![]() Therefore, it should come as no surprise when I suggest that the game’s procedures and systems resemble neoliberal economic practices and ideologies. And, like the pervasive inequalities of the present, many players of the game are simply left out regardless of how skilled they may be or how hard they work. However crude, SimCity BuildIt is a tiny global economy that circulates its digital goods in the same networks that make financial markets hum in the twenty-first century. Galloway (2004) calls “protocol” they are protocological artifacts that use distributed information networks to create a shared “world,” a flattened space in which anyone connected can participate. Mobile games depend upon what Alexander R. It demonstrates how games played on smartphones and tablets do not cut across national boundaries because of their potential to create communities of players through nonlinguistic signification, but rather because of a shared economic system made possible by the standardization of global communication networks. Instead of demonstrating the aesthetic, ludic, critical, or procedural possibilities of the form, SimCity BuildIt is paradigmatic of the repetitive, accumulatory, and exploitative informatic logics of contemporaneity. But the current realities of mobile gaming significantly temper any end of history utopianism. The mobile game, in this way, seems poised for building cosmopolitan communities united in collective global play. In-game screenshotĪt times, SimCity BuildIt makes me think that the mobile game has the potential to be the silent film of the twenty-first century, able to cross national and linguistic boundaries, uniting audiences not because of a shared language, but because of the signifying capacities of gestures, music, and iconography. While traveling in the game to purchase goods, I have seen nearly identical virtual cities named for real places in South Africa and Australia.įigure 1: SimCity BuildIt (Redwood City, CA: EA Mobile, 2014). ![]() I have competed in weekly competitions with people from Germany and Korea (and mostly lost). While playing SimCity BuildIt, I have traded goods with players who speak Arabic, French, Japanese, and Russian (though we have never exchanged a word). Its expansive international community seems, at first, to procedurally deliver on the promises of free market globalization, achieving an equitable marketplace in which anyone, anywhere can participate. With forty million players worldwide, SimCity BuildIt is also the most played SimCity game ever released (Lazarides, 2015). He also blogs at The Hyperarchival Parallax.ĮA Mobile’s SimCity BuildIt, released for iOS and Android in 2014, is the newest entry in the historic SimCity franchise. His essays on contemporary literature and culture have appeared in boundary 2, The b2 Review, Critique, David Foster Wallace and “The Long Thing”, The Silence of Fallout, and Wide Screen. Fest teaches at Carnegie Mellon University.
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