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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

#31

Post by InitialLastName »

nkrisc wrote: post #23
InitialLastName wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In the latter, while you can't build a building zoned for multiple uses, you can certainly very much blend zoning very thoroughly, alternating commercial and residential buildings as you go down the street. Of course, the simulation likely isn't sophisticated enough to make full use of that (people will travel across the entire map to go shopping). I can also understand from a gameplay perspective why this is the cas…

There's the issue you mention, but IIRC there are also some big stat hits (happiness, noise, land value) from that sort of pattern. The game really pushes towards districts of distinct zoning as an optimized solution.

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

#32

Post by i_am_proteus »

InitialLastName wrote: post #17
andys627 wrote: 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.

This. If Jane Jacobs could play Skylines today, she'd probably be on the phone to the devs asking them "why can't I have ground floor retail under my residential?"

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

#33

Post by logfromblammo »

andys627 wrote: 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…

I recall that one of the "optimal" designs for one version of SimCity (2000?) was to place street intersections--without connecting streets--at regular intervals, and build a connected subway station next to each.

Certain features were hard-coded specifically for surface street intersections. So you couldn't simulate a Kowloon Walled City level of density, unless you count the arcologies. The car assumption is as built in to the game as it is to real cities.

Power was supplied exclusively by perpetual-motion hydropower dams, enabled by the terraforming tools: flatten, raise land, add water, build dams on the falling-water squares.

Anyway, the point is that if city planners these days are simplifying their task anywhere near SimCity levels of abstraction, the ensuing disaster won't be one that can be selected from a pull-down menu.

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

#34

Post by tareqak »

darkpuma wrote: post #8
XaspR8d wrote: 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…

There is also https://www.simutrans.com/en/ , which is also available on Steam for free.

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

#35

Post by opportune »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #28
standardUser wrote: post #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.

> 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. I feel the opposite. I think SimCity's charm is just nostalgia. C:S is definitely more of a simulation, as it simulates individual vehicles, including commercial traffic. All the SimCity games before SC4 used a statistical model for traffic, and SC4's path finding was v…

You can definitely get un-modded simcity 4's public transportation and highways to function without a mod, you just need to know a decent amount about the game. Basically sims always take the shortest path regardless of traffic, they are randomly matched 1:1 between residential wealth level and the distribution of jobs from each job-producing building, and sims of certain income categories have restrictions on which types of public transportation they will take (e.g. $$$ sims don't take buses). One of the best ways to force or heavily encourage public transportation/highway usage is to use a tree-pattern transportation network which purposefully creates bottlenecks that are alleviated by high capacity roads or public transportation shortcuts. And you can get the cheapest most effective form of public transportation (buses) to work without any modding or special planning aside from placing them at the right density (every 6-7 tiles).

An advanced city where most jobs are Co$$ and Co$$$ can actually be designed to have very little transportation needs at all because you can zone the high wealth commercial and residential buildings close to each other.

Simcity 4 definitely feels much deeper of a game to me than skylines, perhaps simply because it's complicated and I get a sense of joy figuring out the unintuitive parts.

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

#37

Post by fromthestart »

joshstrange wrote: post #29
standardUser wrote: post #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.

It's not city building but Factorio (factory building). Be VERY careful as it's an extremely addicting game. It pushes ALL the right buttons for me and I highly recommend it. The mod community really takes a great game and makes it amazing (but play at least some Vanilla before you go modding like I did).

After a couple hours, factorio starts to feel a lot like programming, as you get to progressively higher abstractions.

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

#38

Post by DonHopkins »

>That issue speaks to a larger criticism of “SimCity”: Wright's vision imposed an old-school approach to city-building, influenced by Robert Moses and the Chicago school. For those early urban planners, and in “SimCity,” there were binary solutions to problems. To lower crime rates, build police stations. If people complain about traffic, build more roads. If you need space to build a freeway or a stadium, raze working-class neighborhoods.

Will Wright explained the motivation behind the vast oversimplifications he made in the design of SimCity, in "Will Wright on Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games (1996)":

https://medium.com/@donhopkins/designing-user-interfaces-to-...

>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.”

Also, here's a talk about "Micropolis: Constructionist Educational Open Source SimCity" which discusses educational applications of SimCity:

https://medium.com/@donhopkins/har-2009-lightning-talk-trans...

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

#39

Post by filesystemdude »

I loved SimCity and it's probably among the reasons I got a masters degree in GIS with a focus in city planning.

It turns out for a lot of reasons, real city planning wasn't for me, though it took that degree and six years on my city's planning board to figure that out. Glacial speeds of progress, a job that's mostly reactionary instead of visionary, "stakeholders" with infinite time to tell you why any change is the worst thing in the world and a conspiratorial worldview - no thanks, I'll just go back to my sims.

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

#40

Post by SilasX »

InitialLastName wrote: post #17
andys627 wrote: 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.

So, it faithfully represents urban planning in the US then?
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