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The game making it impossible to have a stable large city with low crime without dystopian modes of control absolutely communicates the ideology of the creators of the game, conscious or not.

It's really not a sleight of hand. The idea that it's natural for it being impossible to have a city with low crime and a high population without making everyone miserable is absolutely ideology, and it's just your own ideology that perceives this as somehow a neutral fact.

Its not progressive to say that without over-policing high crime is inevitable, or that industrialization means we have no choice but to be miserable either. Those are solidly reactionary beliefs.

> The game making it impossible to have a stable large city with low crime without dystopian modes of control absolutely communicates the ideology of the creators of the game, conscious or not.

No, it "absolutely" does not. It could simply be a shortcoming of the developer's reach. You try to simulate a large city and get it a stable utopia! Do I have to remind you that this is something we've yet to accomplish in the real world, either. You expect a single game developer to do it successfully? Will Wright is (presumably) not a mayor, city planner, nor politician; he's a gamedev. Talented and famous, I'll grant you, but not infallible. And we're talking about a game he made 28 years ago from today, at the age of 33.

SimCity 2000 isn't your typical illusion as many games are, either. It's trying to be a fairly accurate simulation of its time. Of course it embeds its creators biases, but it's not really trying to "convey a deep message" using an elaborate facade, like some games are, or theatre, for example. It's a sandbox.

You're missing the point of the author.

In that game, people care more about still pretty low levels of crime than they care about their health, having a nice income, and so on.

And in addition, that game has crime as something that's simply immutable and that you remove by totalitarian policing.

I never said the game conveyed a deep message. I said that it conveyed the ideology of the creator. Those are very different things - often the second is accidental.

I'm still not buying it. The levels of care sims give to each attribute of the simulation could be the result of non-exhaustive game balance testing. They wanted to add crime. They wanted to make crime matter. They wanted something to combat crime, they added police. They tweaked values until it "felt good to play" and then shipped it - a commercial product on a budget and schedule. Zero people were likely employed to analyze how the game's systems might be perceived 30 years later.

That's the entire thing about ideology - you don't do it consciously, for most people the dominant ideology is the unknown knowns.

Video games are art. Adding crime in the way it was implemented is an artistic decision. Making crime dependent on policing instead of other, more realistic factors is also an artistic decision (and it's not true that police is the only way to handle crime from a gameplay perspective either). Balancing what exactly the sims are concerned about is also an artistic decisions.

Artistic decisions, especially when they seem obvious, are often ideologically motivated without someone even realising it, and this is both what the writer of Polygon was touching on as well as explicitly on of the things the author of Magnasantis was targetting.

It does, but so do you somehow assuming that 'stable large city' is something to be aimed for. There's ideology behind what it takes to achieve such goal, just like there's ideology in assuming that is a goal to achieve.

There is a lot of intentional and unintentional emergent states in games, but trying to push narration of something being a win state as if that was a minor jump is not doing that critical reading any favours.

Yes, certainly stable large cities with low crime and happy people being something to aim for has ideology behind it. But so does the game, and the ideology in the game is way more pervasive and interesting.

As far as myself, I did take care not to assume that large stable crime free happy cities are inherently desirable in my above comment. Simply the fact that they are impossible still communicates ideology, whether you think they are desirable or not.

> the ideology in the game is way more pervasive and interesting.

I think you have this backwards. The ideology in SimCity is only a tiny reflection of broader ideologies that pervade almost every aspect of modern/urban life and ought to be much more interesting due to their much larger impact. If anything is interesting in SimCity's ideology, it is only what it says about ideology outside of SimCity, as the game itself is trival.

Perfectly fair within comment, nonetheless my point holds thread-wise.

When you try to "define" a black box, to find its edges, what you're aiming for is irrelevant. You'll give it input and analyze the output to find out what states it can be in and what are the "rules", and use that to characterize the black box.

In this case whether a stable large city is to aim for or not in real life or in the game is a bit irrelevant, what's important is that the game's black box allows large, crime free cities if and only if they are a dystopian nightmare. This is how the state was defined and it's backed into the game by design. It's worth noting that someone made it like this and behind that ideology there's a message being passed on through the game.

By testing to find the win conditions in a certain scenario you basically discover what the designer of the system considered to be necessary to win. The coder who wrote the code responsible for this (or their manager) either put their own ideology in code, or put what they believed to be the most accepted by the target audience.

Almost any such creation embodies either the ideology of the creator, or that of the consumer. Sometimes it's boring and sometimes it's interesting to let the genie out of the black box.

> By testing to find the win conditions

you realize, that there are none in SimCity.

Of course there are, just not imposed by the game. You set them up for every scenario you decide to play. A win can be to get to any state of the game. For example the win conditions in the scenario proposed by the article seem to be "large crime free city". The rules of the game are hard coded in the "black box" engine and they represent the ideology and mental assumptions of whoever wrote them.

