What possible relationships could there be between racial tension and virtual reality? This question was nearly impossible to ask in the spring of 1992 when the uprisings in South Central Los Angeles gave my studies temporary pause by forcing me to consider how my scholarly work — cultural studies of the virtual reality phenomenon — could speak to this seemingly unrelated problem.’ The answer came shortly and indirectly from a computer graphics industry trade journal reporting on a South Central redevelopment project at UCLA’s School of Urban Planning: “In the aftermath of [the spring 1992) riots, there’s no question that things in south central Los Angeles haven’t been working, and a new set of (computer) graphics boards is playing an important role in shaping the area’s economicand social recovery.” These graphics boards, when linked together, become something called the RealityEngine™, The RealityEngine™ represents one of the more imaginative computer graphics visualization technologies and is widely employed for rendering virtual worlds. These worlds are compelling for their technical virtuosity; who would not want to visit the future of South Central on a computer? These worlds also weave a formidable network of social meaning — computer graphics, urban rebellion, computer-mediated representation of space, the declining city, Rodney King, virtual reality, and Daryl Gates — that gave some denotation to my search for connections between racial tension and technoscience; these connections are made apparent by the vivid and productive explorations conducted in the study of science, technology, and society.3 The RealityEngine™ is properly a technosemiotic* computer workstation, a base of operations for engineering virtual worlds, making sense of social spaces like South Central LA, and generating the articulations between the simultaneous knowledges of engineering and society. It is technical insofar as it has “graphics boards”; it is semiotic in its ability to discursively invoke the social, political, and mythical space called South Central without missing a beat. But these are only nervously implied invocations; the RealityEngine™ explicitly ignores the contingencies of racial tension even as it is employed to address the structural collapse of South Central following one of the most explosive race rebellions in US history. For the planners at UCLA, the RealityEngine™ is, evidently, just the tonic needed for urban unrest, racism, and police brutality.

How does the RealityEngine™, this technosemiotic workstation, link race and representation, urban rebellion and computer visual- ization, city decline and hope to create a better living environment? How does this workstation congeal seemingly disparate nodes of meaning into a cohesive network that is neither “just” engineering nor “just” social practices? What I would like to do in this essay is to make some sense of the network of meanings between technoscience visions of the urban future and the question of race within these future visions. My contention is that many virtual visions of the urban future, such as the one constructed on the RealityEngine™, are, insofar as they respond to the contingencies of racial tension, intimately bound to a racially marked, present-day urban inner core.

THE GHETTO AND REPRESENTATIONS OF URBAN DECLINE

“Urban decline” is a key phrase that describes the state of the city both in the United States and throughout the world. Before the early 1960s, debates about urban problems were imprecise and unfocused. Dilapidated housing, blight, crime, and exodus to the suburbs were variously singled out as evidence or provocations of the city’s declining state. Since the early 1960s the “ghetto” has been the locus of attention for describing the crisis of urban decline. The pivotal year, according to Robert A. Beauregard, was 1963, when racial uprisings in Birmingham, Savannah, Chicago, and Philadelphia brought together the previously vague arguments surrounding urban decline and centered the problem on questions of race and racism.

Images of the urban ghetto as a burned-out, riotous, and crime-ridden zone, marked distinctively by thick masses of people of color, have been exploited by Hollywood. Any time a bleak, blighted back-drop is needed to add a dingy and exotic edge to a film, a ghetto is fabricated on some studio backlot. Hollywood designers for near-future science fiction films have also found the ghetto to be a fruitful source of inspiration for dreary urban images. RoboCop, Demolition Man, Batman, Blade Runner, Terminator 2, to name but a few, all offer a glimpse of racially marked, “ghettoized,” criminal images of city living at the millennium. Far fewer images of livable and hospitable urban space have made their way into the circuits of popular consciousness. At this moment it may be that dystopia is the viable framework for describing future urban worlds. With the millennium only 67 months—at this writing — away, we might anticipate even more apocalyptic speculation, which will further dilute the visions of livable and hospitable urban space.

A notable exception to the prominence of urban dystopic visions has recently appeared in the form of a computer game, SimCity2000TM, SimCity2000™ is a simulation technology that allows players to build custom virtual city spaces. This game, like the RealityEngine™, is a way to imagine utopic possibilities for urban futures; also, like the RealityEngine™, it evades the contingencies of urban racial tension to create this utopia. Both SimCity2000mm and the Reali- tyEngine™ present enticing and compelling alternatives to the bleak and insistent images of urban decline. They suggest an answer (or, I might hazard, at least a novel approach) to a problem that has seemed insurmountable for over a quarter century. SimCity2000mm provides the challenges inherent to running a city: the impossible task of creating a hospitable urban environment. Such is its lure; who would not want to take a crack at solving the formidable problem of urban decline? SimCity2000™ might be applauded for providing a response to the prevailing dystopian images. However, I cannot help but wonder how, specifically, the game articulates its response. I am wary of the binarism operating between the Hollywood film-inspired urban dystopia and the response of this simulated utopic city. In other words, what, alongside the narrative logic of Hollywood’s blighted urban future, will produce a utopic urban future in SimCity2000™? How does the choice between dystopia and utopia get to be posed as the dominant one? What, precisely, is the distinction? Upon what categories does the binary “dystopia versus utopia” pivot? Admittedly, the terms utopia and dystopia have been thrown around somewhat carelessly. They are not in any sense timeless cat- egories and have particular meanings in the context of a late-twentieth-century urbanity that needs to be explored closely, particularly if we are to escape from impoverished, one-dimensional binarism. For the purposes of this work, the distinction between utopia and dystopia pivots on the contingencies of race in the urban context — people of color, poverty, and the squalor are imagined as proper to the ghetto. This inscription distinguishes itself through a white racial imagination that eradicates the possibility of difference in an ordered social structure and situates racial otherness as an absence, as something to be overlooked or dismissed as aberrant. To specify the terms of this distinction, I will describe the distinguishing characteristics of urban utopia and dystopia through near-future science fiction films. After understanding how this binary becomes meaningful in these films, it will be possible to make sense of the utopic response given by SimCity2000™.

There are many ways to discuss the future of urban space and the ways it is imagined. For instance, one could look to urban planning discourse to see how city spaces are reconceived, debated, and discussed. For the purposes of this essay, I am more interested in the future of the city as an imagined space rather than as a particular goal to be achieved through rational planning. Thus, examining a less specialized, more popularly articulated vision of what counts as the urban future will be appropriate. The imaginary visions of urban futures, the ones that create popular conceptions of what urbanity might become, are of special interest. Given that near-future science fiction films provide one of the more conspicuous, imaginative, and dystopic visions of urban space, they will serve as one node, or source, of future conceptions of the city. Virtual worlds’ technologies will be another node, as will race, urbanity, utopia, and dystopia. With this network topology I can phrase my argument bluntly as an equation:® if near-future science fiction film creates its dystopic edge by extrapolating from the racially tense present-day inner city, then a utopic simulated virtual reality of the near-future city is one that necessarily refuses to acknowledge the question of race. This, then, is an essay about how technology is employed to make social worlds and how these worlds get to count as either utopic or dystopic. I will argue that technology should provide other inhabit- able social worlds not necessarily located between euphoric splendor and dark purgatory.

