SimCities and SimCrises (2017)
molleindustria.org
molleindustria.org
Maybe people who play games for enjoyment don't want the weight of modern problems bearing down on them during their escapist recreation. Maybe people who play games don't want to be preached to.
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.
I will say this: the style of the essay was quite enjoyable, with equal emphasis on images and paragraphs.
it's like... yeah, duh. games are and have always been simplifications of complex systems, allowing for interesting decisions and fun for the player. presenting the idea that SimCity doesn't holistically simulate everything in a real city down to social justice issues like race/class stratification and tensions between the populace and the police, is far from a novel observation, and every time someone makes such an observation it makes me wonder what the intended audience for such an observation is.
that said, yes, the layout and presentation of the ideas expressed here is quite nice.
- They fail to simulate the difficult path from a low class kid to end up driving a F1. Much easier is your father is Lawrence Stroll, e.g.
- They fail to simulate the pernicious effects of CO2.
- Doesn't take into account the resources wasted to the frivolous and improductive activity of car racing.
- Doesn't allow you to drive a bike, a solar powered car, etc. It promotes dirty cars.
- Add displays on the tracks exploits the players silently.
and so on. The main problem here is that "X game doesn't align with MY agenda, so it's inherently wrong designed".
Yeah, but how many people enjoy playing "Pit" ??
I will say that Acquire is a good "more realistic" take on stock trading. Its got some gamey / non-realistic rules... but those aspects make the game more fun (For example: __always__ 2:1 trades, no matter what the value of the stocks are. A $200 stock can 2:1 trade for a $1000 stock, which provides an obvious point of conflict for the various players)
Monopoly is a bad game at its core. You sit around and watch your money disappear due to shear random chance, especially if your table has memorized the probability of each property being landed upon (Orange properties have the highest probability btw, and therefore are the hottest commodity among players who know how to play the game)
E: do you know if the Hasbro version (newer, with far uglier box) has any rule changes compared to the WotC (/Avalon Hill) original?
Yes. There's "Primary", "Secondary" and "Tertiary" bonuses (instead of the previous "Major" and "Minor" bonuses) on Acquires.
So while the rules and overall gameplay is different, the subtle strategies have changed.
--------------
WotC wasn't the original btw. 3M made the original in the 1960s, back when 3M tried to make board games.
The Hasbro 2013 version is probably the best recent version. Its all cardboard instead of 3d plastic, but its printed clearly and feels nice. The newest, ugly printing has very hard to read tiles, and many players suggest spending a few minutes with a silver-permanent marker recoloring the tiles to actually have enough contrast to see.
Avalon Hill / Hasbro made the 2008 edition.
----------
The most recent 2016 edition by Hasbro isn't all bad (despite rule changes and terrible fonts and terrible designs). The core rules still exist and it still feels like a game of Acquire.
Since its like $30 to $50 (depending on retailer), that's just the cheapest way of getting into the game. Finding an old version for $200+ used is for the dedicated fans.
Monopoly is derived from the most political of board games: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Landlord's_Game , written as an act of political activism by a Georgist in 1904.
> Maybe people who play games for enjoyment don't want the weight of modern problems bearing down on them during their escapist recreation. Maybe people who play games don't want to be preached to.
SimCity represents some modern problems anyway, and plenty of people don't like it for that reason. Also, why is this any reason to not critique a game? No one has to read the article if they don't want to be preached to.
> 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.
The article actually goes on to explain how to build better games and showcases examples. The author is literally building up their own game in response to the problem of SimCity.
This is the key: Treating, and naming as, "the problem of Sim City". That's an extremely activist lens which presents critiques of a game not as mere deficiencies, but as something that is a societal problem. It tears down Sim City because the activist mindset aims to tear down all facets of society itself.
It is so darn tiring.
That said, to quote the article:
> SimCity has been used and is being used as educational tool. Now, more than ever, is shaping the way a lot of people understand or misunderstand city planning. This is a recent initiative, a modified educational version.
> The original SimCity is now open source and was included in the OLPC - One Laptop per Child (the cheap laptops created by the MIT for education in developing countries). We are literally shipping our ideas of cities to the third world. Because of this educational uses and because it claimed to be a simulation of a really existing system and not “just a game”, SimCity has been criticized from pretty much every angle.
Of course the map is not the territory. But what exactly is different between the map and the territory? What are you missing when you examine the former and not the latter?
> nothing but one of the many deconstructionist essays, one which prefers to tear down instead of build up
The same could be said about your comment!
Yes, a starting point for a darn, tired activist discussion. SimCity is not merely flawed, it is flawed in a way that is ruining society, as is most everything else.
> The same could be said about your comment!
