notes.husk.org/likes images.

Top, Anselm Kiefer, The Breaking of the Vessels (Chevi- rat ha-kelim), glass, lead, mixed media, about 280 x 380 cm. This iteration made for the exhibition Falling Stars at Grand Palais, Paris, May 30 – July 8, 2007. Via. Bottom, performance by Murakami Saburo, Passing Through, series of Japanese shōji「障子」paper screens lined up in the form of a passageway during the 2nd Gutai Art exhibition, 1956. Photograph by Kiyoji Otsuji, printed in 2012. Via.

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The way (SimCity creator Will) Wright sees games, players occupy and explore what he calls “possibility spaces.” Simply put, possibility spaces are all the potential arrangements a system (or game) might find itself in. The whole tree of possible movements of pieces on a chessboard, or the countless ways you might reach a destination in Grand Theft Auto, each are a kind of possibility space.

These spaces often intersect along numerous dimensions — in the Sims, for example, the interplay between social success and professional success created a jointed set of possibility spaces that a player could work to maximize (the game was designed around an ideal, not unlike in real life, that lay in achieving a balance between the two).

The intersecting choices faced by a player of SimCity include the aesthetic priorities, economic models, level of environmental concern, and other more subjective dimensions of the city. Depending on the player, a city might be a green oasis or a Koyaanisqatsi-esque nightmare; some might try to make the most visually pleasing city they can, or simply have fun wreaking havoc. Their decisions in these spaces—which can be measured, by the way—are often a reflection of their own values and sensibilities.

“Players right off the bat were forced to sit down and in fact pick their goals,” Wright says. “They had to first of all decide what their values were, what kind of city would they like to live in. That was part of it, and the other part of it was that at some point, invariably, the people who played it enough would start arguing with the assumptions of the simulation. They would start saying, ‘I don’t think mass transit’s that effective, I don’t think pollution really would drive away that many residents.’ At that point, they’re also having to clarify their internal model of the way a city operates … all of a sudden your assumptions become clear to you.”

Doug Bierend, from SimCity That I Used to Know - On the game’s 25th birthday, a devotee talks with creator Will Wright, for Medium, October 17, 2014.