Construction and Management Simulations - Fundamentals of Game Design - page 542

THEME PARK, A DISGUSTING EXAMPLE OF POSITIVE FEEDBACK

Bullfrog Productions' CMS Theme Park lets the player build a single theme park, ride by
ride, into an empire of theme parks around the world. In addition to buying the rides,
which attract visitors, the player builds shops and restaurants to extract money from them
and hires maintenance and cleaning staff to keep the rides working and the park clean.
Each visitor to the park has a number of attributes: how much money he has, how hungry
or thirsty he is, and so on. One of these attributes is his current degree of nausea. If a
visitor becomes nauseated enough, he vomits, leaving a mess on the ground that has to
be cleaned up. Nausea can be caused by three things: riding a particularly violent ride,
being near an unclean bathroom, and — you guessed it — being near someone else's
vomit. In a crowded park, if the player hasn't hired enough cleaning staff to deal with
bathrooms and vomit, visitors create a chain-reaction of vomiting. This does nothing for
the reputation of the park and tends to hurt future ticket sales but it does inject a degree
of juvenile comic relief into an otherwise straightforward business simulation.

The Game World
It's easy enough to say that CMSs focus on processes, but the processes must be
meaningfully displayed on a computer screen and must fire the player's imagina-
tion. To do either, you must have an attractive setting. CMSs take place in a
simulated physical space, usually an outdoor world viewed from an aerial perspec-
tive in which the players can construct buildings or other objects. In the Caesar
series, the player builds an ancient Roman town, so the setting is a landscape near
a river. In the Civilization games, the player explores a world while at the same time
advancing a civilization both culturally and technologically, so its setting is an
entire continent or several of them.

NOTE A few pure
business simulations
don't take place in
a physical setting. The
interaction model of
Mr. Bigshot , discussed
earlier, is contestant-
based and doesn't use
a location.

CMSs are often set in 2D or 2.5D (layered 2D) worlds, even if they're actually
implemented with a 3D engine. Using a 2D world simplifies things for the player.
Just as strategy games remove the logistics so that the player can concentrate on
strategy (because he doesn't have a staff to help him), so do CMSs remove the third
dimension so that the player can concentrate on planning without worrying about
the exact details (again because he doesn't have a staff to help him). When a player
lays down a water pipe from a reservoir to a neighborhood, he doesn't want to have
to worry about whether the pipe goes over or under the subway system. He just
wants it to get where it needs to go.