Sure, though this is trivial. Every artifact crated by people shows ideology. Chairs show the ideology of conforming space to human physiology.

As much as I disagree with buran77's use of 'win condition', that is very much not the same.

You can't make (usable) chairs without conforming space to human physiology. The ideology is in making a chair, not in what chair one makes.

You can however put different ideologies into city builder and get different, perfectly fine city builders.

I was reflecting not so long ago that the biggest unexamined ideology of these city builders exists in to the bulldozer brush. No ecosystem externalities included in this simulation, apart from the occasional newspaper headline about unhappy citizens.

The sleight-of-hand trick in this comment is describing Magnasanti, an exercise in building a city with the literal highest population density possible, as "a stable large city".

You could probably create a nice big city that had low crime without dystopian policing, but you might need to build a public park in space that could otherwise be used to pack in a few more apartments.

The idea that a fairly high but reasonable population city - SimCity limits population artifically through zoning restrictions - must be a dystopian nightmare is... ideological. In SimCity, citizens are free to leave, and they do if, for example, crime is too high. Why is it then that the best way not to have them leave is to reduce crime and not improve health or reduce pollution? This is a choice the designers made that was probably unwittingly informed by ideology.

The idea that what people are willing to suffer and keep the city in a state of self-sufficiency has nothing to do with health, income equality, and so on, but only about crime and the amount of commerces and parks, is also ideological.

The assumption that the highest density city that people are willing to live in means that reducing crime is more important than having healthy and happy people is ideological.

The idea that this is an expected result is also ideological.

> The idea that a fairly high but reasonable population city - SimCity limits population artifically through zoning restrictions

I'd say the population limit stems from the game's map size limit. The largest SimCity 3000 map is 32 square kilometers, and Magnasanti packs 6 million residents in there. That's 187,000 people per square kilometer.

For comparison, Manhattan is one of the densest areas in the US, and it has 28,000 residents per square kilometer. Manila, the densest city in the world, has 41,000 per square km.

I am unsure I would describe a city seven times denser than Manhattan as "reasonable", at least in a game designed to replicate cities as they currently exist in the real world, and I am also unsure I would describe the decision to limit the map size in a video game as "ideological".

That's really not the point. The idea that what sims care about more is small increases in crime and not health, pollution, work, income inequality, and that's the best way not to get them to leave is absolutely ideological.

To note, 187k people per sq. km is not actually unrealistic - there are neighborhoods in the world with this level of density such as Ayal Nasir in Dubai, and even some with this level of density and the same order of magnitude in population such as the Imbaba neighborhood of Cairo in Egypt. But this is a detail and mostly besides the point.

Imbaba in Cairo sounds pretty dystopian from all the coverage I can find, and the government seems to rely heavily on totalitarian policing to suppress mass uprisings there. And we're talking about an area with, apparently, something like a quarter of the population of Magnasanti.

It's not necessarily the best way, it's just the way that consumes the lowest amount of space in the city. If there's an ideological point to be made here, it's that hospitals are larger than police stations.

...which means that sims care more about crime than they do about pollution, health, etc...

Put it that way - in SimCity as long as crime is down and some other factors are adequate, they won't leave even if they are miserable. But if crime increases, then they leave, even if they are in good health and make a nice income nonetheless.

> But if crime increases, then they leave, even if they are in good health and make a nice income nonetheless.

Doesn't seem that unreasonable, actually. High-income people leave crime-ridden areas, happens approximately everywhere

If everyone is in good health and making decent money, what is the motive for the kind of crime people move away from? The choice to model "crime" as some kind of naturally-occuring resource is already telling.

I'm not talking about motives, I don't know what they are, but I suspect that when crime happens, people prefer to move away if they can.

Also, do you claim to know exactly how and why crime happens?

> do you claim to know exactly how and why crime happens?

Yes, but since you've been snarky now I won't tell you.

Is there any way to describe how a city works and relates to its citizens that isn't political?

I think Simcity makes a political comment, and there was literally no way for the game to avoid that.

Indeed : code is law, or in this case, ideology.

I think you've found an interesting point here. I don't agree that this is some "slight of hand" by the author to try and convince your, but I do think you're correct that you can't draw your conclusion solely based on the one art project. I see it more as a failing of the author than a trick.

SimCity does have an ideology, and it does have something to say with how it has weighed it's measurements of citizen satisfaction, but the author seems to fail at capturing that ideology and instead just talks about how minmaxing is bad.

The rest of the article is interesting. There's plenty of people out there that don't even think about how the rules of the game frames the discussions you can have about it. It's just kind of a bad example.

SimCity is a piece of code. It may be more fair to say that the author himself had an ideology.

