[HN Gopher] SimCities and SimCrises (2017)
___________________________________________________________________
SimCities and SimCrises (2017)
Author : rrherr
Score : 94 points
Date : 2021-06-22 15:40 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (molleindustria.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (molleindustria.org)
| medicineman wrote:
| This is why the "oppressed" don't listen to their over-educated
| saviors. Its buzzword bombing namedropping tired crap, like most
| continental philosophy.
| thelamest wrote:
| As much as the slideshow points out a genuine, interesting
| question, what's a little frustrating is that presentation author
| then spends a good deal of time advocating for his own preferred
| utopian rulesets, with similar issues of micromanagement in a
| fundamentally shallow meta, and with similarly narrow,
| politically pointed assumptions.
|
| Don't get me wrong: it's perfectly understandable that people
| have preferences, and that questions of complexity and design
| introduce difficult trade-offs.
|
| I doubt I'm alone in finding rut micromanagement the most unfun
| part of sim games. Having to impose all sorts of tiny decisions
| all the time on sim population, in such a constrained rule space,
| that there are always only the same few optimal strategies to
| progress. Issue is not that there are optima, but all of that
| static micromanagement could be handled bottom-up (in sims,
| automatically). Fun play could derive more from variations in
| system dynamics, discrete shocks to rules, and in general, macro
| or meta decisions.
|
| But here am I replying to "this is not the exact game I would
| have designed" with "this is not the exact game I would have
| designed either, plus this is not an exact argument I would have
| made" - with me not even doing the actual work of gamemaking,
| unlike the author.
| seltzered_ wrote:
| see also https://logicmag.io/play/model-metropolis/ (critique in
| some similar directions) and https://www.filfre.net/tag/simcity/
| (deeper origin story on simcity)
| dragontamer wrote:
| SimCity's main issue (and this was true as far back as SimCity
| 2000, maybe earlier) is that the "car traffic" goes from
| residential -> industrial -> commercial in roughly that order.
|
| This means that one plot of industry + one plot of commercial is
| enough to satisfy an entire residential neighborhood's worth of
| traffic planning.
|
| Similarly, one plot of residential + one plot of commercial is
| enough to satisfy an entire industrial zone worth of traffic.
|
| As this design decision became more and more widely known, power-
| gamers took advantage of it to make weirder and weirder cities
| that don't look like a real city at all.
|
| ------------
|
| Cities: Skylines has a better traffic simulator. But its got too
| much emphasis on traffic simulation without actually having
| enough controls over traffic.
|
| Police departments can only go as far as traffic lets them.
| Optimize for traffic, your police cover a greater area. Schools
| only go as far as traffic lets them, optimize for traffic, your
| schools cover a greater area. Etc. etc.
|
| ------------
|
| I guess I'm liking OpenTTD, even though its not really a
| citybuilder. You can plan the routes of every train, bus,
| airplane, and boat. The cities do NOT grow naturally (the more
| traffic you provide, the more they grow. Its not like SimCity /
| Cities:Skylines where you need to provide a variety of services
| to make a house grow... its assumed the cities "figure out the
| details" as long as you provide enough traffic planning).
|
| Its simplified and "less realistic" than Cities: Skylines. But
| because its a bigger focus on traffic-planning that Cities:
| Skylines, its a more "honest" game IMO.
|
| If you're gonna make all elements of the game rely on traffic,
| then focus on traffic like OpenTTD does.
| pram wrote:
| Skylines is absolutely a lot better, but the traffic system is
| weird and tedious. Especially managing stuff like trash and
| dead bodies. I'd end up following a single vehicle around to
| see what the bottleneck was, multiply that x100 for a huge city
| and it quickly sapped the fun.
| nwallin wrote:
| Cities:Skylines has a mod called Traffic Manager which lets you
| ... manage traffic. It gives tools that are sorely lacking in
| the base game, such as setting an intersection to have traffic
| lights, timed traffic lights, four way stop signs, two way
| stops+two way yield, control when/where vehicles are allowed to
| change lanes, where crosswalks are, whether vehicles are
| allowed to pull into an intersection if there's not enough
| space for them to leave the intersection, etc.
|
| By default, Cities:Skylines will despawn vehicles that have
| taken too long to get to where they're going and just warp them
| there. There's a hard cap on how bad traffic can get. Traffic
| Manager lets you disable that ... feature. Traffic Manager IMHO
| fixes the dishonesty you mentioned. C:S with TM is a more
| complete, more correct, more honest game than vanilla C:S is.
|
| There's a youtube channel where most of what he does is takes a
| city from a viewer with shitty traffic and fixes all the
| traffic problems.