THE DYSTOPIC FUTURE: HOW THE FUTURE CAME TO BE

Many visions of “how the future came to be” have pervaded the cir- cuits of the popular imagination through science fiction film. On the one hand, there are images of the postapocalyptic landscape made popular during the anxious years of Reagan’s reign. These are per- haps best exemplified by the postnuclear war scenarios narrated by the Mad Max series. On the other hand, there are the visions of the near future in which some untold events-ecodisaster, economic collapse, moral decay—leave us with a blighted and festering world, such as the Los Angeles depicted in Blade Runner. Pessimistic visions of the future such as Mad Max and Blade Run- ner garnered a fair portion of the popular cultural marketplace when the threat of nuclear annihilation became an apropos symbol of the general state of international sociopolitical emergency. Even if the threat of nuclear war was not always tangible in the 1980s, ecodisas- ters, urban unrest, recession, immigration, hate crimes, domestic vio- lence, micro wars, and so on certainly created paranoia. Outside the cineplex, the contemporary social problems that gave these visions of the future some meaning were salient. While the specter of nuclear annihilation contributed to this paranoia, the zones of urban space were experiencing their own potent blend of localized apocalypse as racial tensions were abetted by federal and municipal governments that systematically ignored the economic and social status of the city and its inner core. Soon enough, the postnuclear film became tired; science fiction cast aside the story of The Bomb quite noticeably. Science fiction author Bruce Sterling, in an op-ed piece for the New York Times enti- tled “Get the Bomb Off My Back,” suggested that science fiction had become bored with the postnuclear scenario and had begun depict- ing a more realistic near-future vision? Popular film quickly focused on the blighted urban core. Nuclear apocalypse-a favorite narrative prop since the Cold War—was abandoned in favor of vaguer cata- strophes that brought about slow decay, decadence, and ruination in a racially marked urban setting. 10 An important distinction can be made between films that narrate postapocalyptic stories and films that leave the audience with more ambiguous descriptions of the disasters afflicting the world. Claire Sponsler describes the indeterminacy of the bad near-future suc- cinctly: “In cyberpunk, angst and ambivalence are replaced by acceptance of the ruined state of the landscape; destruction of the natural environment and decay of the urban zone are givens that are not lamented but rather accepted. There is no reflection on the past that caused the apocalypse and little on the future that lies beyond it.“‘1 As Sponsier describes it, the lack of specificity given to the blighted urban backdrop strips the destruction of any moral or epis- temological import; rumination derives from “off-stage cataclysms” of “profound indifference.”12 One response to the imprecision that Sponsler identifies would be to extrapolate the specificity of present-day urbanity onto the “nonnu- clear scenario” near-future science fiction film. What, precisely, makes urban blight a plausible or the chosen setting for near-future films? Representations of present-day racial turmoil create the backdrop for decrepit urban settings in film. Conversely, one could argue that racial tensions are the largest challenge to imagining a hospitable future urban space. By “racial tension,” I do not mean racial turmoil presented explicitly as such but rather implications of this tension that can be read through poverty, decadence, and decay, which sig- nify anxieties around the problem of racial difference in an urban context. Notably, little attention has been paid to interrogating the racial economy of near-future science fiction films. 13 This is surpris- ing given the disposition of science fiction to extrapolate contempo- rary living to the future; it would seem that an implied critique of contemporary racial economy would draw some attention. Given that science fiction is a valuable discourse that helps explain present conditions and, possibly, steer things away from cybernetic gloom, a race-conscious theorization of science fiction should allude to ways out of the purgatory it depicts as the urban future. If, as some theo- rists maintain, science fiction films operate “instrumentally” _“within a network of meanings… which extends beyond the films them- selves”14—in the expression, enactment, and production of ideolo- gies, then it is crucial to theorize how race is constituted in the fic- tional urban future. It is high time for a cultural critique of science fiction that audits the representation of people of color in a way that responds to the challenge of imagining urban futures that run against the current grain of despair and racism.

Such a comprehensive critique is of course beyond the scope of this essay. At this point I am interested in asking more formative questions about race as it figures in the representation of urban dystopias and utopias. Because many recent science fiction films, including the two films I include in this analysis, include components of both utopia and dystopia, a unilateral inquiry is problematic. One common feature, however, is that they similarly articulate apprehen- sion of particularly racialized social identities. 15 Given this, I will briefly look at recent films that represent urban and world purgatory as contingent upon questions of race and ethnicity.

DEMOLITION MAN

Marco Brambilla’s film Demolition Man (1993) begins in 1996 Los Angeles—a criminally infested urban hell with paramilitary law enforcement. Simon Phoenix (Wesley Snipes) is a maniacal criminal sentenced to a deep-freeze incarceration of indeterminate duration. In the year 2032 he is reanimated, only to find himself in the Los Angeles of the future-now San Angeles—a benign albeit fascist “New Age” society where foul language is ticketed like illegal park- ing, violence is indescribable, and advertising jingles from the 1980s and 1990s are a favorite retro musical genre. Through these narrative features, San Angeles is presented as an ironic incarnation of the utopic future. In the first few moments of Phoenix’s postincarceration parole hearing, he manages to unshackle himself from his restraining har- ness and to commit three homicides, the first in 16 years. Here we see the corruption of the “perfect”— if fascist—future urban space at the hands of the African American criminal. Phoenix brings the most racially marked notions of criminality to the mid-twenty-first century, disrupting the totalitarian and technocratic utopic urbanity of perfect order and efficient similarity. As the drama unfolds, we find that San Angeles’s ordered polis is threatened by a cadre of underground rebels who defy its strict codes of morality and proper conduct. Even in this (outwardly) heav­enly vision of the urban future, the menace to society is the differen­tiated element. In Demolition Man this element is mostly represented by people of color living ir1 the catacombs of San Angeles. The rebels’ styles, desires, and sensibilities are flatly irlcornmensurate with the predominant ideology of San Angeles’s surface world; as such, the rebels are margirlalized to the city’s sewers. Demolition Man’s depiction of what counts as dystopia obtains ir1 the threat posed by a differentiated Other that cracks through the orderly surface of a white suburban fantasy. This is the ever-present problem of orderly social structures: it cloaks the symptomatic con­tradictions lurking liminally below the surface. In the end, the order of San Angeles topples upon its own irlherent fissures, and the underground rebels rise to the surface in celebration, prornisirlg to whoop it up with cold beers, festive gunshots, and plenty of graf­fiti-back to the good old bad times of the 1990s. Such a jubilant return to the comfort of our historical present runs against the grain of such science fiction films as Blade Runner, in which the future returns to the present only ir1 the form of a commentary on the destructive force of racism.

