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

The problem is more that game creation requires radically differentiated skills. Even something "simple" like a Sim City clone would need a sprite artist, someone capable of implementing a 2d renderer, someone to write the AI logic, someone who can do UI, someone to do sound design, you probably want music, etc.

Most open source projects, at the worst, might involve UI design. And honestly you can see how bad that can get already when programmers start making their own interfaces without being "good" at it in most Xorg GUI apps.

That isn't to say there aren't communities around libre music, sound effects, game textures, models, etc - there are large vibrant communities around all of these. The problem with games in particular is that you need to reach across the aisle and involve people from all these niche libre communities to build something, and most of the time without the fundamentals fulfilled you won't be able to pitch or demonstrate a project enticing enough to attract participation.

Its a chicken and egg problem - you can't really get good artists if your game art is placeholder polygons, and you can't get someone working on the renderer until something is already rendering to the screen.

I don't doubt that's one consideration, but my point is that people's preferences - whether they be racism, greenery, privacy, autonomy, or whatever - function as constraints that the market then optimizes around. And given those constraints, the suburban tract neighborhoods with a road hierarchy and wide boulevards lined with strip malls optimize for efficiency.

I grew up in suburban New England. That's inefficiency - triangular acre lots, empty space with no road access, single-lane roads, three lefts that get you back to your starting location, driving to the next town (or New Hampshire, often) for the nearest commercial zone, the "Massachusetts left" because there's no protected left-turn lane at most intersections, major roads that terminate at a stop sign on a freeway where people routinely drive 85 mph. The suburban sprawl of Silicon Valley was a breath of fresh air by comparison - the lights on the 3-lane boulevards here are at least timed in rational ways with protected turn lanes.

Hell, they have traffic lights here - I grew up 2 houses down from the intersection of 3 state highways at a stop sign, and we fought for about a decade, fruitlessly, to get a traffic light and crosswalk there. It backs up for literally a mile in each direction during rush hour, and accidents are common.

I am as far left as we go in France but that's a recurrent leftist criticism that I keep seeing and that I think is really misguided.

I do think that right-wing libertarians are wrong because they have a much simplified model of the world, that does not take into account all that you mention.

Scientists use simple models because they have technical constraints. Even more so for game designers who have to make a fun game while staying a bit realistic. They are biased, but not politically: they are biased technically, toward models that present a simplified model of the world that can be simulated reasonably.

It is easier to have a model of criminality where it is just a function of population density minus distance to police station than a multi-parameter model taking into account different social and ethnic makeup of the population.

But this is an interesting philosophical and actually scientific problem of the left: we do not have naively simplified models like the right has. Because free-market and capitalism are based on simple rules and an ideal but modelizable world.

This is also the reason why Adam Smith "The Wealth of Nations" had more success than his "Theory of Moral Sentiment" where he studies things like charity and non-selfish behaviors: the first one provides a mathematical model of how important variables change.

I would love to write a urban simulation that takes into account things like inclusiveness, corruption, inequalities but when it comes to actually code it, I don't know how to write a function of population growth based on that that would give results that make sense.

"Pop growth = 0.05% population * wealth factor" is much simpler. And when I think about it, I think that a leftist model is not a different model than a libertarian one, it is just a more complete one, I don't think a model that takes more humanitarian values into account can be as simple.

So please do not accuse every bias towards simplification of being a libertarian bias.

Sure, but what's the use in a simplified model that spits out a result that's wrong? Take the assumption that the "underemployed" pay little in taxes while taking money from the welfare system. Sure, on the surface. But that doesn't account for increased spending power as a result of money in their pocket (which isn't saved or put into a hedge fund, but actually spent immediately out of necessity) that goes back into the economy, nor does it account for upward generational mobility as a result of good health and affordable education, or a host of other factors that potentially turn the conclusion on its head.

The problem isn't with simplicity for simplicty's sake. My concern is that we're making public policy decisions based on models that are plain wrong

It is not wrong. It gives an approximation of reality.

With 2 or 3 differential equation, you can model the growth of a city and the densification of its center in a kinda realistic way. It gives you a baseline.

In such a model, population is a number. One way to look at it is to say that it has the assumption that everybody is equal, but another way to look at it is to say that we are averaging the population differences.

Such a model would fail at modelling some behaviors like the densification of some suburban island, would be totally oblivious to the creation of ghettos.

If the goal is to make a game, that can be enough. In some type of scientific or economic simulations they could be enough as well.

> The problem isn't with simplicity for simplicty's sake. My concern is that we're making public policy decisions based on models that are plain wrong

Models are, fortunately, not the only way to establish a fact-based policy. And far more complex models do exist taking more parameters into account.