| johnday wrote:
| Cities:Skylines was built from the ground up to be a platform
| for modding and expansion. While the base game itself is solid,
| there is a staggering quantity of high-quality mods which
| expand the functionality and control you have over your cities.
|
| The most obvious one that springs to mind is Traffic Manager,
| which allows you to go in and change the direction of any
| individual turning lane to maximise throughput and efficient
| road usage.
| Aperocky wrote:
| The scale is a problem, the largest city are no more than 2
| miles wide yet apparently people will struggle to drive their
| cars 300 ft because they somehow cannot walk at all.
|
| The traffic is ridiculous too, having 40 houses on a street?
| Traffic is going to be so insane! Oh and did I mention it took
| them 1 hour of commute to get to somewhere that is only half a
| mile away? This traffic simulator is crooked.
|
| Thank god for NAM.
| dragontamer wrote:
| Tropico is pretty good, but has the opposite problem.
|
| Your people are too poor to typically afford a car. So you
| set up a fancy car network (aka: parking garages), but the
| majority of your citizens spend hours walking everywhere,
| slowing your city to a crawl.
|
| You try to fix the problem by making "free busses", but
| setting up good bus routes remains difficult.
|
| You end up clicking the "free cars" button at great costs
| but... it does in fact solve that problem.
|
| ----------
|
| There's also cheeky political commentary that Tropico is
| fully aware of. Catering to the religion faction increases
| your birthrate, but diminishes the academics. You'll get
| fewer high school graduates / college graduates, so
| industries like Oil refining become impossible.
|
| Or, you can cater to academics who tend to become
| Capitalists, but then they get angered by communist aligned
| policies like free cars and/or free housing.
|
| Then you suddenly go full communist, and the Americans
| invade, ending your reign. Or vice versa, if you go full
| capitalists, the USSR invades and the game ends.
|
| Then you start a new game and tell your hackers to steal the
| White House. (What? I never said this game was perfectly
| realistic...)
| hutzlibu wrote:
| "people will struggle to drive their cars 300 ft because they
| somehow cannot walk at all."
|
| Ah, this is sadly a bit too realistic, no?
| taf2 wrote:
| Ah for me the best part of simcity 2000 was the fact that the
| game could literally never end. just keep expanding. gave me
| great hope for the future - we should be able to expand forever.
| jahewson wrote:
| There's some interesting thoughts in the latter half of this
| article, it's much more compelling to read the author praise and
| explore the new than criticise the old.
|
| I'm disappointed by the paternalism though - the author
| underestimates children - as a 10 year old growing up in Europe
| it was abundantly clear to me that when I played sim city I was
| building a particular kind of modern American West city - the
| ground wasn't even green! The criticism of the game's claimed
| "realism" rings hollow given that the front of that game box has
| a giant alien robot on it.
|
| I'm also disappointed that someone who is so invested in the
| topic of cities would handwave away the existence of suburbs as
| simply "white flight" - again, growing up in Europe we have
| plenty of large sprawling wealthy suburbs and white flight is
| definitely not one of their causes. My understanding is that it
| was a minor factor in the creation of the American suburbs, with
| the automobile and baby boom being key. It's hard not to see this
| misattribution as an attempt to push a biased political
| narrative, given that the author is an activist.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| chizhik-pyzhik wrote:
| The article ends with the following:
|
| > In conclusion, I've been trying for years to imagine an
| alternative SimCity.
|
| > And I realized that the biggest fallacy of a City simulator is
| to try to present itself as an all-encompassing system,
| supposedly capable of describing many possible cities.
|
| > I believe that in order to move away from the SimCity paradigm
| we need many different city simulations, each one limiting its
| scope to certain dynamics, certain contexts.
|
| Does anyone have suggestions for a more prescriptive SimCity?
| something more limited in scope and egalitarian?
| nolvorite wrote:
| Pretty good critique of the realist aspect of the game, and props
| on him for trying to make a new game based on the factors that he
| mentioned. However, it's not like Sim City is expected to include
| every single aspect of city development and growth as a factor,
| nor is it expected to be some kind of acceptably accurate
| depiction of city development. And he said so himself, the
| developers of SimCity didn't want to involve aspects of the real
| world that were politically divisive as a factor, which I don't
| really think is a bad thing.
| rrherr wrote:
| > However, it's not like Sim City is expected to include every
| single aspect of city development and growth as a factor, nor
| is it expected to be some kind of acceptably accurate depiction
| of city development.
|
| Agreed, but SimCity was marketed for realism and used for
| education. The OP writes:
|
| > Over and over, the SimCity series invoked "realism" as a
| selling point. SimCity 2000's box playfully warns: "If this
| game was any more realistic, it'd be illegal to turn it off!"