Ah, but it is mere tit for tat! You play by the deconstructionist rules, then I am allowed to play by them against your own deconstructions.
I haven't been involved in all this tired Sim City discourse, I guess I missed it the first few times around. I found the article interesting.
> activist
The article is about a computer game (that was originally marketed as "realistic" but isn't realistic at all) somehow ended up being used for actual education about cities, and that might not be a good idea. That's some real radical stuff, man!
> SimCity is not merely flawed, it is flawed in a way that is ruining society, as is most everything else.
The article didn't say anything like this. It says that Sim City isn't very realistic as a "simulation", because we can't represent all the nuances of the real world as a tidy automaton. It also says that spreading it around as if it were realistic can therefore lead to and/or perpetuate misguided ideas about how cities and societies work, or about how they ought to work.
The exploration of the differences between the map and the territory is precisely what is interesting about the article.
> Ah, but it is mere tit for tat! You play by the deconstructionist rules, then I am allowed to play by them against your own deconstructions.
Sounds more like hypocrisy to me, but suit yourself.
>The article is about a computer game (that was originally marketed as "realistic" but isn't realistic at all) somehow ended up being used for actual education about cities, and that might not be a good idea. That's some real radical stuff, man!
The author identifies as an activist. Indeed, the author cares more about constructing a game that meets their activist ideals rather than playing a game for fun. This is why I am giving strong push back... the author is fundamentally discarding the purpose of a game, which is to have fun, for ideological purposes. It's in the zeigtgeist to do this for _everything_ and it is so darn tired. Nothing is just a game or just a movie or just a whatever--it is something that is perpetuating a blah blah blah wrong view of the world and This Is A Problem (tm).
> The article didn't say anything like this. It says that Sim City isn't very realistic as a "simulation", because we can't represent all the nuances of the real world as a tidy automaton.
> It also says that spreading it around as if it were realistic can therefore lead to and/or perpetuate misguided ideas about how cities and societies work, or about how they ought to work.
You restate what I just said. The author claims SimCity is wrong in a way that is ruining (i.e., misguiding, misinforming) society. Instead of emphasizing that we should always be prepared to understand the map is not the territory, and hence not make too much of any map, the author extrapolates the case of SimCity as something particular pernicious for society while ignoring its fundamental purpose (to have fun playing a game). In other words, it's not just a minor issue that the map is not the territory, it is a major issue. And this is the tiring activist junk that is being applied to everything these days. Of course you can't capture all the nuances, but no, that does not mean the map/model is ruining/misguiding society.
> Sounds more like hypocrisy to me, but suit yourself.
It is the principle of self defense, that is all. Otherwise if you allow deconstructionism to run roughshod it will destroy everything.
Instead we got statements like "the game contains no racial riots and political problems". It's a game, and honestly I don't want american political drama and strawman arguments adding to a game. That people play. For fun.
A pretty key part of the article is that SimCity isn't just a game. Given it's being used as an educational tool, it invites additional scrutiny.
What if SimCity models its society in post-racial world or world where all sims were always are equally treated?
In that case the only issues to deal with are the ones created by the environment and decision the player makes.
Its a hollow and circular discussion of an entertainment.
IMHO much better article would touch on the mechanics next SimsCity game could implement and how it would be beneficial to player experience.
So write it then. Surely that would be a more productive use of your time.
You've completely invented a position to argue against.
You have done that by implying the game should include racial problems, despite being a game.
Utopias in general are a great demonstration of man'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?
> I swear, I can design you a game that subtly leads people to whatever “solution” you want.
> We have to encourage players to always question the designers’ systems and educate them to detect their biases and agendas, even our own.
> Cities result from conflicts, conflicts are not always “solvable”.
> The problem with most utopian thinking is the idea of tabula rasa, the blank slate. In order to design a perfect society, you have to start from zero. That’s the also utopianism of SimCity.
Ctrl-F for "bias", "utopia", & "conflict" for more along these lines.
All the sims I’ve seen have it set that lower tax rates equals more growth. This also reflects then opinion of one side of the political isle.
It would be super easy to change that so higher taxes means higher growth to train people to believe that.
The problems that growth creates require taxes (crime, traffic, population, affordable housing, etc).
Making taxes mean higher growth one would raise them to the max, get max growth and use the high taxes to buy solutions to growth problems.
It stops being a game because setting taxes lower never makes sense. Now you are just running a predetermined sim.
The reason most economists think that lower taxes are better for economic activity, is that usually the same money will be part of multiple transactions in the same amount of time that the government would take to spend it once.
...but you also have to balance the utility of that expenditure. Some forms of spending go towards equipment purchase, which can increase future economic activity - but other forms of spending really are wasteful until the next use of that money.