BLADE RUNNER

Ridley Scott’s vision of the furore Los Angeles in Blade Runner finds the threat of a nightmarish urban space rooted not in the threat of nuclear annihilation, as was familiar in early 1980s science fiction dystopias, but in the threat of nonhomogenous communities. Far too little attention has been paid to the dense polyethnic hybridity of the street zones below the Tyrell Corporation.16 These zones are the salient determinants of a future technodystopia based on a fear of nonhomogenous ethnic and racial markers. To capture an Othered backdrop for the Blade Runner street zones, the production team relied on top-notch consultants and advisers.17 The film sought to convey the texture of cultural hybridity, exoticism, and dark regions splashed with burning neon light. Mix­ing these elements allowed the designers to extrapolate a compelling and plausible depiction of contemporary Los Angeles into the future. To achieve this pessimistic vision of LA, the design team situated their imaginative skills over the “Third World”: “It was sort of an exotic, technological interpretation of a Third World kind of country, in a way So everything looked sort of junky because you had to add things to it constantly to make it work.”18 As represented in the film, then, the future urban purgatory is pre­cisely the place a white imagination would associate with people of color-the “Third World.” An “exotic” space-with the marks of eth­nicity suggested by the Third World-is one that is often attributed to the dilapidated inner city. It is a space that evokes a sense of ner­vous tension, claustrophobia, and fear for one’s life and property. It is also a space that often counts as dystopic, particularly from the vantage point of a white outsider, who would read the imagery as exotic and unfamiliar. This is not a new image of urban despair; its representation as the plausible future of urban street zones is, how­ever, flatly nihilistic. This dystopic space of panic and nihilism is pre­cisely the effect orchestrated in the street scenes of Blade Runner. The plight of the replicants is the central thread that weaves together the film’s narrative. Replicants, built by the ominous Tyrell Corporation, are genetically engineered androids designed as the supplementary labor force for dangerous work on the “off world” asteroid-mining sites. We learn that they are seen as a threat to life on earth and have hence been banned as “illegal aliens” and restricted to their work zones. The illegal status of the replicants is a curious allusion to the problem of “illegal immigration,” particularly in the context of the film’s setting in Los Angeles. That Blade Runner raises the specter of a different sort of illegal immigration is interest­ing by itself; that these future illegals are represented as Anglo, even Aryan, is far more provocative. It raises the nagging question of a social purity that is as familiar in the present-day as it is in Ridley Scott’s future Los Angeles. It is also a reminder that invoking the rhetoric of “illegal alien” only thinly veils fears of difference imposed by an integrated, ordered social body An analysis of the whiteness through which an illegal immigrant acquires meaning in Blade Runner must take note of the mechanism by which distinctively Othered signifiers-the notion of the illegal immigrant and the differentiated social element-are grafted onto an apparent whiteness. What sticks out oddly from the replicants is how the signifiers of Otherness graft onto replicants who have character­istics distinctive of such Otherness, notably, their remarkably Aryan features. A peculiar tension is invoked as the audience is simultane­ously reminded of the Others that are signified in order to situate the replicants as outside the law (i.e., the replicants as illegal aliens) and displaced by signifiers with identities that oddly elude the stereo­typed characteristics of the signified. Thus, race proper is invoked through the presence of an absence, an invocation of some distin­guishing signifiers of Otherness veiled by those very signifiers of whiteness that necessarily delineate the structure wherein Other acquires its rich meaning. I have tried to show how many popular images of the future of urban space pinpoint the distinction between utopia and dystopia on the category of race. What counts as urban dystopia is repre­sented by heavily racialized tension, hatred, and criminality. Similarly, utopia excludes the possibility of considering racial and ethnic dif­ference as a salient characteristic of urban experience. As suggested in Demolition Man and Blade Runner, the presence of race as a social category is always lurking absentmindedly below the narrative structure of utopic aspirations in, for instance, a Los Angeles free from the contingencies of urban racism or in a race of beings designed as a compulsory labor force; race is an absent presence symbolized by the long history of discriminatory practices. The absentmindedness of such a logic refers to an inability to articulate the place of racism in an urban context. Such is the difficulty of talk­ing about an urbanity free from racism, which has become an inte­gral and necessary component of urbanity itself. In its specificity, racism in an urban context neither precedes the urban experience nor stems from it. Racism has become, in complex ways, a force of coexistence of urban social relations.

SIMCITY2000™ AND THE VIRTUAL CITY

Urban dystopias as represented in science fiction film provide a plau­sible, if discouraging, extrapolation of contemporary urban conditions and thus lend credibility to the narratives. The dystopic urban back­drop provides a compelling setting for the rough edges of these films, because the contemporary urban inner core has been represented in the discourse of urban decline as a tense and threatening space. The discourse of urban decline suggests that racial tension, if left unchecked, will only increase. The “Negro problem” is the harbinger of the bad, dystopic future.19 Racism runs deep, particularly in the US, and might indeed count as an institution with a firm grounding that will not soon be uprooted. As Beauregard notes, the city is often rep­resented as condemned and beyond the point of saving: “Not surpris­ingly, given the great alarm and fear generated by inner-city riots, fis­cal instability, and the combination of federal governmental inattention and local government ineffectiveness, numerous commentators went beyond merely representing the cities as simply decayed. For them, the cities were doomed.”20 Precisely because of its dogged unsolvabil­ity it seems certain that the problem of racism and urban decline will bring the city to the decrepit vision depicted in science fiction film. What makes the simulation game SimCity2000™ so attractive is that it presents the player with the opportunity to address urban decline, albeit with only vague references to the racial dynamics of this crisis.21 Players, when aware of the general representation of cities as sites of profound predicament (and scarcely anyone could be unaware of this representation), can boldly face a challenge that has thwarted the strategies of urban planners, politicians, civil rights activists, and presidents. SimCity2000TM allows players to confront this threatening, doomed social space from the comfort of their own home computer. The game also involves analytic thinking, strategy, ingenuity, creativity, and savvy aesthetic design. SimCity20()()TM’s compelling graphics allow players to build dazzling cityscapes that can be whimsical, outlandish, or practical, depending on the player’s preference and skill. Finally, Sim­City2000™ is a fun technosemiotic workstation-a complex puzzle that articulates the contingencies of urban social space through technology. But, to remain true to the form of the puzzle, a solution must reside somewhere. That is to say, regardless of whether or not the puzzle can be completed (in the plain sense), there must be an opportunity to reach some sort of closure-a state of the puzzle where some useful meaning about the situation being pondered may be extracted and some previously unknown insight apro­pos to the epistemological context proper to the puz­zle can be revealed. A precise analysis of how players make meaning of their engagement with the game will have to wait for a richer ethnographic analysis. Nevertheless, through SimCity20QQTM’s various features, it is possible to draw attention to meanings of urban space that are elicited through interaction rather than through Hollywood stereotyping. SimCity20QQTM breaks down the variables of city management­for example, the budget and the industrial, commercial, and residen­tial infrastructures-to allow players to articulate personal responses to the impasse that has been reached in the general discourse of urban decline. SimCity2000TM is curious in that it does not explicitly address the contingencies of the racial dimension of urban crisis; my argument is that the game need not do so to be challenging. The discourse of the racial dimension of urban decline since the early 1960s has been so far-reaching that urban management is about managing race relations, explicitly or not. In what follows I will consider how SimCity2000™ makes possible a utopic urban space by explicitly erasing the category of race. I am not interested in criticizing the game per se; rather, my intent is to use SimCity2000™-a notable popular cultural artifact-as a lens to see what might count as an urban utopia and how this utopia is artic­ulated through the discourse of urban decline. This project also seeks to make some sense of what are loosely called “virtual worlds” technologies. As I mentioned earlier, Sim­City2000™ is a simulation technology, one that provides worlds that may be inhabited and created by the imagination of the game player. For many players this is an accurate, robust, and realistic simulation of the contingencies of urban space. 22 The larger question then, and one that this article will orbit, asks how a simulation like this becomes “realistic” despite its explicit denial of the crucial category of race relations.

