SimCities and SimCrises (2017)

This essay is just one giant complaint that &quot;The map is not the territory.&quot; No way. It is further annoying because it laments that modern progressive political concerns are not appropriately modeled in the game.<p>Maybe people who play games for enjoyment don&#x27;t want the weight of modern problems bearing down on them during their escapist recreation. Maybe people who play games don&#x27;t want to be preached to.<p>In fact, this essay is nothing but one of the many deconstructionist essays, one which prefers to tear down instead of build up. To highlight problems instead of celebrate what is good.<p>I will say this: the style of the essay was quite enjoyable, with equal emphasis on images and paragraphs.

The problem with &quot;games&quot; is that the designers often have a goal already in mind, and then give players the tools to reach that goal. For any meaningful analysis, you need to understand the artist (game designer) to fully understand the art (game). While SimCity carries its own biases, I highly doubt a game developed for activist conference is any more impartial.<p>Utopias in general are a great demonstration of man&#x27;s hubris, and we have known that forever. The Tower of Babel is perhaps the oldest fable warning against such fallacies, and Bruegel perfectly captured it in his renderings. Ford and Disney both attempted planned cities (Fordlandia and Epcot respectively), and failed. Utopia designers like SimCity wash away all that makes a city (people, struggles, relationships), and replaces it with a Map. Any simulation, no matter how noble, falls victim to the same problem that the Map is not the Land. If anything, its all a bike shedding operation of trying to fix something which we have control over, instead of what we do not, just to fulfill our Ego. How many city planners really care about the people over just imposing their own vision of ideal upon the populace?

There’s some interesting thoughts in the latter half of this article, it’s much more compelling to read the author praise and explore the new than criticise the old.<p>I’m disappointed by the paternalism though - the author underestimates children - as a 10 year old growing up in Europe it was abundantly clear to me that when I played sim city I was building a particular kind of modern American West city - the ground wasn’t even green! The criticism of the game’s claimed “realism” rings hollow given that the front of that game box has a giant alien robot on it.<p>I’m also disappointed that someone who is so invested in the topic of cities would handwave away the existence of suburbs as simply “white flight” - again, growing up in Europe we have plenty of large sprawling wealthy suburbs and white flight is definitely not one of their causes. My understanding is that it was a minor factor in the creation of the American suburbs, with the automobile and baby boom being key. It’s hard not to see this misattribution as an attempt to push a biased political narrative, given that the author is an activist.

As much as the slideshow points out a genuine, interesting question, what&#x27;s a little frustrating is that presentation author then spends a good deal of time advocating for his own preferred utopian rulesets, with similar issues of micromanagement in a fundamentally shallow meta, and with similarly narrow, politically pointed assumptions.<p>Don&#x27;t get me wrong: it&#x27;s perfectly understandable that people have preferences, and that questions of complexity and design introduce difficult trade-offs.<p>I doubt I&#x27;m alone in finding rut micromanagement the most unfun part of sim games. Having to impose all sorts of tiny decisions all the time on sim population, in such a constrained rule space, that there are always only the same few optimal strategies to progress. Issue is not that there are optima, but all of that static micromanagement could be handled bottom-up (in sims, automatically). Fun play could derive more from variations in system dynamics, discrete shocks to rules, and in general, macro or meta decisions.<p>But here am I replying to &quot;this is not the exact game I would have designed&quot; with &quot;this is not the exact game I would have designed either, plus this is not an exact argument I would have made&quot; – with me not even doing the actual work of gamemaking, unlike the author.

For those who are interested in similar discourse, I recommend these cities skylines videos from youtube user donoteat01:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=0lvUByM-fZk&amp;list=PLwkSQD3vqK1S1NiHIxxF2g_Uy-LbbcR84" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=0lvUByM-fZk&amp;list=PLwkSQD3vqK...</a><p>They are sarcastic tutorials on how to worsen your Skylines cities enough to qualify as a realistic North American metro area. If the mic quality bothers you, skip to the newer videos.