...but that analysis is nearly impossible an filled with so many judgement calls that no one can convincingly model it.
You are mis-equating a cost for a benefit, when it is instead that a cost is required to achieve a separate benefit.
The point is that taxes are a cost. They are a cost that needs to be paid, in order to pay for certain things, such as government services.
Setting taxes to 0 would not be bad for growth, because of taxes being 0.
Instead, it is that having taxes be zero, means that we are unable to pay for government services. And the reduction in government services is what causes growth to go down.
It is a subtle, but important distinction.
And if you do not take into account this distinction, then you would come to the incorrect conclusion, that the government taxing people, and then wasting those resources entirely, could actually be good for growth, which is nonsense, outside of some extreme edge case situations, regarding extra-oridinary macro-economic scenarios.
Basically a military so that you don’t immediately get taken over by another country. A solid alliance may be a substitute for this.
A police force so everything doesn’t get burned to the ground each night. Some sort of court / judge/magistrate to decide on disputes.
If you have those you have a stable county. Maybe brutal, maybe not. But a country. Everything else is a nice to have (hopefully)
Tax rate can be 1-100% percent. At 100% everyone is essentially a slave. Revolution / collapse will happen quickly.
America is around 50% or so.
So the question is, what rate is “enough” to cover needs + reasonable wants.
I don't think you read my post. I was saying that taxes are a cost, that are used to pay for things.
They are not a benefit in and of themselves.
The services are the benefit. And the taxes are the costs needed to pay for that benefit. But they are still a cost.
There is no agreement on what is good. Which is why politics is so complex.
Polygon did a video and article:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_51_YJQpeg0
https://www.polygon.com/videos/2021/4/1/22352583/simcity-hid...
This is a message that programming language designers and advocates need to hear. The idea that a better language can lead to better outcomes is itself utopian in the same way that better cities can lead to better outcomes. They both take a look at the substrate and extrapolate. Sure, there's an infinite number of ways to make a bad city, but we have to realize that's a different kind of thing.
Or for that matter something I'd want to play.
Also high status sims class will not use public transport as much because they are rich and can afford to create traffic jams. No matter if you pay for all incentives to use public transportation.
You can't create a Utopia in SimCity, not for everyone.
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.
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.
Don't get me wrong: it's perfectly understandable that people have preferences, and that questions of complexity and design introduce difficult trade-offs.
I doubt I'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.
But here am I replying to "this is not the exact game I would have designed" with "this is not the exact game I would have designed either, plus this is not an exact argument I would have made" – with me not even doing the actual work of gamemaking, unlike the author.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lvUByM-fZk&list=PLwkSQD3vqK...
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.
I wouldn't call them tutorials though, more talks on urban development and history, which use the heavily modded game for illustration.
Agreed, but SimCity was marketed for realism and used for education. The OP writes:
> Over and over, the SimCity series invoked “realism” as a selling point. SimCity 2000’s box playfully warns: “If this game was any more realistic, it’d be illegal to turn it off!”
> SimCity has been used and is being used as educational tool ... shaping the way a lot of people understand or misunderstand city planning.
It's like saying that playing racing car video games makes you think you're good at driving in a race in real life.
DonHopkins on April 12, 2020 | on: Enemy AI: chasing a player without Navigation2D or...
One trick is to spread the computation out over time, if you don't need to do it all at at once every frame. Since the enemies don't move that fast, a bit of delay might be good enough, depending on what you're tracking.
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!)
Chaim Gingold's SimCity Reverse Diagrams show how the different phases of "Simulate()" perform different kinds of analysis over time, and how the different map layers interact with each other.
https://lively-web.org/users/Dan/uploads/SimCityReverseDiagr...
>SimCity reverse diagrams, by Chaim Gingold (2016).
>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).
>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.
>Latour, Bruno (1986). “Visualization and cognition”. In: Knowledge and Society 6 (1986), pp. 1– 40.
>Librande, Stone (2010). “One-Page Designs”. Game Developers Conference. 2010.
>Victor, Bret (2013). “Media for Thinking the Unthinkable”. MIT Media Lab, Apr. 4, 2013.
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.
There was a time when similarly styled stories from imgur were a big thing on reddit, and I also loved those.
This means that one plot of industry + one plot of commercial is enough to satisfy an entire residential neighborhood's worth of traffic planning.
Similarly, one plot of residential + one plot of commercial is enough to satisfy an entire industrial zone worth of traffic.
As this design decision became more and more widely known, power-gamers took advantage of it to make weirder and weirder cities that don't look like a real city at all.
------------
Cities: Skylines has a better traffic simulator. But its got too much emphasis on traffic simulation without actually having enough controls over traffic.
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.