THE CHALLENGE OF THE VIRTUAL CITY

Playing SimCity2000™ is a somewhat challenging task, although familiarity with what counts as urban spac_e makes it less daunting. Indeed, from my experience and the insights of other players, the game is quite engaging. There are two ways to start a game. One may either start from scratch, “terraforming” a terrain, adding forest groves, wateiways, lakes, and hills, or one can start with a pre­designed game-either one included with the package or one exchanged from another player. In the first method of beginning, the terraforming is followed by constructing initial “zoned” regions that will sprout loosely or densely packed commercial, industrial, or res­idential areas. As with the other elements that create the infrastruc­ture of the city, zoning is paid for from the city’s municipal budget. Some of the prepackaged cities, including ones found archived on computers throughout the Internet, give the players the opportunity to try their hands at managing (or decimating) real cities like New York, San Francisco, Malibu, Seattle, Philadelphia, and Chicago. These cities are designed carefully to replicate the terrain and build­ing clusters of the actual cities. Travel is particularly important in SimCity2000™. After zoning a few regions, the player must lay down some means of transit. Typically, roads are the principal means of transit, although railways and under­ground subway systems can provide alternative forms. These modes of transportation must be designed carefully and with some foresight as a haphazard knot of roads spells dis­aster for future traffic. After an initial road or rail network is constructed, players build a power grid. Multiple options exist for power: coal, hydroelectric, oil, gas, wind, solar, and nuclear, with microwave and fusion being the two speculative, sci­ence fictional power sources. The vari­ety of power plants allows the player to experiment with powering schemes and to express ecological sensibilities. Constructing the power grid entails placing (and paying) for a power plant and weaving a network of power lines that feed into each of the previously zoned regions. At this stage of play the city is simply a terrain with a transporta­tion system, a functioning power plant, and a power grid. If all the main, initial infrastructural challenges have been met, residents will sta1t building houses and apartment buildings; factories, warehouses and office buildings will be constructed; and shopping malls, movie theaters, bed and breakfasts, and churches will appear. The city is now “alive,” so to speak. Keeping it contained in this modest state, however, is not nearly as exciting as pushing it to the limits. The player will almost certainly want to explore the myriad possible game elements. At the infrastructural level, building a bus, rail, or subway system can be a quite rewarding (and expensive) means to meet the challenge of commuting efficiency and to combat pollution from private cars. There are also the other options of build­ing a high-speed freeway; opening an airport or seaport; installing a water system complete with pumps, desalinization plants, and water towers; and constructing parks, stadiums, marinas, schools, colleges, hospitals, museums, libraries, and zoos, all appropriately priced. The optional elements open up the possibilities of investigating possible urban designs. The prosperity of the city and its residents indicates the experimental results. From the perspective of the player, who is given the title of mayor -but is more properly an autocrat-building an elaborate and prosperous infrastructure determines how successfully the city avoids, the perils of urban decline. If the residents are employed, healthy, and well-educated, with venues for leisure, the mayor’s popularity ratings increase-an indicator that the player has averted decline. Should the categories of prosperity be deficient, decline is imminent-ratings drop, the population becomes restless and com­plains, and, in extreme cases, residents will take to the streets and riot. Players are provided with a large catalog of surveys and indicators to determine the degree of prosperity for the city and its residents. Indeed, a significant portion of play can be spent sifting through the many tables, charts, and maps that register the levels of particular social and economic indicators, which include GNP, unemployment, average education levels, population, traffic, pollution, employment in industry or commerce, land value, and prime lending rates. Throughout the game, the players also receive feedback on their accomplishments, or lack thereof, through avenues other than graphs and charts of the city’s status. Newspapers give the players feedback on their progress and reveal various goings-on in the city, including unemployment; status of the educational system; complaints on traf­fic, crime, taxes, and weather; disaster reports; and so forth. Adding to the realism of the game, the newspapers also include “interna­tional” reports that, finally, have no direct bearing on the affairs of the city. “Extra!“s also appear in the case of suitably newsworthy events, such as a “natural” disaster or crime wave. Economic viability is measured not only by the size of the munic­ipal budget but also by the amount of money garnered from taxes. The player must decide individual tax rates for residential, commer­cial, and industrial property, as well as for specific industries such as aerospace, electronics, petrochemicals, steel and mining, finance, travel, and many others. This can be tricky business, as overtaxing any particular industry can result in its failure or departure from the city, with a consequent increase in unemployment. Alternative means of financing the city include the issuing of bonds, which must be paid back with interest. Funding and budgeting the city becomes more and more complex as it grows, adds zones, and develops novel infrastructure. Notably, soon after the game was released, players found a cheat function (called an “Easter egg” in the idiom of computer game aficionados, for the elaborate and sustained “hunt-and-find” computer hacking required to locate it) that adds $500,000 to the budget each time it is engaged. Since a typical SimCity200QTM game begins with a budget of roughly $50,000, this extra cash leverages the game in the player’s favor quite significantly.23 The cheat ensures that the city is never challenged by fiscal burdens and can easily meet the demands and needs of the population. Managing a city can be an arduous task-not just from an infra­structural and economic perspective but also from a policy stand­point. Referendums and ordinances can be introduced that either directly enhance economic viability (e.g., legalized gambling, sales tax, and parking fines), increase the welfare of residents (nuclear bans, literacy campaigns, smoking bans, free clinics, and neighborhood watch groups), or promote the city (annual carnivals, city beautification, and travel advertising). Each has its cost, and it is up to the players to determine how the introduction of an ordinance might make sense within their particular gaming strategy. Another challenging and “realistic” feature of the game is the occurrence of disast1:rs, which range from fires, floods, air crashes, tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, nuclear meltdowns, and riots to the occasional destructive romping of a godzilla-like monster. Players must respond accordingly (for example, by dispatching the police to round up rioting rabble-rousers). Each disaster is prompted by appropriate and specific conditions partially or wholly out of the player’s control. For instance, climatic disasters are determined by the weather-over which the player has no influence-whereas riots may be precipitated by high crime, unemployment, or a heat wave. Once the disaster has subsided or been appropriately responded to, the player must rebuild the infrastructure of the disas­ter area. As this description suggests, playing SimCity2000™ can be a chal­lenging full-time job. There is seldom the chance to sit back and watch things happen, as budgets must be balanced, disasters con­tended with, and residents appeased. The constant burden is an inte­gral part of SimCity20QQTM’s challenge; for the game to realistically simulate city management it must, in one way or another, emulate its salient aspects-in this case, its laboriousness. As I will describe in the latter part of this essay, other far less mundane challenges-such as addressing oneself to the problems associated with racial differ­ence in the city-are expressed through nervously suggestive traces of their presence. Much as the signifiers of racial difference graft absentmindedly onto the replicants in Blade Runner, SimCity20QQTM invokes the possible presence of people of color through the pres­ence of an absence of such a possibility. Signifiers of Otherness are thinly veiled by particular symbols of whiteness that constitute and structure the possibility of Otherness. In SimCity2000™, Otherness is that which lies outside the whiteness evoked by suggestive middle­class imagery, like bed-and-breakfasts, shopping malls, and marinas.

