n 2010, Vincent Ocasla, a young architecture student in the Philippines, posted a video on YouTube announcing that he had “beaten” SimCity. His city, Magnasanti, was the product of three and a half years of planning and construction on the SimCity 2000 platform. News of his triumph quickly spread across the Internet. But many wondered: what did it mean to say that someone had “beaten” SimCity?
By analyzing the game’s algorithm for modular growth, Ocasla’s plan optimized the distances between resources, transportation infrastructure, and the energy grid to build the most densely populated city in SimCity history. Achieved at the cost of social repression and totalitarian control, Ocasla’s victory was a numerical one. His goal was not the quality of his Sims’ lives, but the quantification of technocratic efficiency; his intention, to critique the lethality of the game’s managerial assumptions.