I think you are taking this too seriously. Star Trek inspired people to go work for NASA. I'm not hearing reports that NASA has gone to hell because everyone is commited to making Warp Drive a reality so we can make contact with the Klingons.

Early iterations of SimCity would bring an alien invasion down on your head. I eventually concluded it was triggered by inadequate fire coverage.

I have yet to hear a single city planner talk about needing more fire departments as a magical talisman to ward off alien invasions.

I began playing SimCity because I was wondering if I might want to become an urban planner. It caused me to decide to get a Certificate in GIS because, good God, city planning would be so much better if we could handily look up the kind of data that is available on SimCity for making informed decisions if you take the time to look at it.

I have serious health problems. Life got in the way. So far, I haven't worked professionally in this field.

I did spend a lot of time on an urban planning forum for some years and founded a small subforum and was a low level moderator with limited moderating powers. So I've talked to actual professional planners, been to an urban planning conference, etc.

Lots of city planners play(ed) SimCity. Every one of them I've spoken to seems well aware of its limitations and that the real world doesn't actually work that way.

SimCity can be used educationally, but not in the sense of literally training people to be urban planners or mayors.

It's more useful for "Constructionist Education" and "Design Based Learning", as practiced by Seymour Papert and Doreen Nelson.

Constructionism (learning theory):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructionism_(learning_theo...

>Constructionist learning is when learners construct mental models to understand the world around them. Constructionism advocates student-centered, discovery learning where students use information they already know to acquire more knowledge. Students learn through participation in project-based learning where they make connections between different ideas and areas of knowledge facilitated by the teacher through coaching rather than using lectures or step-by-step guidance. Further, constructionism holds that learning can happen most effectively when people are active in making tangible objects in the real world. In this sense, constructionism is connected with experiential learning and builds on Jean Piaget's epistemological theory of constructivism.

>Seymour Papert defined constructionism in a proposal to the National Science Foundation titled Constructionism: A New Opportunity for Elementary Science Education as follows:

>"The word constructionism is a mnemonic for two aspects of the theory of science education underlying this project. From constructivist theories of psychology we take a view of learning as a reconstruction rather than as a transmission of knowledge. Then we extend the idea of manipulative materials to the idea that learning is most effective when part of an activity the learner experiences as constructing a meaningful product."

Chaim Gingold's PhD thesis "Play Design" deeply analyzes SimCity, and also has an entire section about Doreen Nelson's lifetime work on "City Building Education".

Not only did she write the SimCity 3000 Teacher's Guide for Maxis, but long before SimCity ever existed, she developed "Design Based Learning", which in 1974 she originally called "City Building Education", in which kids built cities out of cardboard instead of pixels.

Chaim Gingold's thesis on "Play Design":

https://pqdtopen.proquest.com/doc/1806122688.html?FMT=AI

page 366> Play has a complex relationship to what is not play. Depending on who you ask, SimCity, the software toy, is either a frivolous diversion or an earnest model—and sometimes both. Right from the start, SimCity had appeal as an educational tool, a quality that Maxis tried to capitalize on. According to Braun, “It was never our intention to go into the education market, but the education market came to us and said: ‘This is what we need if you’re gonna work with us.’ ” What the education market wanted was teacher’s guides that translated and adapted SimCity for classroom use. It didn’t hurt that Brøderbund, Maxis’s publishing partner, was deep into the then hot educational software market, and that along with the investment Maxis received from venture capitalists in 1992, came a hunger for aggressive growth into new markets. Wright, of course, was busy making titles like SimEarth and SimAnt for an uncertain market. Maybe that market was education?

>[...] One of the teachers Curtin hired was Doreen Nelson, a brilliant and innovative educator who had developed a pedagogy called City Building Education, in which students collaboratively built cities out of craft materials and role play. Nelson become a regular visitor to Maxis, and Curtin made some trips to Los Angeles to see City Building in action, where she found the experience of “watching a classroom actually go through a couple of days worth of creation” to be “very inspiring. … I will never forget that experience” (Curtin 2015; Nelson 2015). [5]

[5]> This translation took the form of a short teacher’s guide, a pamphlet, really, written by Michael Bremer, and published by Maxis in 1989—the same year SimCity was released, explaining the limitations and applications of SimCity, and offering curricular questions and scripts. Within a few years, Maxis became more serious about tackling the education market, and hired Claire Curtin, in 1992, as their first educational product manager, charging her with finding ways to package SimCity, SimEarth, and SimAnt for the school market. Prior to joining Maxis, Curtin had been the senior producer of Brøderbund’s hit educational franchise, Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego?, a job she had started in 1988, immediately after finishing graduate studies at NYU’s Educational Communication and Technology program, where she had studied with the noted education technology researcher Roy Pea. Over the course of her career at Maxis, Curtin shifted roles and projects, a result of Maxis’s fickle focus and its inability to produce hits beyond SimCity (chapter 5). Later, when Maxis defocused on a hard to reach education market, Curtin would go on to co-design or co-produce the kids’ titles SimTown (1995) and SimSafari (1998). Curtin collaborated closely with Roxana (“Roxy”) Wolosenko, and after Maxis decided not to do any more kid specific titles, the two of them were shifted to Wright’s “Dollhouse” project—a title that was not spoken out loud due to its gender connotations—where they were instrumental, as Wright’s co-designers, in evolving the design focus away from time management and towards people and interactions inspired by everyday life. It is this more human centric vision of Dollhouse that eventually saw release as The Sims, which became, at long last, the second commercially successful Sim title (Curtin 2015).

Design-based learning:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design-based_learning

>Design-based learning was developed in the 1980s by Doreen Nelson, a professor at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona and the Art Center College of Design. Her findings suggested that kinesthetic problem-solving helps students acquire, retain, and synthesize information in practical ways.

Doreen Nelson's SimCity 3000 Teacher's Guide:

https://studylib.net/doc/5921300/simcity-3000-teacher-s-guid...

Here's a transcript of the HAR2009 talk I gave about "Micropolis: Constructionist Educational Open Source SimCity", which explores some ideas of applying Constructionism to SimCity.

https://medium.com/@donhopkins/har-2009-lightning-talk-trans...

Here's some more information on the design of SimCity:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18760822