assignment. When something goes wrong, you can say, “Oh, it’s because I forgot to do
this. I should have bought one of those.” I think people can reason through their failures
and assign credit to the failures more easily with the economic models. Plus the idea
that you have money and you make money this way and you spend money on that all
seems very natural to people, whereas when you get into the complex things like diver-
sity, food webs, and things like that, people just don’t have an instinct for it.
And nothing’s more frustrating than playing and not understanding why
you’re losing...
Right, exactly. And so inSimEarthpeople would be playing and all of a sudden their
planet would freeze up and they’d have no clue why it happened. And I, as the simula-
tion engineer, couldn’t tell them either!
One thing I like aboutSimEarthwas how it could play tones that would commu-
nicate information about the state of your planet.
I always wanted to do more with
that, but I never really got
around to it. There’s been some
interesting work on data
auralization. Instead of visual-
ization, you can take complex
data and map it to sound,
because there are certain sound
ranges that we’re incredibly
good at discriminating. There
was actually some work done at
the Santa Fe Research Institute
in those areas. One of the things
that they did that was remark-
able was taking seismograph
data, from earthquakes and
whatnot, and mapping it into
sound waves, using pretty much
the same waveform just mapped
to a different frequency. And
they did the same thing with
underground nuclear tests.
From the seismograph, if you
look at the waveforms, they’re
pretty much identical. It’s really hard to tell any difference at all between the nuclear
test and the earthquake. But when you map it to sound, there’s a very definite tinniness
to the nuclear test, which you can instantly recognize. And it’s interesting that, no mat-
ter how they mapped the waves visually, they couldn’t find a way to discriminate
between them. But as soon as they mapped it to sound it was obvious.
Chapter 22: Interview: Will Wright 417
SimEarth