The Concourse Vol. 4

Hello and Welcome to The Concourse! A newsletter by stoic da poet.

The Concourse will feature various thoughts & updates from stoic and generally lean towards my collective interests of: cities, coding, culture, creativity, conversation, and climate. We skipped last week for Independence Day in the US but we’re back this week with a streamlined letter with some playful thought.

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The Perks of Living in a Simulation

A special “ponderings” section this week, brought to you with love for escapism.

Last week I found myself in a dark basement in front of an old TV, booting up an Xbox 360. The game in the disc holder was MLB 2K10, a baseball game created in an era when game publishers had to pack their annual releases with new features to keep players entertained all year long. For a sport that basically started the sports analytics boom we know today, this was exciting for a young nerd gamer like myself.

After a few tries to get the disc to stick (how easily we forget the tribulations of CDs), I was greeted with an atomic blast of nostalgia as the load-up screen flashed clips from bygone days of late 2000s baseball - Evan Longoria, Derek Jeter, David Ortiz. Instantly, I was transported back to late-spring evenings and mid-summer mornings bunked up next to a small screen with a notepad beside me, fervently keeping track of players to watch for in my many Franchise Mode endeavors.

What hit me the hardest when I loaded up the 2036 Boston Red Sox starring CPU-generated stars Melky Brewster and Luis Aruba was not just a disbelief at how far I made it back then, but rather how enjoyable it was to escape into a virtual world of our choosing.

Playing long hours of video games yearning for simulated worlds of non-existent teams and created characters is broadly looked down upon by the majority of society. Rightly so, how fortunate are we to be blessed with the time, resources, and access to get to do experience these. And how dangerous can it be to slide into an existence where a virtual one is preferred? We see and hear this time and again.

Yet to me, simulation games are the great extenders of the human imagination. They open up worlds for exploration, propose potential real-world challenges, and offer escapes into realities some of us may never otherwise be exposed to. The complexity of parameters in sim genres from sports to survival to history offers real-world skill building and know-how. Who didn’t learn a bit about how business worked thanks to Roller Coaster Tycoon?

How exciting it is, then, to live in a time where simulated worlds are becoming easier to generate and propel. What kind of real-world challenges might future gamers face against AI agents trained on years of data on GM decision-making in sports games or the true cause & effect of economic policies in political or economy sims? What about city-building and transit planning, climate resilience or resource management?

As I closed down the game and returned to real-life, I felt like I was closing the chapter of an old photo album or yearbook. How rewarding it was to feel that I had accomplished something while playing a game, as opposed to just enjoying an hour or two of mindless shooting. Fair enough, playing with spreadsheets isn’t everybody’s idea of fun. But for technically-minded and artistically-inclined imaginative world-builders, simulation games offer a rewarding exercise in entertainment.

Besides…

maybe we’re all just living in a simulation?

Naturally, this gives me some ideas for simulation games. What about these?

• Manage an emergency response team handling a world of increasingly devastating climate disasters

• Imagine those old Civilization games except instead of Gandhi nuking the world, you have to negotiate with an AI chatbot to prevent it

• A city-demolisher game instead of a city-builder with the goal of returning the world to a more natural state, except it begins with worlds mapped from Google Street

What do you think? What kind of simulation games would be cool to play if you could magically whip one up?

Regardless, if you’re reading this - I appreciate you! I’m always interested to hear what you have to think, so feel free to reply to this email directly.

Working on something exciting yourself? Let me know. I am beginning the start of a reader & friend spotlight section soon and I’d love to have you involved.

Until next time,

stoic
🪴💜

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