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From video game to day job: How ‘SimCity’ inspired a generation of city planners

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Re: From video game to day job: How ‘SimCity’ inspired a generation of city planners

#11
Cities: Skylines is an outstanding successor, but it lacks much of the charm of the SimCity series and feels more like a sandbox than a simulation. It's too bad Maxis decided to take the series in a simplified direction before killing it off.

If anyone knows of any other city-building simulators worth mentioning, please let me know.

Re: From video game to day job: How ‘SimCity’ inspired a generation of city planners

#13
Perhaps this type of simulation may one day help us choose better town planners; perhaps one day may even give us an alternate method of choosing administrators. How radical will it be in a Mayoral election, to see how different candidates will perform in a simulation, and the voters will be able to compare their scores and gain much more insight into how the prospective candidates shall perform.

Re: From video game to day job: How ‘SimCity’ inspired a generation of city planners

#14
post #8
post #7

I don't get the feeling that SimCity suggests that car-centric solutions are the "right" answers. My interpretation always was that it shows you how ideal mass transit solutions were but why economic pressure could keep them from working. Ultimately it seemed like the message was that pure capitalism was biased towards solutions that just barely met the citizens' needs. The lack of parking lots was always an obvious…

Mass transit enthusiasts would probably love OpenTTD. Instead of managing a city, you manage a transit company that operates ships, planes, trucks, buses, and most of all trains. Cities grow as you serve them with more mass transit, which maybe is more optimistic than real life, but on the other hand the game also teaches you that tearing up half the city to install a massive train yard is very expensive and will mak…

I'd love it if OpenTTD had just a smidge more complex of a city simulation, so that towns weren't just concentrically-expanding colonies. But yes, it's much better at bringing that transport logistics puzzle to the forefront, which is probably why I've bothered to keep it around, unlike the various SimCities.

It also teaches you that long routes are magically always more profitable. :P

Re: From video game to day job: How ‘SimCity’ inspired a generation of city planners

#15
post #8
post #7

I don't get the feeling that SimCity suggests that car-centric solutions are the "right" answers. My interpretation always was that it shows you how ideal mass transit solutions were but why economic pressure could keep them from working. Ultimately it seemed like the message was that pure capitalism was biased towards solutions that just barely met the citizens' needs. The lack of parking lots was always an obvious…

Mass transit enthusiasts would probably love OpenTTD. Instead of managing a city, you manage a transit company that operates ships, planes, trucks, buses, and most of all trains. Cities grow as you serve them with more mass transit, which maybe is more optimistic than real life, but on the other hand the game also teaches you that tearing up half the city to install a massive train yard is very expensive and will mak…

While OpenTTD is a fun for a time, I think the Rail Road Tycoon (Esp 2 and 3) are more detailed games, with a simulated stock market and financial system, where one realizes that though through a well planned rail network and well maintained rolling stock, you could stay afloat and expand some, greater personnel wealth is more often and more easily obtained through creative ploys in the financial markets.

Re: From video game to day job: How ‘SimCity’ inspired a generation of city planners

#16
post #3

It's crazy how much SimCity cities look like the cities we've built for the last 75 years. Our cities really can be simplified to a game "fun" for someone to dive in right away. My thesis is that cities are oversimplified and stratified into easily separable blocks because they're easier to "industrialize" that way. This is causing crazy transportation requirements and isolation. If we mixed uses up a bit we could sa…

Judge Doom[0] explains it.

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z75lu0wKbX8

Someone else posted the "General Motors streetcar conspiracy" already.

Re: From video game to day job: How ‘SimCity’ inspired a generation of city planners

#17
post #3

It's crazy how much SimCity cities look like the cities we've built for the last 75 years. Our cities really can be simplified to a game "fun" for someone to dive in right away. My thesis is that cities are oversimplified and stratified into easily separable blocks because they're easier to "industrialize" that way. This is causing crazy transportation requirements and isolation. If we mixed uses up a bit we could sa…

My biggest problem with both SimCity and City:Skylines (its spiritual successor) is that neither allows mixed-use zoning, forcing you to rely heavily on either cars or dense (expensive) transit networks. It's like they can't break the mold of the US suburban mindset.

Re: From video game to day job: How ‘SimCity’ inspired a generation of city planners

#18
My mother worked in city planning/government and at a conference Maxis was giving out copies of their brand new game, Sim City 2000. It was a great way to get the kids of these professionals (or the professionals themselves) into both gaming and city planning.

Re: From video game to day job: How ‘SimCity’ inspired a generation of city planners

#19
This article is a lighthearted and doesn't talk about the underlying models behind simcity. Would recommend also reading:

https://logicmag.io/06-model-metropolis/ - which talks about simcity's inspiration from Jay Forrester's 'Urban Dynamics" and it's flaws.

Also, https://placesjournal.org/article/a-city-is-not-a-computer/ , which is something I've been meaning to read & contrast alongside Geoffrey West's works ( https://www.ted.com/talks/geoffrey_west_the_surprising_math_... ).

There's also a recent interview between an urban planner in portland (the citybeautiful youtube channel) and a developer at cities:skylines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7c5pSCgbZ84

Re: From video game to day job: How ‘SimCity’ inspired a generation of city planners

#20
post #3

It's crazy how much SimCity cities look like the cities we've built for the last 75 years. Our cities really can be simplified to a game "fun" for someone to dive in right away. My thesis is that cities are oversimplified and stratified into easily separable blocks because they're easier to "industrialize" that way. This is causing crazy transportation requirements and isolation. If we mixed uses up a bit we could sa…

The designer behind sim city (in the early 2010's) discusses how they just ignored parking because it makes cities ugly. https://humantransit.org/2013/05/how-sim-city-greenwashes-pa...
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