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If you try really hard, you can find little pieces of evidence of any agenda in any material. It seems like Jeff Braun tried really really hard if he says SimCity is bad because it pushes the opponents agenda. The evidence quickly disappears once you step back and try to see the big picture. It's just a game. And mass transit actually makes sense.

I don't believe Jeff Braun was saying SimCity is bad. As he was the CEO of the company that made it at the time, that would be a very foolish move.

I think he was trying to deflect criticism directed towards the game. Keep in mind that the media was presenting SimCity not as just a game, but as a clever teaching tool for children to understand finance and local government. Okay, great. Whatever sells the game, right?

Then actual economists and city planners start to comment about how the game isn't realistic at all and fudges the numbers in such a way to incentivize certain play styles without showing the trade-offs that are involved in real life. At that point, Braun has to admit to the biases in the game, but he can't say anything so extreme to lose the free advertising his product is getting from schools and teachers and parenting magazines that are telling parents to buy the game for their children.

And although I'm a proponent of mass transit, it's not perfect. I believe SimCity only represents the upfront cost of mass transit and discounts the recurring maintenance costs, while road maintenance costs are inflated. But now were debating specific mechanics of a game other than the one this thread is about.

I mentioned Magnasanti in another part of the thread. In Magnasanti, there is only mass transit. No roads at all. I don't think I'd like living in a place like that where government-owned transportation decides where and when I can travel.

But that's exactly my point. There are two sides to every coin and I think it's important to represent the pros and cons of the choices the player is presented. There's no such thing as a purely positive or negative decision when it comes to city planning.

I appreciate the sentiment and always suspected as much about SimCity. My goal for Citybound is really a meta one: to be flexible enough to try out any number of government and planning styles and for the simulation to be tweakable enough to set up any real-life or imagined political context for a city.

That's good to hear. I think making it open source is already a step in the right direction. City planners who were critical of SimCity at the time often pointed to the game being a black box, so you couldn't examine, much less tweak, the assumptions built into the simulation.

If that is truly your goal, it is a noble one, but in that case baking the pathfinding into the roads seems like a bad design choice. People get lost driving in a convoluted city a lot even with GPS, but much less so in a regular blocked city.

Making them get lost is as easy as picking a random turn instead of the correct one with a certain probability.

According to your article (other comment) on Magnasanti, "There are no roads — all transit is mass transit."

That is hardly "a lot of conservative politics baked into the design of the game", nor would any such politics be "potentially damaging to the kids who played it".

If somebody gets a harmful lesson from the game, it is that you can have a viable modern city without any place to drive a truck.

I regret calling out any particular political ideology by name. It's true that not all of the biases baked into the game are conservative with the bias toward mass transit being a great example of liberal bias. I meant those as two separate thoughts, but I failed to properly express that.

Although I think many American cities could benefit from more mass transit choices, I agree that I certainly wouldn't want to live in a city where mass transit was the only option. It would mean a government-controlled entity would be dictating when and where I could travel. I don't like the sound of that.

The government can blockade roads and impound/boot your car. They also maintain roads. Many low-income people rely on public transit as their only transit option already. If your fear is that the government is going to turn against its own citizens and use public services as a weapon, public transit should be the least of your worries. You could easily say the same thing about municipal water or electricity.

This seems more like a failure in parenting, it was always made clear to me that games and television do not reflect reality and should not be emulated. At what age did you realize Simcity was just a game and that you should not treat it as an actual predication or model of reality?

" it was always made clear to me that games and television do not reflect reality"

And to me it was allways clear that this is just a legal disclaimer.

Of course games and videos reflect reality. Not 100% accurate, no, and some allmost 0% but btw. no scientific model does 100%, even though they are obviously more accurate and I would like more games to be based on scientific models.

But for example angry birds, very succesful, obviously fiction, but the core game mechanic is a physic simulation(Box2D) which works as realistic as a 2d computer can work in a game, so you can learn about kinetics with it.

