<story><title>Will Wright on designing user interfaces to simulation games (1996)</title><url>https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-user-interfaces-to-simulation-games-bd7a9d81e62d</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>noduerme</author><text>As the presenter in the first video says, Will Wright lead to a &amp;quot;real shift&amp;quot; in the &amp;quot;younger generation&amp;quot; about how &amp;quot;people think about computers and about computing in general&amp;quot;. As a member of the Will Wright generation of 12 year old Mac programmers who tried to take his games apart with ResEdit and tried to make our own, with Perl and HyperCard, this was really resonant, really true.&lt;p&gt;When SimEarth came out, I spent hours and hours just rereading the thick paper manual of how it all worked, because the only places I could play it on the disks were in the computer lab after school, or for an hour a day on the home computer.&lt;p&gt;He turned incredibly complex systems into games and games into systems, so that reading his game manuals made you think about the whole world.&lt;p&gt;One thing sad to me now, with the focus on GPT or Diffusion prompts, is how much kids are no longer thinking about the actual systems or logical rules they&amp;#x27;re playing with, and just learning to trick something that&amp;#x27;s already inscrutable and smarter than them. Mastering AI prompts or even running your own neural net doesn&amp;#x27;t teach anything like logic or the kind of deep, recursive cause and effect structure you could get from Will Wright&amp;#x27;s toys, or even from CK3... even if you get all your prompts perfect to make what you want, it teaches something much more like dependence on a magical oracle than, say, a toy&amp;#x2F;game&amp;#x2F;sim that really encourages you to deconstruct and take pleasure in all its interconnections that you can understand.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>shagie</author><text>&amp;gt; When SimEarth came out, I spent hours and hours just rereading the thick paper manual of how it all worked, because the only places I could play it on the disks were in the computer lab after school, or for an hour a day on the home computer.&lt;p&gt;A copy of the manual can be found at &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;retro-commodore.eu&amp;#x2F;files&amp;#x2F;downloads&amp;#x2F;amigamanuals-xiik.net&amp;#x2F;Games&amp;#x2F;Sim%20Earth%20-%20Manual-ENG.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;retro-commodore.eu&amp;#x2F;files&amp;#x2F;downloads&amp;#x2F;amigamanuals-xiik...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Page 149 (yes - it had a lot of pages) starts off with &amp;quot;An Introduction to Earth Science&amp;quot; and continues to the appendix on page 201.  It has enough content to make a good starter for a grade school science class&amp;#x27;s syllabus.</text></comment>
<story><title>Will Wright on designing user interfaces to simulation games (1996)</title><url>https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-user-interfaces-to-simulation-games-bd7a9d81e62d</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>noduerme</author><text>As the presenter in the first video says, Will Wright lead to a &amp;quot;real shift&amp;quot; in the &amp;quot;younger generation&amp;quot; about how &amp;quot;people think about computers and about computing in general&amp;quot;. As a member of the Will Wright generation of 12 year old Mac programmers who tried to take his games apart with ResEdit and tried to make our own, with Perl and HyperCard, this was really resonant, really true.&lt;p&gt;When SimEarth came out, I spent hours and hours just rereading the thick paper manual of how it all worked, because the only places I could play it on the disks were in the computer lab after school, or for an hour a day on the home computer.&lt;p&gt;He turned incredibly complex systems into games and games into systems, so that reading his game manuals made you think about the whole world.&lt;p&gt;One thing sad to me now, with the focus on GPT or Diffusion prompts, is how much kids are no longer thinking about the actual systems or logical rules they&amp;#x27;re playing with, and just learning to trick something that&amp;#x27;s already inscrutable and smarter than them. Mastering AI prompts or even running your own neural net doesn&amp;#x27;t teach anything like logic or the kind of deep, recursive cause and effect structure you could get from Will Wright&amp;#x27;s toys, or even from CK3... even if you get all your prompts perfect to make what you want, it teaches something much more like dependence on a magical oracle than, say, a toy&amp;#x2F;game&amp;#x2F;sim that really encourages you to deconstruct and take pleasure in all its interconnections that you can understand.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>emrah</author><text>&amp;gt; One thing sad to me now, with the focus on GPT or Diffusion prompts, is how much kids are no longer thinking about the actual systems or logical rules they&amp;#x27;re playing with, and just learning to trick something that&amp;#x27;s already inscrutable and smarter than them&lt;p&gt;This is something I don&amp;#x27;t understand. Sure, not every kid is going to think about that but that&amp;#x27;s ok. We need some kids to think about it, probably a small subset..&lt;p&gt;Back when computers were new, not every kid tried to make games or understand how they worked either. Only a small subset and that&amp;#x27;s how it is..</text></comment>