Simulacra

http://www.ellenrixford.com/htmls/MechanicalDisplay.html

Once upon a time, a brilliant engineer by the name of Trurl built a miniature kingdom for the deposed dictator of another planet to govern as he pleased for the rest of his days. At such a small scale, the bored despot could harmlessly indulge his “autocratic aspirations” without risk to the “democratic aspirations of his former subjects.”

This fable, by Polish sci-fi writer Stanisław Lem, appeared in 1981 in The Mind’s Eye, an anthology of reflections on artificial cognition, where it was read by Will Wright, creator of SimCity and founder of the Sim empire. In the many interviews he’s given, Wright cites his encounter with the story as an inspiration for SimCity.

Released in 1989 by then-indie game developer Maxis, SimCity was a gamble. Nobody thought anyone would bother to tinker with an urban development simulator — let alone one without a clear objective. The game is not a story but a managerial system. You can’t definitively win or lose.