thought this was a new meme format for a sec

Many great gems in here that arise from a dissection of SimCity mechanics: crime emanates from all humans like pollution; class is fixed; education reduces crime but less so for poor people! And then Alexander King ties it to critiques of how policing operates IRL

Delighted to read a great critical analysis of SimCity's assumptions about policing in Heterotopias from my colleague Alexander King! His piece germinated as an equally incisive talk in the NYU Game Center's 2020 Teach-In for Racial Justice, very exciting to see it blossom

And hey, a little ~~bonus extra~~ to the piece, an annotated bibliography!
I was going to do this as a twitter thread, but realized I had way too many things to list.

So if you're interested in any further readings, here's everything I referenced:

literallyaking.com/blog/defund-th…

Assumed it was a wizard pondering his orb, but it's just Galileo pondering his kirby

'This could've been a raven!' - today's GoT

Great title and great essay by Alexander King adding to the ruthless criticism of everything existing in SimCity.

From the latest issue of Heterotopias:
heterotopias.itch.io/heterotopias-0…

Just spent like twenty minutes trying to remember the name of this game Bennett mentioned once, searching for every permutation of 'dos game arsonist', 'shareware burn building fire', etc etc, before finally finding it and kicking myself (its just 'Pyro')

I don't think games or game designers 'need' to address real world issues. But for me, understanding games has always been, in part, a microcosm of trying to better understand the world.

Anyway, check it out!

And really grateful for Gareth Damian Martin | Jump Over the Age for the opportunity to be part of this issue, all the help editing it (I'm not much of a writer!), and for the just stellar layout. With all the screenshots interlaid, I think the issue is just beautiful!

Later that fall I did a small talk about it for a racial justice teach-in that Naomi Clark 暗悪直美 #blacklivesmatter organized, and which Eric Zimmerman encouraged me to develop further into an essay (and to whom I'm both very thankful), and this is the eventual result of all that,-

The origins of this were from me playing SimCity 4 as a sort of comfort food in the early days of the pandemic, and in the midst of the George Floyd protests that summer becoming sort of disgusted with the assumptions built into it,-

It's only sort of about SimCity I guess, it's really more just a reflection of me reading things like Alex Vitale's End of Policing (2017), and processing these ideas through the filter of things I care about like system theory and simulation games,-

009 | Wielder of Power | OUT NOW
-Defund the SimCity Police
-Nationalism and Sekiro
-Photo series: Battlefield 2042, Control, Matrix Awakens
+more

🖤Get it here:
heterotopias.itch.io/heterotopias-0…

🖤Get all 9 issues for 25% Off:
itch.io/s/20655/hetero…

It seems the prompt they received was 'simple, stark and beyond anything we would have thought of' and not, as I alleged, 'something Game of Thrones-y, maps and all that'. But I was right about the music of the Ainur at least!
plainsofyonder.com/lord-of-the-ri…

Well, now I *do* know who was responsible for it! The studio Plains of Yonder put the sequence together, the creative director was kind enough to respond. And their site provides some background as well, check it out-

twitter.com/a_vitagliano/s…

I'm honestly amazed something so symbolic and thematic made it into production past the Amazon studio execs, who presumably were like 'we're thinking something Game of Thrones-y? Maps and all that?'
So, well done to whoever was responsible for it!
(9/9)