Vincent Ocasla says that in fashioning the “Magnasanti” metropolis, he has “beaten” SimCity by creating the max stable population of six million. It consists of four grids of identical 12 x 12 grids with everyone’s workplace within walking distance. There are no roads, the city runs entirely on subways. There’s zero abandoned buildings zero congestion, and zero water pollution. It sounds like paradise, but it hides a dark core with a sinister message for would-be top-down urban planners.
Ocasla told Vice:
Technically, no one is leaving or coming into the city. Population growth is stagnant. Sims don’t need to travel long distances, because their workplace is just within walking distance. In fact they do not even need to leave their own block. Wherever they go it’s like going to the same place….…The ironic thing about it is the sims in Magnasanti tolerate it. They don’t rebel, or cause revolutions and social chaos. No one considers challenging the system by physical means since a hyper-efficient police state keeps them in line. They have all been successfully dumbed down, sickened with poor health, enslaved and mind-controlled just enough to keep this system going for thousands of years. 50,000 years to be exact. They are all imprisoned in space and time.
They also don’t live past age 50, which Ocasla is fine with because max population, not max longevity, was the goal.
In this over-the-top video, you can watch how Vince made the city, a process of trial and error that took four years to complete and involved burrowing into the code and math of SimCity to figure out how to game the ultimate solution. It comes off as a bit occultish and intimidating, so much so that, according to a comment Vince made on his YouTube channel, the original video was falsely flagged and taken down from YouTube for containing Satanic messages. That’s okay, it’s nearly Halloween.
Gallery of Ocasla’s graph paper equations and drawings [Shareapic]
magnasanti [via mammoth]
THE TOTALITARIAN BUDDHIST WHO BEAT SIM CITY [Vice]
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But did his Launch Arco’s take off?
YES
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Here’s a megalomaniac with way too much time on his hands…
better for an amateur tyrant to do it with Sims rather than with real people. Imagine if Hitler had stuck to watercolors…
damn, did I just Godwin?
I think so, but it’s still on topic, so I’ll let you pass.
Yes, but it’s relevant so… I think you technically broke it.
Adolf Hitler was rejected as a young man on his application to art school. One thing led to another… and the United States dropped two atomic bombs on the sovereign nation of Japan.
and, some (myself included) would argue that being the only country to have it’s population nuked caused some of the more idiosyncrasies in the modern Japanese culture, like hentai tentacle porn. So, if hitler had been admitted to art school, would we not have any tentacle porn either?
Well, that would require ignoring the fact that Hitler declared war on the US, not the other way around. Japan would have gotten burned either way, but Stalin may have ended up with the bomb first, as there would have been less of a reason for Jewish physicists to flee Europe, and the geographical distance of the Atlantic was a bigger deal back then.
Or we could have seen Command and Conquer: Red Alert played out.
Wow, guys. I was just quoting Brian Regan.
Nope, as the fascination Japan has with tentacle porn dates as far back as *at least* the 1700′s – I couldn’t find the statue I was looking for, so here’s a painting (probably NSFW depending on where you W): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dream_of_the_Fisherman's_Wife
OMG I love Hokusai! Never knew he dabbled in erotica though.
This sounds really familiar to me and I recall it having a different ending…the ending I remember involves Reavers leaving to destroy and maim their way across the universe. And the place also started with “M”!
Great reference. I approve (because of course you care about my approval).
You’ve obviously been listening to too many candy bar commercials.
The ironic thing about it is the sims in Magnasanti tolerate it. They don’t rebel, or cause revolutions and social chaos. No one considers challenging the system by physical means since a hyper-efficient police state keeps them in line.
my sims did not do any of that either because as their overlord and creator I turned those functions off. Just like I did not allow that pesky tree huger mother earth to cause natural disasters. It’s my world and I don’t want anyone screwing it up for me.
It still was fun to send the occasional tornado or fire to mess with their little minds.
I wonder what would happen to his system if you put in one square of road on one edge of the map and tell it to connect to the neighboring city.
I think an experiment is in order.
It said all utilities come from neighbors. If that include garbage disposal, there has to be a connection to a neighbor.
Not too long ago I put the finishing touches on a city plan I’ve been toying with for a long time — all residential zones are adjacent to water, all dense commercial buildings are rated astronomical, and most road and rail are in tunnels. 400,000 population, education 112, and a tax rate of 3%/1%/3% adds a couple of thousand to the funds most years. I’m thinking about gettin SimCity4 now.
