.

That matters because impact physics involves quantities that are difficult to feel intuitively. A change in diameter changes mass dramatically. Composition changes density. Velocity feeds directly into kinetic energy. A modest-looking change in the input can produce an enormous change in the result.

The site even randomizes terrestrial impact locations in some classroom exercises, which gave instructors a simple way to prevent every student from turning in exactly the same worksheet.

This is classic educational web design: a small interactive program, explanatory pages, downloadable activities, and enough structure for a teacher to turn curiosity into an assignment.

CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list includes university experiments like this because they preserve an era when the web itself was treated as laboratory equipment.

Twenty-plus years later, the button still does the important thing.

It lets you throw the rock.

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