------------
I guess I'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 / Cities:Skylines where you need to provide a variety of services to make a house grow... its assumed the cities "figure out the details" as long as you provide enough traffic planning).
Its simplified and "less realistic" than Cities: Skylines. But because its a bigger focus on traffic-planning that Cities: Skylines, its a more "honest" game IMO.
If you're gonna make all elements of the game rely on traffic, then focus on traffic like OpenTTD does.
The traffic is ridiculous too, having 40 houses on a street? Traffic is going to be so insane! Oh and did I mention it took them 1 hour of commute to get to somewhere that is only half a mile away? This traffic simulator is crooked.
Thank god for NAM.
Ah, this is sadly a bit too realistic, no?
Your people are too poor to typically afford a car. So you set up a fancy car network (aka: parking garages), but the majority of your citizens spend hours walking everywhere, slowing your city to a crawl.
You try to fix the problem by making "free busses", but setting up good bus routes remains difficult.
You end up clicking the "free cars" button at great costs but... it does in fact solve that problem.
----------
There's also cheeky political commentary that Tropico is fully aware of. Catering to the religion faction increases your birthrate, but diminishes the academics. You'll get fewer high school graduates / college graduates, so industries like Oil refining become impossible.
Or, you can cater to academics who tend to become Capitalists, but then they get angered by communist aligned policies like free cars and/or free housing.
Then you suddenly go full communist, and the Americans invade, ending your reign. Or vice versa, if you go full capitalists, the USSR invades and the game ends.
Then you start a new game and tell your hackers to steal the White House. (What? I never said this game was perfectly realistic...)
By default, Cities:Skylines will despawn vehicles that have taken too long to get to where they're going and just warp them there. There's a hard cap on how bad traffic can get. Traffic Manager lets you disable that ... feature. Traffic Manager IMHO fixes the dishonesty you mentioned. C:S with TM is a more complete, more correct, more honest game than vanilla C:S is.
There's a youtube channel where most of what he does is takes a city from a viewer with shitty traffic and fixes all the traffic problems.
The most obvious one that springs to mind is Traffic Manager, which allows you to go in and change the direction of any individual turning lane to maximise throughput and efficient road usage.
>Will Wright on Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games (1996)
[...]
>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.
>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.”
[...]
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.
I think it's too easy to attempt to 'model' (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'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's Pittsburgh was a complete disaster.
The author of the article didn’t even push a race based agenda (clearly class oriented) and the parent commenter is projecting onto it.
Americans and their insane racial culture is causing people like the parent commenter to disengage from reality.
A lot of these city-builder games assume that "higher land values" is better, because land values == better tax revenue. But is that really what we should be optimizing for in these games? A city without trailer parks / low-cost housing is a city where my friend wouldn't stand a chance at all.
The power-gamer in SimCity 2000 ignores hospitals and schools. Because life-expectancy doesn't lead to any tax benefits, and school / education counts don't seem to have any real effect on the city either.
At some point, the game "stops reflecting reality", and when that illusion disappears, some players no longer find the game interesting. I personally am a power-gamer, I've never held that "illusion of reality" in any game I've ever played (be it SimCity, Civ, or whatever). I play these games to have fun and understand that there's almost no political or social commentary associated with the game design decisions.
----------
But other people play these games hoping to "roleplay" a City's Mayor, or to "roleplay" the emperor of a Civilization. For these people, realism is a highly important trait.
Alas: most games are not realistic at all. The games that do seek realism (ex: Hearts of Iron) are too complex for the typical person to pick up on.
-------
I think its fair for people to look at SimCity and say "well... that's not realistic. The game doesn't have the right incentives in the right places". Because frankly: it doesn't. Its just an incomplete viewpoint into city building.
Even Cities: Skylines has a similar issue.
----------
Games like "Two Point Hospital" are better, because its all clearly a joke. So the game is clearly a game. Curing clown's disease is funny and clearly not what happens in Hospitals. You better understand the game in the abstract: patients seek a diagnosis. The GP takes a guess, and sends the patient to a diagnosis room (X-Ray or other machine). The diagnosis room gives another result, and the doctor either is confident in treatment or needs additional diagnosis machines to make a better guess.
Or... you just remove all the diagnosis rooms and force doctors to send patients in for treatment because treatment makes more money. Lulz. Then when the patients inevitably die to these poorly made decisions, you get a bunch of janitors with vacuum cleaners to clean up the ghosts.
But yeah, it makes the most money (because you have the highest throughput of patients), so its the "Power gaming" move in Two Point Hospital.
> In conclusion, I’ve been trying for years to imagine an alternative SimCity.
> 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.
> 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.
Does anyone have suggestions for a more prescriptive SimCity? something more limited in scope and egalitarian?
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.
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.