Pretty good critique of the realist aspect of the game, and props on him for trying to make a new game based on the factors that he mentioned. However, it&#x27;s not like Sim City is expected to include every single aspect of city development and growth as a factor, nor is it expected to be some kind of acceptably accurate depiction of city development. And he said so himself, the developers of SimCity didn&#x27;t want to involve aspects of the real world that were politically divisive as a factor, which I don&#x27;t really think is a bad thing.

I’m not sure anyone who has spent any significant time in Singapore would call it a “dystopia”. The place is clean, safe, and well run. The west has given up on building more cities, which I think is a pity. I’m looking forward to visiting Neom, Songdo, and other places where the future is being created.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=22851109" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=22851109</a><p>DonHopkins on April 12, 2020 | on: Enemy AI: chasing a player without Navigation2D or...<p>One trick is to spread the computation out over time, if you don&#x27;t need to do it all at at once every frame. Since the enemies don&#x27;t move that fast, a bit of delay might be good enough, depending on what you&#x27;re tracking.<p>SimCity has several layers like pollution, land value, etc, which slowly diffuse over time. But it only does that computation every so often, not every frame. It has a 16 phase simulation clock, and it scans the cells of the map in eight stripes over eight steps, then scans different layers like taxes, traffic and rate of growth decay, power, pollution and land value, police coverage and crime, population density, fire coverage and disasters, and the RCI valves. (That made it possible to run on a C64!)<p>Chaim Gingold&#x27;s SimCity Reverse Diagrams show how the different phases of &quot;Simulate()&quot; perform different kinds of analysis over time, and how the different map layers interact with each other.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lively-web.org&#x2F;users&#x2F;Dan&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;SimCityReverseDiagrams.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lively-web.org&#x2F;users&#x2F;Dan&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;SimCityReverseDiagr...</a><p>&gt;SimCity reverse diagrams, by Chaim Gingold (2016).<p>&gt;These reverse diagrams map and translate the rules of a complex simulation program into a form that is more easily digested, embedded, disseminated, and and discussed (Latour 1986).<p>&gt;If we merge the reverse diagram with an interactive approach—e.g. Bret Victor’s Nile Visualization (Victor 2013), such diagrams could be used generatively, to describe programs, and interactively, to allow rich introspection and manipulation of software.<p>&gt;Latour, Bruno (1986). “Visualization and cognition”. In: Knowledge and Society 6 (1986), pp. 1– 40.<p>&gt;Librande, Stone (2010). “One-Page Designs”. Game Developers Conference. 2010.<p>&gt;Victor, Bret (2013). “Media for Thinking the Unthinkable”. MIT Media Lab, Apr. 4, 2013.

I really enjoyed the heavy use of pictures and animations.<p>There are no page size limitations on the web, as opposed to print media, so there are few reasons to be economical with pictures, imho.<p>There was a time when similarly styled stories from imgur were a big thing on reddit, and I also loved those.

SimCity&#x27;s main issue (and this was true as far back as SimCity 2000, maybe earlier) is that the &quot;car traffic&quot; goes from residential -&gt; industrial -&gt; commercial in roughly that order.<p>This means that one plot of industry + one plot of commercial is enough to satisfy an entire residential neighborhood&#x27;s worth of traffic planning.<p>Similarly, one plot of residential + one plot of commercial is enough to satisfy an entire industrial zone worth of traffic.<p>As this design decision became more and more widely known, power-gamers took advantage of it to make weirder and weirder cities that don&#x27;t look like a real city at all.<p>------------<p>Cities: Skylines has a better traffic simulator. But its got too much emphasis on traffic simulation without actually having enough controls over traffic.<p>Police departments can only go as far as traffic lets them. Optimize for traffic, your police cover a greater area. Schools only go as far as traffic lets them, optimize for traffic, your schools cover a greater area. Etc. etc.<p>------------<p>I guess I&#x27;m liking OpenTTD, even though its not really a citybuilder. You can plan the routes of every train, bus, airplane, and boat. The cities do NOT grow naturally (the more traffic you provide, the more they grow. Its not like SimCity &#x2F; Cities:Skylines where you need to provide a variety of services to make a house grow... its assumed the cities &quot;figure out the details&quot; as long as you provide enough traffic planning).<p>Its simplified and &quot;less realistic&quot; than Cities: Skylines. But because its a bigger focus on traffic-planning that Cities: Skylines, its a more &quot;honest&quot; game IMO.<p>If you&#x27;re gonna make all elements of the game rely on traffic, then focus on traffic like OpenTTD does.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;donhopkins.medium.com&#x2F;designing-user-interfaces-to-simulation-games-bd7a9d81e62d" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;donhopkins.medium.com&#x2F;designing-user-interfaces-to-s...</a><p>&gt;Will Wright on Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games (1996)<p>[...]<p>&gt;Everyone notices the obvious built-in political bias, whatever that is. But everyone sees it from a different perspective, so nobody agrees what its real political agenda actually is. I don’t think it’s all that important, since SimCity’s political agenda pales in comparison to the political agenda in the eye of the beholder.<p>&gt;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>[...]

