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Simulations and models, regardless of whether they're designed for fun or for realism, can still teach you plenty of things about the real world; sometimes not from the simulation itself but explicitly by its omissions. The fact that SimCity famously removed all the parking lots tells you something interesting right away. The fact that City Skylines bites the bullet of traffic and renders it in fairly sophisticated detail -- to the degree that the game often devolves into "Traffic Management Simulator" instead of "City Builder Simulator" -- is another such interesting lesson.

But in terms of "how directly transferable are lessons learned directly from the model" is always going to depend on the model's assumptions.

Fun fact -- have you ever heard of the "Monocentric city model?" It comes up in a lot of econ papers, and a lot of urban economics, and therefore a lot of real world policy is based on it.

The "Monocentric city model" is about as simplistic as it gets -- it models the city as a LINE. IE, you have a bunch of agents, and they live some distance from the city, and they have different travel/commuting costs proportional to their distance from the city center; let's run that and see what kinds of consequences fall out of it.

Turns out it's actually a pretty good model and generates outcomes that are pretty analogous to what we see in the real world! Is it perfectly representative of the real world? Of course, not, it models the city as a friggin line. But if we're talking about sheer complexity alone, SimCity is already orders of magnitude more complex than this famous economic model. But that in and of itself doesn't mean that a successful SimCity city would make for a successful real world city, because it's not just about sheer complexity, it's about the appropriateness of the assumptions.

This is fascinating! (All simulation requires abstraction.)

You’re the author of the book, right? I’d love to chat with you sometime about your work on this and more — care to email me at Lars.doucet@gmail.com?

Based on your capitalization of “LINE”, you might also know this, but “THE LINE” is a real world example of a (proposed) linear city project in Saudi Arabia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Line,_Saudi_Arabia

I am aware! Though I have reason to believe this very literal approach will work out less well in real life than in simulation :)

With some serendipity, I learned about Neom yesterday while surfing YouTube. It doesn't seem to be going well. (Warning: video 25mins long) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e40Ju-zNyXk

And back into fiction, Snowpiercer is a movie about a linear city on a train.

Didn't Cities Skylines come out of a previous project by the same developer, a transport simulator called Cities in Motion? It's no wonder it has a heavy focus on transport management.

The original SimCity franchise did an amazing job of combining both simulation and game, but later iterations (past SimCity 4) ditched any pretense of being a simulation and went full on-game. That shift quickly tanked a previously sterling franchise, which I think shows the significance of the simulation angle.

Cities Skylines eventually filled in that gap and if you look at the dedicated community around those games you'll see a heavy emphasis on simulation and very little focus on making it a more fun game. Interest is somewhat split between modeling aesthetics and modeling transit. I think the greatest interest is in modeling societies and economies, but few games seem to make that work except on small scales. There's an old game called City Life that did an commendable job modelling social classes. The early Tropico games had a very engaging economic system. I can't think of any modern games that have impressed me like those, but I would love suggestions.

> Cities Skylines eventually filled in that gap and if you look at the dedicated community around those games you'll see a heavy emphasis on simulation and very little focus on making it a more fun game.

Nowhere near. If Cities Skylines was a truly accurate simulation:

1. It would be nigh-impossible to bulldoze private property. Every road, once built, would become essentially permanent.

2. Every city would be perpetually cash-strapped, with tax income insufficient to cover the maintenance costs on the infrastructure.

3. If you either raise taxes or reduce spending you would get thrown out of office at the next election.

Thankfully, the creators realised that making it fun was more important than making it accurate.

Those objections are differences to the cities we live in, but not impossible.

China builds cities without regard for 1 and 3, and partially 2.

Also, you don't have to consider changing the city part of the simulation. It may just be switching from one test model to another.

I would also like to know any economic type simulator recommendations.

My list would probably include: Capitalism and Capitalism 2. I also put a lot of time into Civ1, the original X-Com and Theme Hospital. Not really simulators, but they all had interesting economic models.

Famously they had to make cars pocketable so that parking wouldn't make car dependent cities as ugly as they are

I’m not sure I’m following the distinction you’re trying to draw. SimCity is a simulation — just a simplistic one with many simplifications and short cuts.

It’s a toy model.

There’s always simplifications made in any model — SimCity’s happened to be made with “fun” in mind.

That’s actually the point. SimCity was made to be fun, not to be a simulation.

To put the dissonance in clearer terms, imagine a book described as "Analyzing interpersonal relationships through the lens of The Sims". Would you take it seriously?

It doesn’t seem like a pedantic distinction to say that the goals of SimCity are different from the goals of simulating reality.

The point is SimCity is no more a simulation than Monopoly is.

The rules of both are explicitly set up to be fun not a simplification of some model.

I’m not convinced anyone described monopoly as fun

It's mostly that the rules are propagated by hearsay from 10 yo:s.

If you don't add all the house rules all kids use to prolong the game, it is quite playable.

For some reason alot of kids love it. I think handling money is the main lure.

It can be a straight up ruthless experience if you play it by the rules as written rather than adding shitty house rules. I love playing with other adults that know how to play.

What's fascinating is that some of those house rules seemed to have come up independently in places all around the world. For example, the stupid free parking jackpot. (I assume that Hasbro added it to the manual as a house rule at some point?)

And yeah, getting money and property is fun! But the game is supposed to be a 30-45 minute experience.

The reason is probably because Monopoly as written is short and brutal. Which isn't fun for families. So people add rules to make more fair. Which has result of making it last longer and turn into slog.

The solution is for families other games which are better suited especially for younger kids. But Monopoly has established itself as universal family board game.

I think Monopoly is very fun, and I think the vocal haters online are obnoxious as hell. It's snobbery, but for board game nerds.