|
| > SimCity has been used and is being used as educational tool
| ... shaping the way a lot of people understand or misunderstand
| city planning.
| nolvorite wrote:
| That's what they want you to think. However I strongly doubt
| that people think they have the city-macrocosmic simulation
| down to an exact science.
|
| It's like saying that playing racing car video games makes
| you think you're good at driving in a race in real life.
| nopeYouAreWrong wrote:
| I am pretty sure I would be a great city planner based on
| my extensive collection of utopian simulations in Cities
| Skylines. Though I would have to take a huge payout to do
| far more important work, so I will have to pass.
| f154hfds wrote:
| I also have lived in Pittsburgh for the last 10 years as this
| author but I have to say I have a different impression of the
| city. One of my employers had an orientation on Pittsburgh a few
| years ago and brought in some city planners who talked about the
| successes and failures of some of their initiatives - the South
| Side Works and Homestead Waterfront. Their main objective was to
| integrate neighborhoods with the riverfront which had
| historically been pretty destroyed by industry and was now ripe
| for rehabilitation. For all of their effort and good intentions
| they had mixed success. South side does nicely slide into the
| Works but Homestead remains to this day awkwardly separated from
| the Waterfront.
|
| Other neighborhoods have gentrified with terrifying speed -
| Lawrenceville and East Liberty are the two that come to mind. I
| know poorer folks sitting on properties that have likely tripled
| in value in the last 10 years alone. Other neighborhoods seem
| perfectly situated for gentrification and somehow years go by and
| nothing changes.
|
| I think it's too easy to attempt to 'model' (simplify) these
| dynamics to attempt to provide evidence for some sort of
| narrative. White flight happened in many locations around this
| country, gentrification is happening now. These are opposite
| movements of people that both get criticized. Reality tends to be
| much more complex than we would like and doesn't like to play by
| pre-determined rules. Who knows what the upper and middle class
| will be criticized for 20 years from now or what these cities
| will look like? In the 90's Pittsburgh was a complete disaster.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| I really enjoyed the heavy use of pictures and animations.
|
| There are no page size limitations on the web, as opposed to
| print media, so there are few reasons to be economical with
| pictures, imho.
|
| There was a time when similarly styled stories from imgur were a
| big thing on reddit, and I also loved those.
| eumoria wrote:
| The Magnasanti video he references brought back some memories.
| Very fun video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTJQTc-TqpU
| abnry wrote:
| This essay is just one giant complaint that "The map is not the
| territory." No way. It is further annoying because it laments
| that modern progressive political concerns are not appropriately
| modeled in the game.
|
| Maybe people who play games for enjoyment don't want the weight
| of modern problems bearing down on them during their escapist
| recreation. Maybe people who play games don't want to be preached
| to.
|
| In fact, this essay is nothing but one of the many
| deconstructionist essays, one which prefers to tear down instead
| of build up. To highlight problems instead of celebrate what is
| good.
|
| I will say this: the style of the essay was quite enjoyable, with
| equal emphasis on images and paragraphs.
| senortumnus wrote:
| I'm curious to know if you have read "Seeing Like A State" by
| James Scott. There's a fair bit of discourse on the idea of the
| territory and the map edit: I learned about the book on HN and
| so wondering how pervasive it might be on other HN readers'
| bookshelf
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| Depending on your social circle (or that cross-section of the
| general public that one encounters on Twitter and Reddit), then
| we may be entering - as society does cyclically - an era where
| any "escape" from modern problems is viewed as offensive. I
| have seen this recently even in literature forums where poets
| who wrote abstract modernist verse are now labeled as
| problematic because their work does nothing to tackle the
| problems that BIPOC and LGBT face. It would be no surprise if
| gamers, too, were challenged for the games they play being
| supposedly unhelpful.
| mkr-hn wrote:
| I've met way too many people who confuse a map of policing for
| a map of crime, and I believe SimCity's crime map and the
| game's widespread use in education shares some responsibility.
| adamrezich wrote:
| basically my thoughts exactly. almost all military shooters
| don't even try to accurately portray the horrors of war. most
| driving games don't accurately simulate driving at all. GTA
| doesn't model just how much it sucks to have your car stolen.
| Age of Empires and Civilization don't accurately model empire-
| building. Monopoly isn't anything like real-life property
| trading. Titanfall doesn't model the economic ramifications of
| building and deploying dozens of giant robots--which are often
| destroyed within a couple minutes of landing--per 10-minute
| conflict.