Out of all that information, the one thing that stuck out most to me is that I mistook the name of his first city, Armadasanti, as a reference to the actor Armand Assante. I was thinking about what a hilariously obscure choice that was; was he referring to Assante’s work in the distopian police state-like city in Judge Dredd, or was he referring to The Prophecy, an ecological fable about the evils of industrial pollution? Boy was I on the wrong track.
Your track is more interesting.
This video is super creepy.
“Zero Water Population”? So the problems I had with that game were the result of too many mermaids?
Since when is Satanism against Youtube’s policies?
I agree.
Upon reading the article, this was the most troubling information coming from the article.
That’s what I was wondering.
So was I
Can’t you flag a video for any reason you like? Rabid fundamentalists are the likely culprits.
Um…everyone knows that this is a computer game, right?
Thats what they make you think.
Reminds me of the book Ender’s Game.
Everyone knows that they choose the leaders from the games.
And 1984 was just a book.
I wonder where in this city they produce food.. or do the just make McNuggets out of 50 year olds?
Soylent McNuggets are people!
What is the Sweet n Sour sauce made from?
He is doing this with simcity 3000 . Sim city 4 is much more difficult .
I’ll say, the thing wouldn’t let me past the loading screen…
No kidding. It took him six friggin’ years to figure this out w/SC3K. I’ll look for his SC4K video sometime around 2070.
Wow, a liberal paradise! Too bad we can’t digitize Ted Rall and send him to live there.
I’d like to send Sarah Palin there.
But Sarah Palin doesn’t *want* to live in a perfect totalitarian state. Ted Rall just recently said that he does.
Actually, that’s not true– she’d be perfectly fine if she were the leader of the totalitarian state.
Way to soundbite. What Rall actually said was:
I’m all the way on the far left, as far as you can get, so I would like to see a completely leftist proletariat dictatorship, but what I want is neither here nor there. I don’t think that what I want is important, or relevant, or realistic to even discuss, because once you unleash the forces of revolution, anything could happen.
Yeah, a dictatorship sounds nothing at all like a totalitarian state.
dictatorship means something different here than you think it means. we typically use the term to mean a single authoritarian ruler that wields power to his own device. well, now imagine that one person as millions of workers, wielding their power to their own (collective) device.
that’s the political theory idea of “dictatorship” anyway. it’s a great dream – the idea that we can all live happily together in collective self-interest. john lennon type stuff. requires entirely too much faith in humanity, though. we’re just not capable of it.
Yes, I have read on Marx’s dictatorship of the proletariat, and I know what it means. But a dictatorship by any ideal is still a tightly controlled, small power base, whether literally a single ruler or a small group of power-wielding individuals. The result, even with “majority support” is still a totalitarian state.
As in, a state under the control of a single individual, faction or class that has no limits to its authority that regulates all public and private life.
not exactly, but that’s most likely what it would devolve into.
there is a distinction, though. it’s difficult to distinguish b/c it requires looking at the entire state of society from a viewpoint that doesn’t exist naturally.
i had a really hard time wrapping my mind around it (& i have a degree in this shit), but if you’re really interested in reading about it, i found the best literature on the matter to be HG Wells’ book The Open Conspiracy. it’s virtually impossible to find – it’s been out of print for almost 80 years. interesting read though (if you like political theory).
The really sad thing about SimCity is that after version 4 the game designers have no clue what the hardcore fan base likes/wants. After “4″ they totally missed the mark. I suspect they hired a manager from Radio Shack or Circuit City to oversee the development of SimCity.
What are you talking about, we should all want to build amusement parks and zoo’s. Why concentrate on what made you great when you can branch out and expand through new verticals?
I’m not talking about all the “tycoon” or Sim games, I was referring to simcity 5 that was a total fail.
Simcity 5? Wasn’t that called Simcity Societies?
Didn’t buy that one :-/
You didn’t miss much. I loved all the SimCity games, but I panned Societies when it came out:
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/review/simcity-societies/
There is no Sim City 5. Sim City 4 is the last Sim City game out there.
Yep. Also, there are only three Star Wars movies. It really is too bad George Lucas couldn’t put his genius behind another great Star Wars film.
Reticulating Splines!
Ascending Maslow’s Heirarchy!
But, wrong Sims game.