SIMCITY2000™‘5 UTOPIA

What counts as the “ideal” urban environment? Historically, this has been well-hashed over by futurist and urban planners of all sorts. Most of these dream environments begin with the assumption that, soon enough, the latent possibilities of technology will realize their full potential, and individual needs, wants, and desires will be sati­ated. With everyone satisfied, the contingencies of class, racial con­flict, and competition for material needs will be erased. Like most of the other Maxis™ games-SimLife™ SimEarthTM SimAnt™, SimFarmtM, SimHealth™, and SimCityClassicTM-Sim- City2000™ is pitched as educational. Unlike the typical shoot-‘em-up computer games, there is no predetermined goal, no homicidal maniac to capture and no kung fu championship to win. Playing SimCity2000™ is meant to be an instructive experiment, a study in strategic thinking, or simply good fun. 24 Despite the game’s lack of an explicit goal, it seems clear that the players’ implied objective is to create the most fantastic and beautiful city possible.25 As stated earlier, SimCity20QQTM does not assume that urban spaces of a plausible future will be without points of contention. It does, however, suggest that these contingencies do not result in a dystopic urbanity. The city of the future, according to SimCity2000™, will be fraught with the immediate-but, when considered alongside of the contingencies of racial difference, still banal-problems typical of the close quarters associated with urban living. For instance, it simply does not seem plausible that a future urban space will be free of such things as traffic jams, mediocre education, unresponsive emer­gency services, water shortages, and unemployment. Indeed, it would be hard to take SimCity2000™ seriously if it did not force the player to labor with just these sorts of urban contingencies. This is not to say that SimCity2000’™ does not offer the player more cha!lenging crises to handle. 26 A whole menu, literally, of potential dis­asters haunts the player. 27 Although it might be hard to remember the last time a monster invaded a present-day city, it can still be safely argued that the disas­ters in SimCity2000™ provide a high degree of realism. The disasters also serve to delineate the absentminded invocations of race with respect to the white imagination. For instance, it has been suggested that the unsolvability of traffic problems symbolizes the unsolvability associated with racism; traffic, like racism, is a never-ending dilemma that resists even the most determined player’s efforts to derive a solu­tion. 28 Disasters delineate elements outside the order of human social life-most plainly, the eventualities of phenomena proper to nature, like floods, tornadoes, and earthquakes-and elements tightly bun­dled to the social experience of a smoothly functioning urbanity invested heavily with a white urban imagination: industry, commer­cial business, and productive, prosperous residential lives. From this perspective, airplane crashes and nuclear meltdowns fit more com­fortably under the menu of natural disasters insofar as they belong outside an ordered, efficient social structure, which necessarily situ­ates such calamities as contrary to the desire for an efficient and prosperous urban life. Similarly, riots firmly organize the boundary between the white imagination and the Other; falling alongside those eventualities that are coupled resolutely to the nature-as-outsider, riots are carefully and expediently oriented outside the fold of an ordered urban social lifestyle. Monsters, perhaps the most telling dis­aster, serve as a prototype for the constitution of Otherness in Sim­City2000™, to the extent that they suggest both a wrathful supernat­ural response to the evils of humanity and the wickedness associated with deviation from the norms that structure an ordered social fabric. Although SimCity2000™ manages a carefully articulated distinction between what counts as a component of the ordered urban experi­ence and what lies outside it, certain contradictions to this order stick out conspicuously. Notably, the apparently white urban imagination that undergirds the possible SimCity200QTM worlds-complete with bed-and-breakfasts, shopping malls, and private automobiles- belies the experience of anyone who has explored a city, which typically involves a melange of cultural, ethnic, and racial diversity. In this regard, what proves most paradoxical is the simultaneity of such an unrealistically homogenous account of urbanity and the impressions of many players who describe the game as one of the more realistic simulation games they have experienced.29 Invoking certain key sig­nifiers of salient urban features-features considered too controver­sial for an explicit accounting-without categorically acknowledging them, the game laminates the connotative aspects of these features onto itself; thus SimCity200QTM invokes traces of a richer, more com­plete, and realistic image of urbanity. Although there are several aspects of the game that, when subject to analysis, constitute this paradox or contradiction, riots serve as a dear and revealing example of the presence of racial difference through its very absence.

THE VIRTUAL RIOT

In constituting an urban imagination anchored to a perceivably homogenous, utopic, racially unmarked whiteness, SimCity2000™ distinguishes itself from recent and prominent representations of urbanity. SimCity2000TM proves an exception to the death of habit­able visions of urban life at this premillennial moment of social, political, and economic strain. Following decades of federal neglect, topped off by 12 years of Reagan-Bush, visions of urban living have been decidedly bleak since at least the late sixties and seventies. Sim­City2000™‘s utopia, complete with New Age background music, is simply at odds with the images of urban space produced in popular representational mediums such as near-future science fiction films.3° Given that a realistic simulation will address most of the con­stituent elements of a city, it is important to consider the peculiar ways in which race figures into SimCity2000™. SimCity2000™ does not (and could not realistically) deny the saliency of racial difference in an urban context; rather, it apprehensively suggests the contin­gencies of race through such racially marked occurrences as riots. When considering the realism of each of the disasters offered in SirnCity2000™, riots stand out as particularly dependent on a social and, in the dim shadow of the LA uprisings, a racial contextualiza­tion. 31 SimCity2000™, however, offers no explicit acknowledgment of race or ethnicity. Impressive details notwithstanding, the demo­graphic metrics stop at age and gender. Thus, despite the complex associations between race, ethnicity, and the phenomenon of urban uprisings, riots in SimCity2000™ are explicitly “raceless.” It would seem then that in SimCity200QTM’s utopic idiom, riots, as long as they are not “race riots,” are one plausible artifact of a “realistic” utopia. Of course urban riot implies race riot; the explicit acknowledgment need not be made. Such an implication summons forth the rich his­tory and meaning of urban unrest without having to map such mean­ings directly onto the game. Presenting riots as divorced from a racial context performs what Kimberle Crenshaw and Gary Peller call “disaggregation,” a “narrative technique that narrows the perception of the range of illegitimate racial power by divorcing particular episodes from their larger social context.”32 Disaggregation, as Crenshaw and Peller describe, was the technique employed by the defense when the videotape of Rodney King being beaten was shown as a sequencE:_ of freeze-frames, or “isolated stills,” that could be “reinterpreted through a benign narra­tive of justification.” In SimCity2000™ a similar reinterpretive strategy is made possible when the riots are given no explicit racial context; the conditions that trigger a riot include high heat, high crime, and high unemployment, all desperate allusions to life in the inner -city ghetto. Through tlie disaggregation of race, the player can construct a more “benign” narrative justification while the specter of a racial context remains implicit. The meanings of a riot are themselves constructed by weaving ide­ology, politics, and power together in a narrative that, for each individual player, invests riots witli particular meanings. In the context of SirnCity2000™, riots cannot be “race riots” because the game of city simulation need be pleasant and unhampered by such “unsolvable” problems as racial tension. Indeed, when one looks closely at the rioters marching about one’s sirncity, it becomes apparent that the placard-carrying agitators are more properly protesters; the riot is therefore a remonstrative liberal democratic display, rather than the spontaneity associated with civil unrest in an urban setting. The pro­testers eventually become intemperate and can only be disbanded with the aid of police and fire services. Ev􀅠n under the racially marked banner of riot, one must note how the game insists on anchoring itself in particular ideologies and values exclusive of an explicit audit of racial difference. Simulations provide compelling grounds upon which to fantasize a hospitable urbanity, and anything that might intervene in the fantasy may be absentmindedly ignored. So, for instance, if imagining one’s simcity as harboring a disenfranchised, angry, tense throng of people of color disrupts the fantasy, the reinterpretation of what the riots might mean (e.g., simply the outcome of non-race-specific unem­ployment) allows the fantasy to continue unabated. A specifically utopic fantasy of urban space demands racial and ethnic homogene­ity. The most troubling insight is that riots in SimCity2000™, stripped of an important social contextualization, get counted as realistic. As I have described, the uneasy tension surrounding questions of race and ethnicity results from avoiding explicit depictions of these categories. The game yields to implications of the racial and ethnic predicament of urban space. For example, riots in the game are not framed as responses to or similar to the uprisings following tlie Rod­ney King trial. Relying on the player’s recent experience and knowl­edge of the racial and etlinic specificity of urban riots allows the game to avoid an explicit acknowledgment of these categories. In tliis situ­ation the uneasy and nervous tension I am discussing manifests itself. An explicit acknowledgment might be deemed too risky for the designers of SimCity2000™; implying the specificity of race and eth­nicity allows for simulated riots and, hence, a realistic virtual city.