Ho hum. Who lacks ideology? Well, the dead, for starters.

My observation is of the "who smelt it, dealt it" variety: those offering the heaviest charges of bias and ideology are communicating the depth of their own.

SimCity very much does express an ideology, though generally not because the designer wanted to.

But try to zone something for mixed use.

SimCity itself tells you that certain things will happen under certain conditions, and it is generally wrong about those predictions. It's not intended to be an accurate simulation; it's intended to be amusing and to conform to people's intuitions about what they want to happen when they plan their city in a certain way. But people play it and feel they're learning something about how cities actually work.

> SimCity very much does express an ideology [...] try to zone something for mixed use [...] It's not intended to be an accurate simulation

It absolutely is trying to be an accurate simulation, for its time. That was 28 years ago. Do you remember how slow computers used to be? You can't zone for mixed use because of technical limitations. The simulation takes place on a grid; each grid cell is limited in memory by computer technology; therefore the performance requirements of the simulation dictate that only one thing can exist in one place.

I'd assume that having no win state in the game is precisely because the creator didn't want to make a statement about the ideal city. Instead, each person who plays the game can decide if and when they've created the ideal city for themselves. Calling a crime-free city with a stable population "ideal" is just as valid as calling a crime-filled city with happy citizens "ideal."

I love that you called it a sleight of hand because that's exactly what it is; just by assuming someone could beat the game, the authors have misunderstood Sim City.

Well, that one is pretty egregious but there are other blatantly misleading statements. I don't know what polygon is meant to be, but the author seems to be far more ideologically biased than SimCity ever was.

One example: "Scientific simulations, like those used to model climate change, don’t keep their formulas hidden in a black box because replicability is a big part of the scientific method."

But the black box nature of climate models was the core issue in one of the biggest disputes between sceptics and researchers of all time. It went to court and the researcher preferred to lose the suit than reveal his model (Michael Mann). The COVID model from Imperial College that justified lockdowns had to be extracted from the university via FOIA requests which were stonewalled for months. The scientist who wrote it openly claimed in interviews nobody except him understood the model equations, which were all entirely undocumented. Probably the author doesn't know these things, but it shows a rather naive misunderstanding of the true nature of science. Black box models that encode ideological beliefs are common throughout serious research.

The comment about how SimCity doesn't simulate race or gender is also rather ideological. The belief that race and gender are central to everything is both quite new, very much a view of the left and totally USA centric, but SimCity was designed to sell to international markets too. "Cities are built on history, politics, and racial bias" is the sort of comment that gives away the article for what it is: a complaint that a a popular video game wasn't woke. We learn more about Polygon's ideology than that of Will Wright.

Polygon also seems to forget that SimCity 2000 is a 28-year-old game. I think I had a 200 MHz computer to play it on with mere dozens of megabytes of memory. To store and simulate such fine details was simply not possible at the time.

It originally came out in 1993, so you're looking at more like 16-25 MHz that it was targeted at

I played it on an Apple Performa 460. That's a 33Mhz 68030 with 4MB of RAM

> But the black box nature of climate models was the core issue in one of the biggest disputes between sceptics and researchers of all time. It went to court and the researcher preferred to lose the suit than reveal his model (Michael Mann).

Which court case was that?

It was in 2019 in Canada. https://issuesinsights.com/2019/08/30/media-ignores-climate-...

The ends are open but the means are limited by the design. Want to elevate your Sims out of poverty? Well you can't really, but you can tax the poor out of their inconvenient, property-value reducing existence by setting regressive tax rates and your city will function just fine. Want to build a European style city centre which is pedestrianised, mixed-use and has controls on building style? Nope, you can't, the game wants to fill a commercial zone with towers and parking lots.

Sure, not all the design assumptions align quite so neatly with American and right wing sterotypes: suburbs are really inefficient to provide services for and Sims aren't at all bothered about religion in many versions. But they are designed limitations rather than the product of players' imagination.

> Want to build a European style city centre which is pedestrianised, mixed-use and has controls on building style? Nope, you can't

Because it's a 28-year-old game with the computational limitations of the time. It does not simulate people walking. It does not simulate multiple types of buildings existing in the same plot. It does not simulate building styles (I think?). And it has nothing to do with ideology. No-one could make such a simulation in 1993.

I dont think the requirement for road access or the US-style zoning or the only way to stop low wealth apartment towers popping up next door to shiny condos being to raise taxes on the poor or the impossibility of centrally planning a housing development without using a cheat/mod was down to computational limitations, especially not by SimCity 4 in 2003. It was a game based on a US vision of what a city is and how (un)involved its planners are, and ideology certainly shaped city planning in the US, if not Will Wright.

> It does not simulate people walking... And it has nothing to do with ideology

Buddy,