{"id":28067,"date":"2013-11-19T20:19:39","date_gmt":"2013-11-19T20:19:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/in-fact-kay-illustrates-his-point-about-the-black\/"},"modified":"2013-11-19T20:19:39","modified_gmt":"2013-11-19T20:19:39","slug":"in-fact-kay-illustrates-his-point-about-the-black","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/in-fact-kay-illustrates-his-point-about-the-black\/","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>In fact, Kay illustrates his point about the black box nature of SimCity by describing how crime operates in the game. SimCity, Kay argues, &ldquo;gets the players to discover that the way to counter rising crime is to put in more police stations&rdquo; [Kay 2007]. Of all the possible options in the real world \u2014 increasing funding for education, reducing overcrowded housing, building mixed use developments, creating employment opportunities, and so on \u2014 it\u2019s the presence of the police that lowers crime in SimCity. This is the argument that game makes, its procedural rhetoric. Na\u00efve though it may be, the game has staked out a position on urban planning from which it cannot deviate. It doesn\u2019t take long for players to figure out the position. Indeed, the original manual itself tells the player that &ldquo;Police Departments lower the crime rate in the surrounding area. This in turn raises property values&rdquo; [Bremer 1993, 5]. It\u2019s one thing for the manual to propose a relationship between crime, property values, and law enforcement, but quite another for the player to see that relationship enacted within the simulation. Players have to get a feel for it on their own as they play the game. Recall Manovich\u2019s comment about the hidden logic of a game. A player\u2019s success in a simulation hinges upon discovering the algorithm underlying the game. But if the manual describes the model and players can discover it for themselves through gameplay, what\u2019s the value of looking at the code of the game? What can the code reveal that playing the game cannot?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<div class='attribution'><a href=\"http:\/\/www.digitalhumanities.org\/dhq\/vol\/7\/1\/000153\/000153.html\">Mark Sample (@samplereality). Criminal Code: Procedural Logic and Rhetorical Excess in Videogames. Digital Humanities Quarterly<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In fact, Kay illustrates his point about the black box nature of SimCity by describing how crime operates in the game. SimCity, Kay argues, &ldquo;gets the players to discover that the way to counter rising crime is to put in more police stations&rdquo; [Kay 2007]. Of all the possible options in the real world \u2014 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"quote","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[],"tags":[1538],"class_list":["post-28067","post","type-post","status-publish","format-quote","hentry","tag-humane-games","post_format-post-format-quote"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6PWot-7iH","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28067","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28067"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28067\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28067"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28067"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28067"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}