Comment by dexwiz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dexwiz | Hacker News Reader

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The problem with "games" 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.

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?

Yes, the OP acknowledges this:

> 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.

A fun one is to look at how taxation affects growth.

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.

Games reflects reality. Lower tax rates do encourage growth. People/business keeping more money means lower prices more demand.

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.

It really depends on how efficiently the gov't can spend the tax revenues.

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.

I would imagine that taxes, like almost all dials you can tweak for optimization, have a point that is optimal for growth, above or below which, they are bad for growth. As taxes approach zero, for instance, you live in a mad max society and nothing can grow because there is no stability.

> have a point that is optimal for growth, above or below which, they are bad for growth. As taxes approach zero, for instance, you live in a mad max society and nothing can grow because there is no stability.

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.

What is a sufficient tax level to maintain security, external / internal threats, and basic dispute resolution.

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.

> What is a sufficient tax level to maintain security, external / internal threats

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.

The first is correct (though in practice the system is chaotic enough that we can only get close to that point). However is that really what we want? Maximum growth is good for some things, but some of us will trade less growth for something else - either "more for me" (less taxes), or a "more services from everyone" (more taxes). I put both of the above in quotes because there is no way to capture all the subtitles of the complex trade offs involved here, and I hope you don't try to fight the strawmen I setup in my attempts.

There is no agreement on what is good. Which is why politics is so complex.

SimCity itself was based on some questionable ideas about city planning.

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...

> Utopias in general are a great demonstration of man's hubris, and we have known that forever.

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.

> I highly doubt a game developed for activist conference is any more impartial.

Or for that matter something I'd want to play.

My biggest realisation as a kid playing SimCity 4000 was the fact that a city need industry, and industry needs blue collar workers. So you need to artificially create poorer districts.

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.

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