Games were “designed to reward the kinds of decisions that the game designer thinks are proper,” instilling opaque values and beliefs into players—a critique later leveled at SimCity. The model was a “black box,” and even if it was good model, one could not “fathom its complexities by this type of external teasing.”
[...] [and here is a follow-up on how that may go wrong]
Cities would be artfully and aggressively abstracted into their essential feedback structures. The models would be unencumbered by a rigorous adherence to quantitative data, or really any kind of data, for that matter.