School of Culture and Communication - Theses

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SimCity: text, space, culture

BOULTON, ELI JAMES ( 2015)

Critiques in the humanities and social sciences of the SimCity games have often stressed the restrictive and mystifying aspects of its underlying ideology. From this point of view, the ways in which these games work to encourage certain player-behaviours and discourage others serves to reinforce certain hegemonic values in urban management and planning. Other writers have contended that players possessed far greater levels of agency in challenging these ideas. This contention in critiques of SimCity is but one expression of a much wider problem in game studies. This problem is, how do we reconcile the multitude of play experiences implied by instances of player agency, with the restrictiveness implied by game structure? This thesis will strive to answer this question using the philosophical terminology of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's 'A Thousand Plateaus' (2003, trans. Massumi).