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

I am eagerly anticipating Satisfactory, which looks like a first person Factorio.

The map editor only allowed basic logic in the form of conditions/actions, but soon some very smart people figured out how to compose this into more expressive logic. Big communities and clans formed around map making, standards were made, and eventually, super high-quality maps started to come out. Many people I know from that time are now successful programmers.

I think the problem - in SimCity, Cities: Skylines, other video games, and real life - is that if you're building for aesthetics, there are many right answers, but if you're building for efficiency, there's only one right answer. The reason so many mid-size American cities have converged upon 1/4 acre lots with a road hierarchy, 3-lane boulevards, commercial strip malls on the boulevards, office parks, and freeways to link suburbs is that that's the most efficient way to satisfy the constraints of 2-3 child nuclear families who want privacy and a patch of greenery that's all their own and have varied destinations that each support too little traffic to be worth building mass transit to. The reason many megacities (I'm thinking particularly of NYC + Asian megacities like Beijing, Taipei, Hong Kong, Shanghai, etc.) have converged upon high-rise condominiums with street-level retail taking up whole city blocks with abundant bus & mass transit routes is because at a certain population density the suburban model ceases to work, and this becomes the only feasible way to move people to work & shopping. Interestingly, both models show up in Cities: Skylines, and the transition point between them is usually a painful inflection point in your city's development.

It may have been mostly trivial, but it did get you ready to dig into the internals of a program and not be afraid of big scary configuration pages and charts.

I remember being EXCITED when Warcraft III came out, and the huge upgrade in the map editor. Spent a whole summer making horde-mode style maps for WCIII. It was always SO EXCITING when you saw someone else playing the map you built!

To me it didn't feel like there were many challenges or ways you could irreparable damage your city in City Skylines. You could maybe invent your own goals, like creating a specific look to your city or building the most density possible while maintaing efficient transportation. But that's what I'd consider sandbox: using your own creativity on a blank canvas with almost no chance of entering a complete failure mode you can't recover from.

The SimCity games felt more like they were a challenge needing to balance the budget and build a sustainable city all while being resilient to events like disasters. Might just be me, but I never felt like I could fail at C:S; whereas in SimCity you could make a few stupid decisions or expand too fast and start losing money, and all you could do is watch the city degenerate into a wasteland that can't be gotten out of (without cheating anyways). That made it feel more like a simulation.