Reading Material

An interesting new column by Will Doig on Salon.com entitled Dream City begins with an article about trends in urban renewal and the motivating forces behind them. Well worth a read at the link below.

How should we design the cities of our dreams? by Will Doig, via Salon.

I read a good piece by David Wong on Cracked the other day (contrary to what you might expect, they have a lot of really good articles) about recent worrying trends in the video game industry. Two parts of the article in particular struck me as particularly relevant to what we're doing here. First, he talks about how a combination of increased piracy and rising development costs are driving companies towards ever-more-restrictive DRM and a "software as a service" model, in which one-time purchases of games are replaced with a subscription and/or microtransaction-based approach. Second, he points to the growing lack of innovative titles as studios concentrate on "safe" genres and themes to protect their return on the increasingly large budgets needed for top-tier games.

Read a great post this week by Jeff Atwood at Coding Horror (incidentally a really entertaining blog, even if you're not interested in programming) about version numbers and their growing irrelevance. He holds up Google Chrome (which happens to be my browser of choice) as a prime example of this: while most programs are defined by version number, like Internet Explorer 6 or Firefox 3, Chrome has essentially abandoned major releases in favor of gradual, minute improvements, which are pushed out in the background via auto-update. As Jeff puts it:

…as a regular user of Chrome, I no longer think of myself as using a specific version of Chrome, I just … use Chrome.

This is exactly the paradigm I'm hoping we can achieve with Metropolis; Although clearly this is tricky in the face of a large amount of user-created content, Chrome demonstrates pretty well that even something with many independent extensions can do it. In any case the post is well worth a read, check it out here.

In other news, continuing apologies for the long hiatus, regular updates will hopefully be resuming soon!

There's a great article by Jonah Lehrer in the New York Times Magazine about the work of physicists Geoffrey West and Luis Bettencourt and their application of advanced math and statistics to urban studies (also linked to at Simtropolis, which is where I found it.) Lots of stuff for city sim fans to think about, but most importantly the idea that urbanization patterns can be explained in terms of a few relatively simple equations; obviously that has big implications for what we hope to do here. Fairly long but well worth taking a couple minutes to check out.