Here's some more information on the design of SimCity:
Will Wright on Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games (1996)
A summary of Will Wright’s talk to Terry Winnograd’s User Interface Class at Stanford, written in 1996 by Don Hopkins, before they worked together on The Sims at Maxis.
https://medium.com/@donhopkins/designing-user-interfaces-to-...
>SimCity Classic:
>Unfortunately I didn’t type the notes from this part of the talk in, but it’s been well covered elsewhere. Chaim Gingold’s PdD dissertation on “Play Design” has some excellent in-depth analysis of SimCity as a cultural artifact, its code, algorithms and design, the story of open sourcing SimCity, his SimCity Reverse Diagrams, and many interesting quotes from interviews with Will Wright and other game designers. It includes a fascinating chapter about Doreen Nelson (who wrote the original SimCity Teacher’s Guide) and her lifelong work on Design Based Learning (formerly City Building Education):
Gingold, Chaim. “Play Design.” Ph.D. thesis, University of California Santa Cruz, 2016.
https://search.proquest.com/docview/1806122688
>I did my Ph.D. research on play and the history of computing. My thesis argues that it is productive to consider playthings, playmates, playgrounds, and play practices as constituting a set with shared design characteristics. SimCity, a software plaything that confounds game-centric approaches (e.g. game studies and game design), is the keystone in an arch of case studies that takes us from some of the earliest examples of computer simulation all the way to model cities enacted with children, cardboard, and costumes, and unusual playgrounds made of junk.
Chaim Gingold: http://chaim.io/
Open Sourcing SimCity, by Chaim Gingold
Excerpt from page 289–293 of “Play Design”, a dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor in Philosophy in Computer Science by Chaim Gingold.
https://medium.com/@donhopkins/open-sourcing-simcity-58470a2...
SimCity reverse diagrams. Chaim Gingold (2016):
https://lively-web.org/users/Dan/uploads/SimCityReverseDiagr...
Doreen Nelson: https://www.cpp.edu/~dnelson/aboutdoreen.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design-based_learning
http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/c8p55t3m/entire_...