Boom goes the sandbox.

A cool bit of news from the world of video games, specifically old school Civilization II.  This from Reddit, where a submitter has played the same game of the world building sim for 10 years.  Now in the year 4000, the planet is an environmental wasteland of misery, poverty, and war.  No real improvement or development is possible, as all resources are locked in combat with the other nations or cleaning up the last round of ice cap melting.

Awesome.  I love Civ, and could never get enough of moving through the development tree and wiping out enemies.  Until I raised the difficulty level and was destroyed in three turns by the AI.

One article about this fellow's dilemma actually looks at the AI for some of the issues.  From io9.com:

One way to look at it would be to decide that the game systems have hit their equilibrium point: the three remaining nations are locked in a cycle because of scripted AI behavior in the face of a world that cannot have any further technological innovations discovered or resources uncovered. The game has hit its breaking point; the walls of the sandbox have been found.

The image of pre-established rule bound entities being locked in such a stalemate is a very interesting one.  That the stalemate actually illustrates the box they're in is a phenomenal concept.  It's like using dynamite to measure the depth of a bathtub.

This is exactly what is going on in the office right now.  I am a bit of an interloper at work.  I move between the planning work and the development management work pretty easily.  That can also be read as I am a free agent, not trusted by either side.

And they are sides.  Most people don't know the difference between those two halves of the planning profession.  If you're in a planning department, you're a planner.  But there are groups of folks who use professional experience and community outreach to establish what goes where. And there are others who apply those visions to tangible permits and applications.

Ideally, these should feed back and forth between one another.  But they do not.  They are little fortified fiefdoms.

Now the department is locked in a fierce battle over the rewriting of the zoning ordinance.  This is not a vision document, it is law that puts limits and controls on the ground.  Part of it establishes how plans can establish zones.  The other part establishes how the zones actually effect the land they're on.

The fight that goes into this battle really illustrates the confines of the box.  Our AI that is established by the work we do - vision or development - really is defining the shape of the space we occupy.  We talk about process.  We talk about purposes.  We talk about bulk and setbacks and uses.

But we don't talk about neighborhoods.  We don't talk about architecture.  We only talk about economic development or health or poverty in carefully coded words like mixed use or density or affordability.

That is the truly frustrating part.  While the argument does feel artificial, we are true intelligences.  But we're stuck in this very small sandbox of our own making.