Ah for me the best part of simcity 2000 was the fact that the game could literally never end. just keep expanding. gave me great hope for the future - we should be able to expand forever.

I also have lived in Pittsburgh for the last 10 years as this author but I have to say I have a different impression of the city. One of my employers had an orientation on Pittsburgh a few years ago and brought in some city planners who talked about the successes and failures of some of their initiatives - the South Side Works and Homestead Waterfront. Their main objective was to integrate neighborhoods with the riverfront which had historically been pretty destroyed by industry and was now ripe for rehabilitation. For all of their effort and good intentions they had mixed success. South side does nicely slide into the Works but Homestead remains to this day awkwardly separated from the Waterfront.<p>Other neighborhoods have gentrified with terrifying speed - Lawrenceville and East Liberty are the two that come to mind. I know poorer folks sitting on properties that have likely tripled in value in the last 10 years alone. Other neighborhoods seem perfectly situated for gentrification and somehow years go by and nothing changes.<p>I think it&#x27;s too easy to attempt to &#x27;model&#x27; (simplify) these dynamics to attempt to provide evidence for some sort of narrative. White flight happened in many locations around this country, gentrification is happening now. These are opposite movements of people that both get criticized. Reality tends to be much more complex than we would like and doesn&#x27;t like to play by pre-determined rules. Who knows what the upper and middle class will be criticized for 20 years from now or what these cities will look like? In the 90&#x27;s Pittsburgh was a complete disaster.

Stopped reading when the author began complaining about SimCity not including enough Race Relation management features.

The Magnasanti video he references brought back some memories. Very fun video: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=NTJQTc-TqpU" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=NTJQTc-TqpU</a>

The article ends with the following:<p>&gt; In conclusion, I’ve been trying for years to imagine an alternative SimCity.<p>&gt; And I realized that the biggest fallacy of a City simulator is to try to present itself as an all-encompassing system, supposedly capable of describing many possible cities.<p>&gt; I believe that in order to move away from the SimCity paradigm we need many different city simulations, each one limiting its scope to certain dynamics, certain contexts.<p>Does anyone have suggestions for a more prescriptive SimCity? something more limited in scope and egalitarian?

SimCity shaped how I see many aspects of how the world was constructed, especially as a child.<p>The author mentions how Dziga Vertov and the French New Wave subverted the tools of the medium to expose the lie at the core of cinema. These ideas then circulated and transformed cinema to the core.<p>Seeing these strange games used as examples is a great parallel. It is logical conclusion that we really are in the midst of a somewhat similar big leap in gaming and simulation, both as a tool and an artform.

Developers of simulation games could publically state what biases they put in their ruleset, and even release multiple rulesets with different biases. Maybe a rule-set editor could be included. What would my city look like if people generally put up with taxes? Or if people hated them? Or if education was a quick solution to crime, or a less guaranteed one?

see also <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;logicmag.io&#x2F;play&#x2F;model-metropolis&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;logicmag.io&#x2F;play&#x2F;model-metropolis&#x2F;</a> (critique in some similar directions) and <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.filfre.net&#x2F;tag&#x2F;simcity&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.filfre.net&#x2F;tag&#x2F;simcity&#x2F;</a> (deeper origin story on simcity)

That screenshot looks like &quot;Raid on Bungling Bay.&quot; I had no idea sim-city was inspired by the level editor for that.