CONCLUSION

Few twentieth-century artifacts can cloak the turmoil around race as well as technology, particularly simulation technologies. Revealing how technology manufactures and diagnoses social relations like race, gender, and ethnicity is no easy task as, conceptually, technol­ogy is not often understood as one of the many analytic tools employed in the interpretation of the very worlds within which these social relations inhere. This interpretive mechanism proper to tech­nology might be understood as “making meaning” insofar as certain technological tools, such as SimCity2000™ and the RealityEngine™, render the world in ways that are complexly interpreted by the tech­nology user. These meanings graft onto the user’s knowledge about the rendered worlds and, at the human-machine interface where interpretation occurs, the user constructs new and developed stories with narrative orbits that are elliptically bound to the seduction of technology. At the same time that SimCity200QTM restructures the player’s knowledge and understanding of urbanity, the player’s prior knowledge of urban space becomes an integral part of shaping the structure and meaning of the simulated city. This is the function of the technosemiotic workstation; as a metaphor, it is meant to describe the active mechanisms of technology in which important stories are constructed about technology itself and the worlds we helped it build. “Important” is the operative word here. As in the cases of Reali­tyEngine™ and SimCity2000™, the authority of the technosemiotic workstation is warranted through its presumed ability to “realisti­cally” render the object at hand-the engine that motivates under­standings of what one takes to be reality-and thereby produces the knowledge that informs proactive accounts of the world. making apparatus is discarded as too subjective an explanation for something that has enjoyed a long history seated comfortably in the opulent epistemological and ontological furniture that inspires scien­tific objectivity. 33 Or, the subjective account becomes tangled in the dismissive rhetoric of “it’s all relative anyway,” which only serves to stigmatize individual interpretation and ignore the rich meanings in the tensions between differing interpretations. The technosemiotic workstation brings these tensions to light; when employed interpre­tively to SimCity2000™, the juxtaposition of competing narratives about the city reveals the important contingencies of urbanity. Within these contradictions important meanings are revealed between, for instance, the interpretation provided here-where racial markings, through their absent presence, are indeed a central component of SimCity200QTM—and that provided by Mark Schone in a recent article in the Village Voice in which he suggests that SimCity200QTM’s instru­mentalized logic ignores the contingencies of race.34 Although Schone provides a compelling analysis of the ideology that inheres in the game, he does not consider that playing SimCity200QTM might produce other interpretations (or what it might mean to have con­trasting interpretations), even as he acknowledges the enormous number of people who play the game. Schone’s analysis only con­siders the logic of the game’s programming; my argument holds that SimCity2000™ only takes on full meaning at _the user interface, in the player’s engagement where his or her understanding of what the city means fills out the shallow SimCity2000™ narratives of urban riots. An important and necessary mechanism by which race and eth­nicity are evoked requires a particular absentmindedness on the part of the player; a rich analysis of this mechanism would yield impor­tant insights as to how technologies kin to SimCity2000™ and the RealityEngine™ facilitate self-evidently realistic renderings of their virtual worlds. As I have suggested herein, such a mechanism relies on a particular illusion operating between the player and the game at the interface between the human and the machine. The crucial illusion facilitated by these technologies is not their ability to render the object of analysis in a sufficiently complex and hence “accurate” or “realistic” manner. Rather, the illusion proper to the technosemiotic workstation consists in a mechanism of displacement-for instance, the displacement of racial markings onto other things so as to pre­sent race, a necessary component of the city, through its absence. In SimCity20QQTM, this illusion undergirds the simulation’s verisimilitude. From this perspective one can fruitfully determine the ideological stakes of the technosemiotic workstation. Too often in the analysis of virtual worlds, technologies criticism focuses on how a “false con­sciousness” is constructed, whereby the virtual world represents a masked and mediated version of “real social relations.” Schone’s analysis of SimCity2000™ is an example of this analytic tack, wherein the problematic proper to virtual realities is their ability to insidiously mask the “real” world. Although this approach reveals the apparent contradictions in the gap between what the virtual world describes and what we “really” know to be “true,” what remains wanting is an analysis of why, specifically, people rely on, actively engage in, and, particularly in the case of SimCity2000™, enjoy such virtual worlds. I am suggesting that SimCity200QTM provides a space that accommo­dates the fantasy of a living space free of the contradictions that inhere in the “real” lived space; these contradictions and inconsis­tencies are explicitly overlooked in the interests of expediently orga­nizing the enjoyable experience of imagining a city unhindered by the complexities associated with racial difference. Herein lies the ide­ology that undergirds the “reality effect” of SimCity2000™: despite the fact that the game avoids a denotative nod to racial or ethnic dif­ference, enough game elements exist to compel the player to absent­mindedly connote the existence of racial difference so that the game appears to be an accurate and “realistic” city simulation. In other words, the game avoids a direct confrontation with the issue of urban racial problems yet maintains its urban verisimilitude by oblique references to the possibility that such problems lie latent within the game’s structure. The common fatal flaw in analyzing “vir­tual” technologies occurs in Schone’s article: an emphasis is placed on the machine side of the human-machine interface, the moment before a player is allowed to make some sense of the game. Such analyses highlight the ideology of a purely artifactual structure-a piece of computer code-rather than the content of thought that leads the player to produce meaning. In SimCity2000™, the player’s engagement with the program reveals the ideology supporting the game’s realistic qualities. While Schone maintains that the game is incomplete for its failure to account for race, I would hold fast to the argument that the game must be complete, if only because it appears so to an enormous number of those who play it. Still, and despite the compelling verisimilitude of the game, SimCity2000™‘s completeness lies on fissured ground insofar as it does not address racial differ­ence in a manner as forthrightly as many of us would desire. But one cannot say that it simply and plainly misses the category of race; race is misplaced-it’s latent. Thus, the ideology that undergirds the almost pernicious “reality effect” of SimCity2000™ is such that the game “presents” a totality intent on effacing the traces of its own possibility, rather than, as Schone contends, a flawed or incomplete partiality that overlooks the totality of social relations, including those introduced by racial difference (see Zizek, 1989). In other words, SimCity200QTM’s avoid­ance of a direct and forthright articulation of race in an urban context would seem to precipitate its own failure as an accurate simulation of the city.35 Yet for many it does count as an accurate simulation and, hence, maintains its structural completeness. From this perspec­tive the deleterious side of the game is its ability to quietly and effec­tively erase the category of racial difference and turn its back on the struggles against racism while still appearing realistic. Finally then, the ideology of SimCity200QTM resides within its mechanism of making a city that facilitates the possibility of its own unmaking while still appearing to be an accurate and realistic portrayal of the city. Such an unmaking would obtain were basic social “antagonisms” truly not featured in any guise or representation (e.g., if there were no traffic, riots, disasters, no police to combat crime, etc.) Were no social antagonisms present, the game would collapse upon itself; there would be no challenge; and indeed, it would be impossible to describe such an an­tagonism-free structure as a city. If, according to Schone’s analysis, Sim­City2000™ is structurally distinct from what one knows to be the “real” city, why do players engross themselves with it as if it were like a “real” city? Why doesn’t SimCity2000™ fall apart under the weight of its own flaws and inconsistencies? SimCity2000TM sur­vives because of the symptomatic traces of antagonism-the traces of racial difference invoked through their effacement, through their absence; thus, through the long shadow cast by riots, the player absentmindedly maintains the structure of the simcity in order to make it appear homologous to the antagonism-fraught “real” city. Throughout this essay, a distinction is implied between technolog­ical artifacts that are limited in the scope of their cultural import and those that intervene resoundingly in important debates where such antagonism puts lives on the line. Hidden within this analysis is an argument for the impracticality of considering technology as a disin­terested window through which objective interpretation of the world may be produced. Through the trope of the technosemiotic worksta­tion, technology must be thought of as a weaving together of the technology user’s knowledge-one’s experiences, politics, and desires-that, finally, creates worlds. But it is not simply the large­scale “big science” technologies-such as the Space Shuttle, Bio­sphere II, or the Stealth bomber-that must be considered as producers of worldly meanings. To a significant extent, cultural artifacts like video games, which have become de facto trappings of the liv­ing room entertainment center, are both technologies and producers of cultural meaning. Video games, of which SimCity2000™ is but one example, cannot be considered as simply diversions or, in more nor­mative terms, just toys. Video games are complex cultural artifacts consumed by huge numbers of people from an incredibly large range of socioeconomic backgrounds. 36 To consider video games as artifacts that produce culture is to acknowledge that they exist along­side other important sites of cultural production-homes that have televisions, lobbies of movie theaters, shopping malls, and neighbor­hood hangouts, to name but a few. All of these sites have been con­sidered worthy of sophisticated cultural analysis, although at one time they were seen as less than “sophisticated.” But when what counts as a video game is a “realistic” simulation of the city, or when video games are authored by Daryl Gates,37 the ex-Chief of Police of Los Angeles, it no longer makes sense to consider such things as mere toys unable to produce worldly meaning.