|
| it's like... yeah, duh. games are and have always been
| simplifications of complex systems, allowing for interesting
| decisions and fun for the player. presenting the idea that
| SimCity doesn't holistically simulate everything in a real city
| down to social justice issues like race/class stratification
| and tensions between the populace and the police, is far from a
| novel observation, and every time someone makes such an
| observation it makes me wonder what the intended audience for
| such an observation is.
|
| that said, yes, the layout and presentation of the ideas
| expressed here is quite nice.
| dragontamer wrote:
| > Monopoly isn't anything like real-life property trading.
|
| Yeah, but how many people enjoy playing "Pit" ??
|
| I will say that Acquire is a good "more realistic" take on
| stock trading. Its got some gamey / non-realistic rules...
| but those aspects make the game more fun (For example:
| __always__ 2:1 trades, no matter what the value of the stocks
| are. A $200 stock can 2:1 trade for a $1000 stock, which
| provides an obvious point of conflict for the various
| players)
|
| Monopoly is a bad game at its core. You sit around and watch
| your money disappear due to shear random chance, especially
| if your table has memorized the probability of each property
| being landed upon (Orange properties have the highest
| probability btw, and therefore are the hottest commodity
| among players who know how to play the game)
| adamrezich wrote:
| Acquire is awesome! some friends and I stumbled across it
| while studying game design at school and we played the crap
| out of it. I've been meaning to pick up a copy for myself,
| thanks for reminding me!
|
| E: do you know if the Hasbro version (newer, with far
| uglier box) has any rule changes compared to the WotC
| (/Avalon Hill) original?
| dragontamer wrote:
| > E: do you know if the Hasbro version (newer, with far
| uglier box) has any rule changes compared to the WotC
| original?
|
| Yes. There's "Primary", "Secondary" and "Tertiary"
| bonuses (instead of the previous "Major" and "Minor"
| bonuses) on Acquires.
|
| So while the rules and overall gameplay is different, the
| subtle strategies have changed.
|
| --------------
|
| WotC wasn't the original btw. 3M made the original in the
| 1960s, back when 3M tried to make board games.
|
| The Hasbro 2013 version is probably the best recent
| version. Its all cardboard instead of 3d plastic, but its
| printed clearly and feels nice. The newest, ugly printing
| has very hard to read tiles, and many players suggest
| spending a few minutes with a silver-permanent marker
| recoloring the tiles to actually have enough contrast to
| see.
| adamrezich wrote:
| thanks so much for the info! gonna try and get one of the
| older versions soon now
| dragontamer wrote:
| Woops, I got my dates confused.
| https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgameversion/23828/avalon-
| hill...
|
| Avalon Hill / Hasbro made the 2008 edition.
|
| ----------
|
| The most recent 2016 edition by Hasbro isn't all bad
| (despite rule changes and terrible fonts and terrible
| designs). The core rules still exist and it still feels
| like a game of Acquire.
|
| Since its like $30 to $50 (depending on retailer), that's
| just the cheapest way of getting into the game. Finding
| an old version for $200+ used is for the dedicated fans.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > Monopoly isn't anything like real-life property trading.
|
| Monopoly is derived from the most political of board games:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Landlord's_Game , written
| as an act of political activism by a Georgist in 1904.
| makeworld wrote:
| The article is critique of SimCity, because it claims to be
| realistic and even educational, but actually has some serious
| biases. It's not a lament that's it not perfect. Indeed, the
| article goes on to explain how games shouldn't try to be
| perfect.
|
| > Maybe people who play games for enjoyment don't want the
| weight of modern problems bearing down on them during their
| escapist recreation. Maybe people who play games don't want to
| be preached to.
|
| SimCity represents some modern problems anyway, and plenty of
| people don't like it for that reason. Also, why is this any
| reason to not critique a game? No one has to read the article
| if they don't want to be preached to.
|
| > In fact, this essay is nothing but one of the many
| deconstructionist essays, one which prefers to tear down
| instead of build up. To highlight problems instead of celebrate
| what is good.
|
| The article actually goes on to explain how to build better
| games and showcases examples. The author is literally building
| up their own game in response to the problem of SimCity.
| nerdponx wrote:
| The article is obviously using SimCity as a starting point for
| a discussion.
|
| That said, to quote the article:
|
| > SimCity has been used and is being used as educational tool.
| Now, more than ever, is shaping the way a lot of people
| understand or misunderstand city planning. This is a recent
| initiative, a modified educational version.
|
| > The original SimCity is now open source and was included in
| the OLPC - One Laptop per Child (the cheap laptops created by
| the MIT for education in developing countries). We are
| literally shipping our ideas of cities to the third world.
