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Article

Abstract

While the author of this chapter agrees with anthropologists who reject an urban studies predicated on postmodern surfaces and insist that we analyze cities in regional, national and global contexts of political economy, he nevertheless suggests that the urban imaginary has never been so important: Movies, television and music have proven all too useful in the continued vilification of an urban "underclass." In 2001, in order to explore the role media might play in the structuring and delimitating of the ways we think about cities, Collins assigned SimCity, a computer simulation game combining models of urban development with "cellular automata," to his "Anthropology of American Culture" class. Students were asked to design any city they liked; the author analyzed the subsequent imagined cities ethnographically, "visiting" them in the capacity of a digital anthropologist. The resulting spaces evidenced high levels of oppression and urban abandonment, echoing the ruinous, urban divestment in the United States in the post-World War II era and, in particular, the rise of parasitic "edge cities" around pathologized, urban cores. Although SimCity theoretically allows for the development of a wide variety of urban forms and the final result of a session, moreover, can never be entirely predicted, the game is nevertheless structured according to historically particular perspectives of the U.S. city as a "growth machine" that preempt the formation of other, more utopian, spaces. Through its narrow, monetarist interpretation of the city, Collins suggests the extent to which SimCity delimits the realization of alternative futures and co-opts players into co-performances of urban dystopia. This chapter raises questions regarding the veracity of ethnographic method and its relation to the virtual worlds of video games while also providing insight into the relation between game players' expectations and their imaginations.

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