He essentially created a system of Arcologies. That notion’s been around for quite a while. Saw it in some scifi in the 80s when people thought Japanese megacorps would take over the planet.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcology
It’s not a bad idea, as long as you don’t take it to the extreme he did. The notion of living in a mega-building that contained work, home, and shopping is pretty comfortable. I despise commuting.
What do you men by “when people thought Japanese megacorps would take over the planet”? As in what’s with the past tense?
(OK, maybe the Japanese part is a little outdated, but I guess we can safely replace that with “multi-national”)
Not so much. The japanese mega-corp, or more precisely japanese-style megacorps, where a person would work for a single corporation their whole life, the corporation would take care of them, give them a nice place to live, health care, and pension in return for unwavering loyalty is very, very, different than the current megacorporate system that favor wringing as much out of an employee as possible and tossing them to the curb at the first opportunity.
Now I know where they got the idea for SimTower.
A lot of us have that already, but not in a megabuilding. Some can already work at home and can use the internet to take care of just about any shopping need they have.
As someone who liked the game but never got good at it, I’m very impressed.
What the Matrix is.
Taken down for containing Satanic messages? Why is Youtube making decisions about what religions are appropriate?
And cue the masses of hutt burt atheists to come and scream about how Christianity is destroying the world one youtube video at a time.
I agree it was wrong to take it down for that reason, but acting like that is a story, and that the person didn’t just upload it again and was fine, likely due to the actions of one mod or small group of people flagging it, and some software automatically taking it down, rather than a giant conglomerate of evil Christians TRYING TO CENSOR THE WORLD.
ummm… u kind of come off as a jackass christian. no one said anything about any religious people at all, just how it was odd for you tube to be deciding one religion was valid or not by not allowing a reference to it. that’s all and it’s a decent point. calm down
hyperbolic much?
I find it funny when one person makes a good point in a relatively calm manner and the response is akin to “OMG YOU ARE SO OVERREACTING!!!!!!!111! how dare you say mean things about anyone, you think EVERYONE IS EVIL!!!”
No one cares about christians on this one- it’s just a question of why YouTube is deciding that Satanism is inappropriate (or a question of how they even define such things). People against censorship don’t have to even be a part of the censored group. I’m not a Satanist by any stretch, but I still question the validity of removing content with Satanic messages. I’m not a Christian, but I would question the validity of YouTube removing content if they determined that Christianity was also inappropriate. Unfortunately, here is where a lot of Christians (in my personal experience) tend to waver. They can’t stand the thought of Christians being silenced, but also don’t care to support opposing groups that are put down or censored. Too often, they seem to support the silencing of opposing views. Religion and a free society are difficult concepts to reconcile.
am i the only one that gets bored after a few hours and send monsters and tornadoes to terrify my villagers?
No, and there are people who will let their sims die in fires or in the pool in The Sims 1-3. Poor Sims.
I’ve never played Sims, but I’ve heard of some twisted but ingenious ways to torture one’s creations. I don’t know enough about the game to know whether these schemes would even work.
Plans??! 3 YEARS in development?!?! Holy SHIT! I will show this to my husband the next time he complains about how much I’m gaming.
Kind of reflects something interesting I have seen in movies and books. Pretty much all utopias end up being dystopias when you get in there and actually see what is going on.
I think it’s inevitable. A true utopia is probably impossible. Some resources: land, status, and the like- are inherently finite, and conflicts will arise over them unless all members of society adhere to some value system that resolves such conflicts. Since humans have free will, not everyone will hold those values (at least not without exceedingly authoritarian measures). Control in turn breeds dystopia.
Screenshots make it look like simcity 3000. I wonder if the same thing works in simcity 4
There’s never a zombie virus around when you need one.
While maximum population density may be dystopic, I’m not sure why being able to get everywhere by mass transit or walking short distances is. A couple of businesses have moved so it’s not as convenient as it was, but at one point I could walk to the grocery store, the doctor’s office, several restaurants, a video store, my mechanic (when your car needs repair it’s nice to be able to walk home from the garage), a pharmacy (actually pharmacies, there have been four but the third one closed before the fourth one opened), a golf course, a school with sports fields you can use after school is out, and all this with a view of nothing but trees out my apartment window. And I could take a bus to the mall if I wanted.
Satanic messages? Can I start flagging videos for containing Christian messages?
I wonder if he ever read Frank Herbert’s /The Dosadi Experiment/?
Was this with sim city 2000 or later? I can’t read the article, blocked at work.
Who built this city, Ivo Shandor?