CSGdesign

Originally entering the Simcity Community on Simtropolis in 2008, I started a journal called CSGdesign's NATURAL GROWTH which was designed to show the fun side of development to counter the abundant plop-and-show style journal I was seeing a lot of at the time.

The journal was supposed to show how making things perfect and gridded was nice - but how I much more enjoyed the challenge of making things abstract and irregular. I achieved this by role-playing the decisions made at the ground level, rather than grand-planning the city from an over-view level. Towards the end of 2009 when I pulled the journal off Simtropolis for personal reasons I was getting over 1000 reads per day on the journal, and updating it every 1 to 3 days depending on how busy I was in real life.

Due to Natural Growth's popularity it led to several spin-offs and similar styles from other players, and eventually lead me to starting a wordpress blog site dedicated to it, which then lead to an entire forum which has grown since and now boasts almost 200 members (zero bots) and over 31,000 posts by active and friendly members, as well as a file exchange and live chat. The focus of CSGforums is social rather than developmental... it's designed to be a fun place where players can hang out and discuss stuff without heavy rule sets... come check it out, it's got a great bunch of folks there!

The word-press site has since been decommissioned in favour of the forums, which continue to grow.

The most recent addition to the forums is a new project that takes Natural Growth to a whole new level, called The Towne.

This exciting project now has 32 active players involved, and is gaining a lot of attention due to it's unique nature - it is the only true RPG in existence that uses Simcity4 as it's base.

In The Towne players themselves determine how their characters live and grow, and by doing so alter the layout and structure of the city from within it, just like real citizens would... again focusing on Natural Growth decisions from the "ground level" rather than from an "overview" level.

My focus in Simcity 4 (and life in general) is to experiment with new and unorthodox things, to explore limits and find new ways of doing things.

It's more fun that way!