Recently I did not have access to the internet, so I was compelled to look at images that I had compiled for myself, rather than those that internet saturates me with. What I found was disturbing. For the most part, because of what it revealed about myself, in that, in over twenty-plus years, my neurosis has changed not at all. Observe for yourselves, a dot matrix printed image from the 386 PC version of the original SimCity.
I recall now that I had printed out my progress of a city so that I could review it the next day at work and make plans of what hoped to bring to life that night. Of course, I never spent so much time on my actual future, or the people around me, but damn, I had the city of Pinion in my hands.
The name was certainly a subconscious choice, Pinion meaning to immobilize a person by pinning back their extremities, while also being the definition of a part of the wing that gives flight. At the time I likely thought it as a conjunction of a state of stability linked with that of being a citizen/ denizen, a name without cognitive dissonance, or what used to be called irony.
You can see that I was planning a "NPS" (New Power Station) and various roadways when I could afford them, fortunately for the future Sims (yes, even back then they were called Sims) the nuclear powers station in what would become the 'burbs” was not to be. At some point I arrived at Pinion one hundred years later and low and behold, things pretty much panned out as planned (though those NPS were placed more reasonably further out of town). Also, I've gotten rid of a phallic island and infringed on a poor internal waterway. These images, my first time seeing them in at least a two decades, raised some introspection. First that of sadness, a simple emotion and so easy to cut straight to. But then, ruefulness, a contextual sadness. But then something more, resentment, one which carries over to my un-simulated world, an embarrassment of naivety. A naivety that believed, without reflection, that the future can be planned and that the current inhibitors and restrictions are not necessarily defied, but unknown.
-Phil Fogg