Why Do Some Places Just Feel Right?

Gregory Wieber does these engaging, info-rich videos on tech history — I posted his HyperCard Changed Everything video back in the spring. For one of his latest videos, Wieber goes through a short history of Christopher Alexander’s landmark book, A Pattern Language (Bookshop), which anyone interested in building anything should at least have paged through once in their life,¹ and how his work inspired not only object oriented programming and the invention of wikis, but also SimCity and The Sims.

1. The Timeless Way of Building is shorter, less dense, and perhaps a better introduction to Alexander’s ideas about patterns. ↩

• Gregory Wieber
• simcity
• The Sims
• video games
• Will Wright