Like in SimCity, if you really think about
playing the game, it??™s more like gardening. So you??™re kind of tilling the soil, and fertilizing it, and then
things pop up and they surprise you, and occasionally you have to go in and weed the garden, and
then you maybe think about expanding it, and so on. So the actual process of playing SimCity is
really closer to gardening. In either case, your mental model of the simulation is constantly evolving.
And in fact you can look at somebody??™s city that they designed at any point and see that it??™s kind of
a snapshot of their current understanding of the model. You can tell by what they??™ve done in the
game??”???Oh, I see they think this freeway is going to help them because they put it over here.??? So it
gives you some insight into their mental model of the game.
CP: What??™s the underlying metaphor of The Sims? The less obvious one, the garden-level one?
WW: That depends on how you play the game. For a lot of people, the mainstream game is more like juggling,
or balancing plates. You start realizing that you basically don??™t have enough time in the day
to do everything that you want to do.
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