I loved SimCity and it's probably among the reasons I got a masters degree in GIS with a focus in city planning.<p>It turns out for a lot of reasons, real city planning wasn't for me, though it took that degree and six years on my city's planning board to figure that out. Glacial speeds of progress, a job that's mostly reactionary instead of visionary, "stakeholders" with infinite time to tell you why any change is the worst thing in the world and a conspiratorial worldview - no thanks, I'll just go back to my sims.
This article is a lighthearted and doesn't talk about the underlying models behind simcity. Would recommend also reading:<p><a href="https://logicmag.io/06-model-metropolis/" rel="nofollow">https://logicmag.io/06-model-metropolis/</a> - which talks about simcity's inspiration from Jay Forrester's 'Urban Dynamics" and it's flaws.<p>Also, <a href="https://placesjournal.org/article/a-city-is-not-a-computer/" rel="nofollow">https://placesjournal.org/article/a-city-is-not-a-computer/</a> , which is something I've been meaning to read & contrast alongside Geoffrey West's works ( <a href="https://www.ted.com/talks/geoffrey_west_the_surprising_math_of_cities_and_corporations" rel="nofollow">https://www.ted.com/talks/geoffrey_west_the_surprising_math_...</a> ).<p>There's also a recent interview between an urban planner in portland (the citybeautiful youtube channel) and a developer at cities:skylines: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7c5pSCgbZ84" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7c5pSCgbZ84</a>
It's crazy how much SimCity cities look like the cities we've built for the last 75 years. Our cities really can be simplified to a game "fun" for someone to dive in right away. My thesis is that cities are oversimplified and stratified into easily separable blocks because they're easier to "industrialize" that way. This is causing crazy transportation requirements and isolation. If we mixed uses up a bit we could save on transportation overhead and be exposed to more things. The driver of this SimCity pattern of development is undoubtedly the single occupancy automobile. Sprawl works best for the car and the car works best for sprawl. Denser, mixed up uses work best with walking, biking, and transit. Conspiracy theorist in me says the auto industry influenced city planning from the ground up because they could profit off of it. Who profits when you walk more? Well, everyone... healthier bodies, healthier minds, more efficient transportation, etc. etc. etc.
Cities: Skylines is an outstanding successor, but it lacks much of the charm of the SimCity series and feels more like a sandbox than a simulation. It's too bad Maxis decided to take the series in a simplified direction before killing it off.<p>If anyone knows of any other city-building simulators worth mentioning, please let me know.
>That issue speaks to a larger criticism of “SimCity”: Wright's vision imposed an old-school approach to city-building, influenced by Robert Moses and the Chicago school. For those early urban planners, and in “SimCity,” there were binary solutions to problems. To lower crime rates, build police stations. If people complain about traffic, build more roads. If you need space to build a freeway or a stadium, raze working-class neighborhoods.<p>Will Wright explained the motivation behind the vast oversimplifications he made in the design of SimCity, in "Will Wright on Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games (1996)":<p><a href="https://medium.com/@donhopkins/designing-user-interfaces-to-simulation-games-bd7a9d81e62d" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/@donhopkins/designing-user-interfaces-to-...</a><p>>Some muckety-muck architecture magazine was interviewing Will Wright about SimCity, and they asked him a question something like “which ontological urban paradigm most influenced your design of the simulator, the Exo-Hamiltonian Pattern Language Movement, or the Intra-Urban Deconstructionist Sub-Culture Hypothesis?” He replied, “I just kind of optimized for game play.”<p>Also, here's a talk about "Micropolis: Constructionist Educational Open Source SimCity" which discusses educational applications of SimCity:<p><a href="https://medium.com/@donhopkins/har-2009-lightning-talk-transcript-constructionist-educational-open-source-simcity-by-don-3a9e010bf305" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/@donhopkins/har-2009-lightning-talk-trans...</a>
Here's a video of an urban planner playing Sim City 2000, and commenting on the various ways in which it's accurate or inaccurate: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUQaCoxybW8" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUQaCoxybW8</a>
If anything SimCity, makes transit heavy options seem really easy to build. Building a new subway in the game is easier (and not very expensive) than re-doing a grid of roads in an area that's already developed.
Perhaps this type of simulation may one day help us choose better town planners; perhaps one day may even give us an alternate method of choosing administrators. How radical will it be in a Mayoral election, to see how different candidates will perform in a simulation, and the voters will be able to compare their scores and gain much more insight into how the prospective candidates shall perform.
This reminds me of how I got into programming by playing Starcraft: Brood War. If anyone is familiar with the Use Map Settings game mode, you could program your own scenarios using a Map Editor that came included, eg a Tower Defense map.<p>The map editor only allowed basic logic in the form of conditions/actions, but soon some very smart people figured out how to compose this into more expressive logic. Big communities and clans formed around map making, standards were made, and eventually, super high-quality maps started to come out. Many people I know from that time are now successful programmers.
It really is something. I remember a friend from childhood who gave me a pirated copy of the original Sim City. He's now a city planner in Los Angeles.
This bridge in Alexandria Egypt must have been inspired by SimCity.<p><a href="http://i.imgur.com/YbrJG2h.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/YbrJG2h.jpg</a>
My mother worked in city planning/government and at a conference Maxis was giving out copies of their brand new game, Sim City 2000. It was a great way to get the kids of these professionals (or the professionals themselves) into both gaming and city planning.
I'm surprised, as I often notice things in a given city and think "hmmm seems like someone in city planning never played SimCity"! haha ;) .. like when multi-million-dollar highway construction projects which take 10 years are built to usage levels measured at the start of the project, not for what the projected population/needs will be way down the line...
SimCity was my childhood. Played thousands of hours trying to find the right formula to optimize land value and population. Then they introduced more sophisticated terraforming tools and the ability to import contour maps in SimCity 4. I spent more time on landscaping than the actual game. The community behind SimCity 4 was great as well with all the mods.
I still play, the mod scene for SC4 is great. There are bike lanes now and all the parking lots you could want. You can easily build American suburban shopping centers with acres of beautiful cement.<p>When I was in high school I went to city counsel meetings, was active in youth in gov't, and even met the city manager. All because I loved playing SimCity for much. We never had a computer powerful enough to play SC2k so I saved and bought a Sega Saturn and the AT keyboard adapter and spent hours playing on that.
My favorite is the 9% tax that a presidential candidate wanted to have and that was based on SimCity.<p>e.g. 9% personal income tax, 9% federal sales tax, and a 9% corporate tax.
Given its popularity, tech minded players and complete failure of Maxis as a steward of the game, I'm incredibly surprised a popular and well maintained Open Source city sim hasn't appeared[1]<p>1 - I'm aware of Lincity, OpenCity and OpenSC2k, but none of them are popular and/or are recreations, not full-up new city makers.
I think they read <a href="https://logicmag.io/06-model-metropolis/" rel="nofollow">https://logicmag.io/06-model-metropolis/</a> and were wise enough to give their article a more click friendly headline.
I don't get the feeling that SimCity suggests that car-centric solutions are the "right" answers. My interpretation always was that it shows you how ideal mass transit solutions were but why economic pressure could keep them from working. Ultimately it seemed like the message was that pure capitalism was biased towards solutions that just barely met the citizens' needs.<p>The lack of parking lots was always an obvious bias, though a reasonable game design choice considering the visual appeal. I remember when SimCity 4 modders started making more buildings with "correct" parking lots (and other scaling aspects), it was so contrastive with the built-ins that people often either rejected it, or worked to acquire enough custom buildings that they could turn off <i>all</i> the default ones, which required a pretty staggering number of assets.