I think Monopoly is awful, and I think the vocal minority of people who like it are obnoxious as hell.

The funny thing about this is that Monopoly was designed to be a simulation of capitalism rather than a fun game. So it's arguably less of a simulation.

Not quite the goal was to be illustrative not a simulation.

> The point is SimCity is no more a simulation than Monopoly is.

Simulation or Game is a false dichotomy, there's plenty of opportunity for overlap.

Consider the original X-COM: obviously a game, yet also a simulation, not withstanding that the situation it was trying to simulate was not real. Units with individual statistics, status effects, individual gear with weights and placements that affected movement and actions, etc.

Another example to consider might be the Napoleonic warfare origins of Dungeons & Dragons.

Overlap is coincidental, yes people may be doing similar kinds of things in a game. But Microsoft flight ‘simulator’ doesn’t come with a bunch of built in systems for handling loss of hydraulic pressure the way actual training systems do. The general public doesn’t want to spend time memorizing checklists for minor systems issues etc.

The other kind of simulation where people are trying to understand how systems interact is even further removed in how they are used. Running the exact same hour plus simulation repeatedly while only changing initial conditions isn’t fun, but it can be informative.

MSFS is a flight simulator, not an aircraft operations simulator. Similar, but different.

MSFS can be used as a flight simulator but the default c172 is unrealistically easy to fly. That’s exactly the kind of thing you see in games which care more about fun than realism.

So people can argue around MSFS’s trim modeling, ground modeling etc, but the issue isn’t with the physics engine’s specific compromises it’s a more fundamental problem.

I think he is actually trying to say it IS a simulation and NOT emulating the real world.

At least in the hardware world, there are simulators (which are faux short cut versions that work reasonably like the real thing) and emulators (which are software versions that act exactly like the real thing, but usually are very slow)

I haven't played a lot of Sim City, but in my mind, factorio is more a simulator than sim city.

Simulating means there is granularity about how each element can be seen and touched by the player.

In sim city there are a lot of shortcuts and simplifications. It looks like you have a city, but the more you play, the more it's just a decor, because the game shows a representation, but doesn't let you see the details.

So you see a car, a house, money, a school, but there is no day planning for citizens, they don't have a lifespan, citizen A or B doesn't have a commute with job C or D, they don't have children that you see grow up, you don't see those citizen bring back groceries or corn going out of the farm.

The problem is simulating granular elements of a city or even a village would require a lot of memory and computing power, even today, so back in 1990 or 2000 it was just not possible to have a granular village or city.

I want to see a mixture of The Sims and Sim City, but you can imagine how difficult it is to design such a game.

I think Cities Skylines 2 has simulation down to that level, where individual residents have houses, jobs, kids, go to school, can die eventually. etc. But it doesn't really seem to add anything to the gameplay and the game didn't get great reviews.

There’s a common rule of thumb in sim game design: “never simulate anything more than one layer of abstraction below what the player can actually observe”

IBM is way into this racket now of Smart Cities and digital twins.

Idea being if you make a Sim City type game but worse, because you are IBM, and then market it to bureaucrats around the world, because you are IBM, they will happily pay you a lot of money, because you are IBM, so that they can point to your simulation as justification for their in/actions. The ass covering is magnificent you just have to feed it a little bit of real data (traffic, power consumption, weather).

Of curse part of what you are simulating is your own understanding and aspirational ideals about how society should function. If you write an essay or a speech people will argue but if you embed values into a game... well, they will still argue but they have to notice it first.

Some will ascribe magical powers of clairvoyance and correctness unto the simulation for reasons that nobody quite understands.

I'm not sure what my point is exactly other than this is potentially a very interesting fulcrum point. Like who is playing whom really in this situation?

Dwarf Fortress is perhaps a stronger exploration of your thesis, because it is unapologetically simulation-first.

A game can consist of a simulation. The fact that you add feature sets to it does not change the fact that.

The various control planes and randomness of the simulation can be tuned, sure, but if you were to capture all those control inputs you can reconstruct the world event timeline in a determistic timeline.

Starcraft 2 Is a simulation. Replays are just games with all commands timestamped and the simulated world throttling forward and backward through time.

Science

It's a game that simulates planning and building a city for enjoyment.

It is a simulation, just a simulation game as opposed to simulation software.

You may have a reasonable point, but that doesn't mean that SimCity cannot feature in a book about computer simulation history.

My hot take is that all games are simulations to some extent. Many sports are a kind of war game, simulating a specific aspect of real war, obviously abstracting quite a bit. A big part of the fun in catan is in the tension of having to cooperate with rivals to mutually beneficial ends, much like what happens in economics all the time. The point being, that yes, there are varying levels of realism, but in the end I don’t really think there is a simple line denoting “game” or “simulation.”

I'm a bit hesitant about posting this link. I wrote the article mainly for myself (memory capture exercise); it happened a long time ago - and I'm sure my former employers (and hopefully all similar organisations) don't encourage this sort of approach at all.

https://rikroots.substack.com/p/why-rik-left-the-neighbourho...

Isn't that the whole point? SimCity and all its sequels and imitators present a very simplified set of tools and mechanics. Those tools and mechanics are more than the sum of their parts: They entertain, they teach, they advance a political opinion (Jeff Braun has been explicit about this[0]) and yes, they simulate, albeit very simplistically. The intersection of those things and the tradeoffs that are required in all simulations (which all reside on a spectrum of toy to faithful representation) are interesting. IMO it's (ironically) too simplistic to say that SimCity is a mere game and thus unworthy of thinking more deeply about, and I suggest that you're taking that "world in a machine" marketing phrase a bit too literally.

[0] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1992-10-02-vw-391-st...