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Deliberate Constructions of the Mind

When renowned game designer Will Wright designed and developed SimCity, the first “software toy” released by his company Maxis, he was strongly influenced by a 20-year-old text on urban planning written by Jay Forrester of MIT. I will argue in this article that we can only understand Wright’s actions if we think of the game model he developed as a fictional text. Yet Forrester’s work, which had been heavily criticized by urban planners, may also be considered as a work of fiction. I rely here on Gough’s theories concerning the utility of fiction in exploratory research as well as Smithers’ work on exploratory, freeform design work. Both of these models—Wright’s and Forrester’s—may be adapted, altered, or mined to create new fictional models. I will also cite Woolgar’s technology as-text paradigm to explain the ways in which these model texts differ.