NOTES

The support, criticisms, and comments of several colleagues makes a clirecl deposit of ideas herein: Tanya Turkovich, Lisa Rofel, Mimi Ito, Donna Haraway, Kathy Biddick, Andrew Baird, and the participants of the Stanford Workshop on Biology, Computers, and Society (June 2-4, 1994) where an early draft of this essay was presented; special thanks to Joan Fujimura, for inviting my contribution. 1 See Julian Bleecker, Cobemnt Light: Virtual Reality, Cultural Politics, and the New Humanism in Science (M.S. diss., University of Washington, 1992). 2 Which is almost the same as asking who would visit South Centrnl without the vicarious aid of a computer? I do not mean this question rhetorically or face­tiously. I would hazard a speculation that South Central is equated easily with the threat of violence and harm in the minds of many. This equation renders South Central a particularly suitable candidate for computerized (i.e., virtual) urban planning in the safe, cloistered labs at UCLA. The threat of South Central can be generalized as the urban inner-core in the abstract. This threat was oper­ating when, in an oral reading of the representation of the perilous side of the city’s inner-core through the film Bad Lieutenant, a critic made two suggestive slips of the tongue when describing urban despair, criminality, and the omen of the inner city: “Black Lieutenant” and “Bad Lieu-tenement.” Both slips reveal the way the discursive field of general fear, paranoia, and decrepitude surrounding the inner city are racially and spatially marked. 3 The rich literature on the intersections of science, technology, and society-with which this essay converses-explicitly invests social meaning into the technosci­entific object. Thus, herein, technology means much more than a box composed of a collection of parts; rather, it is presumed that a complex understanding of technology as a social artifact reveals the intricate manner in which it shapes, and is shaped by, the world of social relations. Although the social studies of science and technology bibliography is far too extensive to reference with any complete­ness, the following work directly informs this essay: Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter, Zone 6· Incorporations (New York: Zone, 1992); Donna Haraway, Simi­ans, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991); Andrew Ross, Strange Weather: Culture, Science, and Technology in the Age of Limits (New York: Verso, 1991); Allucquere Rosanne Stone, Presence: The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Santa Cruz, 1993). 4 By “technosemiotic” I am referring to the complex network of social meanings programmed by such corporate signifiers as RealityEngine™, SimCityn”, Sim­LifeTM, SimEarth™, SimHealth™, and SimFarm™. These signifying elements are persuasive catalysts for the simulation of worlds of the (virtual) past, (virtual) pre­sent, and (virtual) future. The RealityEngine1’M is a technosemiotic node among this network of world building, for it means both technological artifact and mean­ing-making apparatus; using its hardware and its computer monitor, it renders the problems of South Central LA bare fact. The awe-inspiring power of its technol­ogy gives these renderings the air of believability. Technosemiotics is a rich con­ceptualization of artifice insofar as it is about cleverly maneuvering technological objects to touch upon, and give meaning to, questions of race, gender, and class; imagination, play, and fantasy; the military, industry, and media. By naming their technological artifact “RealityEngine™,” the Silicon Graphics® corporation inge­ niously allows it to encompass a wide and varied network of influence that includes South Central LA and all its heated particulars. This particular corporate signifier implies the engineering of reality (or, a bit more provocatively, an engine for producing or manufacturing reality). 5 Donna Haraway, “When Man™ Is On me Menu,” in Crary and Kwinter. 6 Haraway makes sense of what counts as “technoscience” and the meanings of technoscience worlds. Technoscience is meant to suggest a hybridization that is not science, technology, or both as a single fused entity. Technoscience tran­scends the historical construction and the (separate) epistemological and onto­logical grounding of science and technology. It is, as Haraway puts it, “a kind of visual onomatopoeia” that is carefully designed to disrupt the binarisms between nature and society, the natural and the artifacrual, subject and object (cf. Donna Haraway, “Modest Witness@Second Millennium: The FemaleMan@Meets Onco­Mouse™,” unpublished conference paper, Located Knowledges: Intersections between Cultural, Gender, and Science Studies, UCIA, Apr. 1993). 7 Robert A. Beauregard, Voices of Decline: The Postwar Fate of US Cities (Oxford, United Kingdom: Blackwell, 1993). 8 This is almost a computer programming construct-the ubiquitous “if {x) then {y}” clause-and gives away my other incarnation as a computer designer. I hope I am excused for me reasonableness of this formulation; it belies the grave political stakes of the argument. 9 Bruce Sterling, “Get the Bomb Off My Back,” New York Times, Oct. 13, 1991, sec. 4, p. 15. 10 For insight into the science-fictional specificity of urban decay see Claire Sponsler, “Beyond the Ruins: The Geopolitics of Urban Decay and Cybernetic Play,” Sci­ence-Fictwn Studies 20, no. 2: pp. 251-265. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid., p. 253. 13 For the purposes of this essay I have limited my analysis to film, which, of course, does a great disservice to the contributions of science-fiction literature that responds to the ideological, political, social, and economic specificity of race. I am specifically thinking of Octavia Butler’s work. Jenny Wolmark provides an insightful reading of Butler’s work; see Jenny Wolmark, Aliens and Others: Sci­ence Fiction, Feminism and Postmodernism (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994). 