Parents don't make legal disclaimers, which is what I should have explained, they always reminded me that it's just a game. If I started spouting political opinions and justified them with "but that is what happens in Sims when you have that policy", they would have further reinforced that games mechanics should not influence your life decisions. Your explanation is overly pedantic and not a charitable interpretation. It's not appropriate to base political opinions based on a black box game.

"Parents don't make legal disclaimers"

But they repeat them.

And since you were the one who insulted someone with the assumption that they just realized that SimCity is just a game, it is a bit laughable to accuse me of pedantry, because I told you, that games do have a base in reality.

While this is certainly clear for media like cartoons, action movies, Mortal Kombat, and Doom, SimCity was touted as an educational tool for children and an accurate model of reality throughout the early to mid 1990s. I was in elementary school at the time. Parenting magazines and journals as well as the broader media claimed as much. A friend of mine growing up who absolutely loved SimCity is a real life city planner now. I have fond memories of playing SimCity 2000 with my father.

If you really want to know when I realized that the real world doesn't work like SimCity, it was when I was in college and I started actually paying attention to the news and what was going on in the cities and towns I lived in.

Yes, it's especially important when these games are used to educate students. Recently came across this [0] very informative talk that discusses some of the same things.

On another note, I'm really excited to see that A Pattern Language was an inspiration for this sim. That seems like a great start!

[0] http://molleindustria.org/GamesForCities/

I wouldn't say mass transit is a conservative policy. Quite the opposite.

I didn't mean to imply I thought mass transit was a conservative policy. I was trying to highlight another example of bias in the mechanics of the game. I failed to do so.

Maxis wasn't without its subversives, though. In SimCopter, Jacques Servin hid an easter-egg to display "bikin-clad, kissing men... to balance the 'bimbos' ordered by his 'aggressively heterosexual' boss"[0]

[0] https://www.nydailynews.com/pixel-gaiety-costs-job-article-1...

Any city building sim is gonna be inherently political, so much of city planning is the policies or agenda of one side or the other. What you appear to be arguing is that the republicans are always wrong and you want the dev to make a liberal-policy based game.

It's OSS so you can do that yourself if you think such a thing should exist.

A city building game will be political as it's at least partially simulating politics. However, I regret mentioning Republicans by name. I was trying to warn more broadly about adding the biases of the developers into a seemingly objective simulation. See this later comment I wrote:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19588287

Thank you for those articles, would you happen to also have books you can recommend that informed your thoughts on government policy?

You're welcome. I can't really recommend any specific books. I don't want my personal views on politics to be the focus, though. I'm just wary of biases hidden in supposedly unbiased algorithms.

If that topic interests you, I can recommend Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O'Neil, and Algorithms of Oppression by Safiya Noble.

I'm a programmer myself, so I understand if people are initially defensive about these topics. But it's important to me that I never write software that's harmful to people, so I try to check my biases as I create software to avoid these more insidious issues. It's easier to spot issues that may arise due to programming machinery that could crush a person, for example. Or software designed to estimate fuel usage for an airplane. It's much more difficult to spot inequity of minorities in software.

There's plenty of examples out there of biased AI in response to biased training sets.

If you're more interested in the dystopia that must be created in order to "win" SimCity, here's a couple of interesting articles. (I think they've been shared here before.) By taking the game to its absolute extremes, it becomes clearer what the simulation considers most important and valuable, thereby laying bare some of the biases inherent in the game's design.

https://rumorsontheinternets.org/2010/10/14/magnasanti-the-l...

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/4w4kg3/the-totalitarian-b...

Every opinion on complex reality makes assumptions that are not 100% certain to be correct. I assume you would have considered SimCity more objective if it didn't give low taxes the effect of increasing economic growth, but a centrist opinion is no more certain to be congruent with the truth than a left-wing or right-wing opinion, and is based on just as much speculation/conjecture as the other two.

I personally see the evidence overwhelmingly support the "right wing" view that low taxes and an absence of restrictions on contract freedom bolster economic growth, and I think that is what most analyses by economists conclude, which is why leftists have had such a problem with the Economics field for such a long time, and why Economics has had held out so long among the social sciences in becoming dominated by those who hold left-wing views (though that's been changing in recent decades).

Make the game informed by data instead of ideology