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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

#41

Post by DonHopkins »

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…

It's very much because of gameplay issues. Theoretically the computer can simulate whatever model you can dream up, but the much harder problem is the user understanding, visualizing and editing that model with an easy interface that feels fun like playing a game, not tedious like doing your taxes in Excel or rigging skeletons in 3D Studio Max.

Think of the number of extra user interface panels and gizmos and views and pop-ups and menus that users would have to wrangle in order to build, edit, query, visualize, and maintain 3D multiple story mixed use buildings in a city simulation, instead of having a simple 1:1 correspondence between space on the 2D map and zone type.

The closest thing SimCity comes to mixed use zoning is multi-layered Arcologies, and the interface to those is pretty complicated and unwieldy. Imagine if every building and skyscraper in the city were that complex!

Sim Tower supports mixed use zoning (with different discrete rooms in the same building), but just within one high rise tower, not a whole city. It's as much a game about pedestrian traffic, elevators, queuing and congestion, as an economic simulation.

The Sims is whole a game unto itself at a different level of abstraction, that lets you build multi-story residential and commercial buildings with walls, doors, windows, furniture, etc. But it doesn't simulate "urban dynamics" between zones, just "personal dynamics" between the people and the architecture and contents of the buildings. The Sims 3 was scaled up so you could seamlessly walk around small towns, but The Sims 4 went back to focusing on houses or apartments in individual lots or flats, instead of expanding to simulating entire cities.

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

#42

Post by bitxbit »

SimCity was my childhood. Played thousands of hours trying to find the right formula to optimize land value and population. Then they introduced more sophisticated terraforming tools and the ability to import contour maps in SimCity 4. I spent more time on landscaping than the actual game. The community behind SimCity 4 was great as well with all the mods.

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

#43

Post by DonHopkins »

fromthestart wrote: post #37
joshstrange wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Factorio is Programmer Crack. I love it!

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

#44

Post by TheGRS »

filesystemdude wrote: post #39

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…

What is the bigger barrier to getting things done - regulations or politics with locals? I grew up learning that regulations were the reason things would take so long, but the older I get the more I realize its just a bunch of really loud NIMBYs.

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

#45

Post by duado »

bitxbit wrote: post #42

SimCity was my childhood. Played thousands of hours trying to find the right formula to optimize land value and population. Then they introduced more sophisticated terraforming tools and the ability to import contour maps in SimCity 4. I spent more time on landscaping than the actual game. The community behind SimCity 4 was great as well with all the mods.

In SC2K I always used to make capitalist dystopias with a elevated elite neighborhood of low-density residential and commercial, separated by a mountain range from the plebes with their belching factories. The Mayor’s House was on a private island. The Mayor’s Statue was on a single tile on the mountain ridge that was the tallest point in the city.

Pray I never get elected President.

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

#46

Post by DonHopkins »

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.

I agree! I believe a large part of the nostalgic "charm" of SimCity was thanks to the excellent art direction of Ocean Quigley, who's worked on SimCity and The Sims artwork from the early days.

https://www.polygon.com/2016/5/20/11722342/simcity-launch-ea...

Both of them are beautiful, but I think SimCity really is more polished, visually coherent, and better balanced than Cities: Skyline. Which makes it even more tragic and frustrating that SimCity limits you to such a small lot size, because one of the best things about earlier versions of SimCity was backing way up and looking across vast urban sprawls, every road and building which you created with your own hands!

What Cities: Skylines really got right was user modding and extensibility!

Maxis (before EA bought them) held some user focus groups while developing SimCity 2000, and asked SimCity users what they thought about additional "plug-in" content. (I don't remember how they framed it, whether they mentioned "downloadable" or "add-on packs" or "user created content"). But in general, the users were strongly against it, because they said they wanted to buy the whole game up front, and didn't want to feel like they were being nickel and dimed to get the entire experience. (And now here we are with free-to-play games with in-app purchases, alas.)

User created content and expansion packs were crucial to the success of The Sims, and users rightfully complained about being nickel and dimed by a long series of expansion packs. But the vast amount of free downloadable user created content that's available dwarfed the fixed number of items available in all the expansion packs (but you still had to buy the expansion packs to get the base objects and features (like pets or magic), in order to use any user created content cloned from those expansion objects).

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

#47

Post by gph »

TheGRS wrote: post #44
filesystemdude wrote: post #39

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…

What is the bigger barrier to getting things done - regulations or politics with locals? I grew up learning that regulations were the reason things would take so long, but the older I get the more I realize its just a bunch of really loud NIMBYs.

Aren't most the regulations enacted in order to placate the really loud NIMBYs?

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

#48

Post by andys627 »

SilasX wrote: post #40
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.

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

Exactly!

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

#49

Post by TheGRS »

gph wrote: post #47
TheGRS wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the bigger barrier to getting things done - regulations or politics with locals? I grew up learning that regulations were the reason things would take so long, but the older I get the more I realize its just a bunch of really loud NIMBYs.

Aren't most the regulations enacted in order to placate the really loud NIMBYs?

I don't think so, at least the sort of regulations I'm thinking of: environmental, structural, earthquake protection, etc. I think most of that stuff comes from outside studies and not from residents. But stuff like building height codes or putting wind farms near your city, yes I think that's mostly NIMBYs.

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

#50

Post by aisngionio »

DonHopkins wrote: post #41
nkrisc wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's very much because of gameplay issues. Theoretically the computer can simulate whatever model you can dream up, but the much harder problem is the user understanding, visualizing and editing that model with an easy interface that feels fun like playing a game, not tedious like doing your taxes in Excel or rigging skeletons in 3D Studio Max. Think of the number of extra user interface panels and gizmos and views a…

I'd be interested in a city simulation game that is focused on realism and depth with no concern for having a modern UI or being pretty. Think Aurora 4x, Dwarf Fortress, or Nethack. "Doing your taxes in Excel" is, surprisingly, a real game genre.

It would be a very unpopular game, but there are people who would love it.

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