14 Annette Kuhn, ed., Alien Zone: Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fic­ tion Film (London: Verso, 1990). 15 Wolmark. 16 Mike Davis makes this point in Beyond Blade Runner: Urban Control, The Ecology of Fear (Westfield, NJ: Open Magazine, 1992), specifically with respect to the polyethnicity represented in “Blade Runner.• 17 Designers of the film ambience included the director, Ridley Scott (he is also an artist and graduate of the Royal College of Art), Lawrence G. Paull, and the indus­trial designer Syd Mead (credited as the film’s “visual futurist”). 18 From transcript of an interview with Syd Mead, distributed by Marco Baria and Associates, Inc. (1982) to promote the film. Quoted and cited in Marshall Deutel­baum, “Visual Memory/Visual Design,” Literature/Film Quarterly 17, no. l (1989): 66-72. 19 Beauregard, pp. 161-162. 20 Beauregard, p. 198. 21 SimCity™, the predecessor and conceptual base for SimCity2000™, is the flagship product for Maxis™; more than 2.3 million copies have been sold since 1989. Sim­City2000™ was released during the pre-Christmas push in 1993, and, after three months, sales outpaced those of SimCity™-during its first two years. Gross sales for Maxis™ have increased from $13.9 million in fiscal 1993 to $23.1 million in fiscal 1994 (rom Abate, “Sim Mania: Maxis Builds a Real Empire on Sophisticated Simu­lation Games,” San Francisco Examiner, May 8, 1994, sec. C, p. l; and Susan Greco, “Looking for Mr. Right,” Inc. [May 1994]: 40). According to a Maxis™ spokesperson, sales of SimCity2000™ surpass the other Maxis™ games three to one. 22 Kathy Biddick, personal communication, June 1994. 23 As with most games, a discourse of “purity” has developed. Players complain about others “cheating” to construct elaborate cities. A form of censorship restricts “cheat cities• from being entered in contests. 24 Tom Abate, “Sim Mania.” 25 There have been worldwide contests for the most beautifully designed and elab­orate cities. More are sure to come. In one book on SimCity2000TM, color pho­tographs feature some truly amazing designs-see Nick Dargahi, Sim City 2000: Power, Politics, and Planning (Bremer, M. Rocklin, CA: Prima, 1994). 26 Indeed, it was recently discussed that the problem of traffic is the more insistent crisis and, indeed, is insolvable in SimCity2000™; players must simply try their best to stay one step ahead of a general infrastructural failure. This speaks to the sort of verisimilitude I am addressing: the representation of traffic congestion as simply something that must be handled, not eradicated, is a more or less accurate representation of how traffic problems are understood. 27 When disasters are turned off completely-one option in playing city mayor in a computer simulation-growth of the city continues unfettered by annoying riots or floods. 28 Biddick. 29 This observation is based on a continuing dialogue among players on the Usenet newsgroup comp.sys.mac.games and the electronic newsletter sim-/ist about dis­cussions of the full line of Maxis simulation games. The extent to which Sim­City2000™ is accepted as a compelling and utilitarian simulation of urban space is undergirded by its use by some urban planners, both as an experimental and as a pedagogical tool. 30 For example, consider Blade Runner, RoboCop, Max Headroom, Videodrom.e, They Live, Freejack, the Terminator series, and Batman, to mention a few. 31 It should be noted that the decision to introduce riots as a disaster was a last­ minute one, perhaps, I might speculate, in a suggestive response to the contin­gencies of the uprisings that flashed across the United States in response to the not guilty verdicts of the LA police officers accused of beating motorist Rodney King. See Nick Dargahi, Sim City 2000: Powe,; Politics, and Planning (CA: Prima, 1994), p. 282. 32 .Kimberli: Crenshaw and Gary Peller, “Reel Time/Real Justice,” in Reading Rodney King, Reading Urban Uprising, ed. R. Gooding-Williams (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 64. 33 Haraway, personal communication. 34 Mark Schone, “Building Rome in a Day,” Village Voice, May 31, 1994, pp. 50-51. 35 Slavoj Zizeck, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1989); Schone takes to the extreme the game’s possible failure and argues that its attempt to simulate a city fails. Adding some precision to his analysis, I might say that it is not the game’s failure (as any discussion of a game must necessarily take stock of the players’ engagement) but the actual program code’s failure (it omits the fea­ture of race). 36 While scholars of popular culture rushed to assess the latent meaning in the Hol­lywood movie megahits of this decade, they evidently missed another contender in the prize fight for the world’s entertainment dollar: the video game industry quietly lapped tl1e movie box office take by a cool $1 billion, cresting at a 1993 year-end gross of $6.S billion in the United States-fully one quarter of the entire entertainment industry’s revenues. 37 I am referring to a game put out by Sierra™ called “Daryl Gates: Police Quest IV, Open Season” which is the focal point of another analysis I have done on vio­ lence in video games. In Police Quest™ the player assumes the role of a homi­cide detective investigating a series of homicides against police officers. Gates was actually an instrumental member of the development team in several respects. He helped author the narrative of the game, along with a producer from the reality television show “America’s Most Wanted.” Gates also coached the video game’s actors and actresses (the game includes actual video recordings integrated in the various scenes) in proper police stances and so forth. Also, and perhaps most interesting in the context of the analysis of SimCity2000™‘s realistic quali­ties, Gates submitted the full meaning of his name as the brutally pragmatic champion of the burdened officer of the law.