| Because of this educational uses and because it claimed to be a
| simulation of a really existing system and not "just a game",
| SimCity has been criticized from pretty much every angle.
|
| Of course the map is not the territory. But what exactly is
| different between the map and the territory? What are you
| missing when you examine the former and not the latter?
|
| > nothing but one of the many deconstructionist essays, one
| which prefers to tear down instead of build up
|
| The same could be said about your comment!
| q_andrew wrote:
| For those who are interested in similar discourse, I recommend
| these cities skylines videos from youtube user donoteat01:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lvUByM-fZk&list=PLwkSQD3vqK...
|
| They are sarcastic tutorials on how to worsen your Skylines
| cities enough to qualify as a realistic North American metro
| area. If the mic quality bothers you, skip to the newer videos.
| scyzoryk_xyz wrote:
| donoteat01 was a huge discovery for me personally.
|
| I wouldn't call them tutorials though, more talks on urban
| development and history, which use the heavily modded game for
| illustration.
| nickdothutton wrote:
| I'm not sure anyone who has spent any significant time in
| Singapore would call it a "dystopia". The place is clean, safe,
| and well run. The west has given up on building more cities,
| which I think is a pity. I'm looking forward to visiting Neom,
| Songdo, and other places where the future is being created.
| dexwiz wrote:
| The problem with "games" is that the designers often have a goal
| already in mind, and then give players the tools to reach that
| goal. For any meaningful analysis, you need to understand the
| artist (game designer) to fully understand the art (game). While
| SimCity carries its own biases, I highly doubt a game developed
| for activist conference is any more impartial.
|
| Utopias in general are a great demonstration of man's hubris, and
| we have known that forever. The Tower of Babel is perhaps the
| oldest fable warning against such fallacies, and Bruegel
| perfectly captured it in his renderings. Ford and Disney both
| attempted planned cities (Fordlandia and Epcot respectively), and
| failed. Utopia designers like SimCity wash away all that makes a
| city (people, struggles, relationships), and replaces it with a
| Map. Any simulation, no matter how noble, falls victim to the
| same problem that the Map is not the Land. If anything, its all a
| bike shedding operation of trying to fix something which we have
| control over, instead of what we do not, just to fulfill our Ego.
| How many city planners really care about the people over just
| imposing their own vision of ideal upon the populace?
| rrherr wrote:
| Yes, the OP acknowledges this:
|
| > I swear, I can design you a game that subtly leads people to
| whatever "solution" you want.
|
| > We have to encourage players to always question the
| designers' systems and educate them to detect their biases and
| agendas, even our own.
|
| > Cities result from conflicts, conflicts are not always
| "solvable".
|
| > The problem with most utopian thinking is the idea of tabula
| rasa, the blank slate. In order to design a perfect society,
| you have to start from zero. That's the also utopianism of
| SimCity.
|
| Ctrl-F for "bias", "utopia", & "conflict" for more along these
| lines.
| treeman79 wrote:
| A fun one is to look at how taxation affects growth.
|
| All the sims I've seen have it set that lower tax rates
| equals more growth. This also reflects then opinion of one
| side of the political isle.
|
| It would be super easy to change that so higher taxes means
| higher growth to train people to believe that.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Games reflects reality. Lower tax rates do encourage
| growth. People/business keeping more money means lower
| prices more demand.
|
| The problems that growth creates require taxes (crime,
| traffic, population, affordable housing, etc).
|
| Making taxes mean higher growth one would raise them to the
| max, get max growth and use the high taxes to buy solutions
| to growth problems.
|
| It stops being a game because setting taxes lower never
| makes sense. Now you are just running a predetermined sim.
| koheripbal wrote:
| It really depends on how efficiently the gov't can spend
| the tax revenues.
|
| The reason most economists think that lower taxes are
| better for economic activity, is that _usually_ the same
| money will be part of multiple transactions in the same
| amount of time that the government would take to spend it
| once.
|
| ...but you also have to balance the _utility_ of that
| expenditure. Some forms of spending go towards equipment
| purchase, which can increase future economic activity -
| but other forms of spending really are wasteful until the
| _next_ use of that money.
|
| ...but that analysis is nearly impossible an filled with
| so many judgement calls that no one can convincingly
| model it.
| gameswithgo wrote:
| I would imagine that taxes, like almost all dials you can
| tweak for optimization, have a point that is optimal for
| growth, above or below which, they are bad for growth. As
| taxes approach zero, for instance, you live in a mad max
| society and nothing can grow because there is no
| stability.
| bluGill wrote:
| The first is correct (though in practice the system is
| chaotic enough that we can only get close to that point).
| However is that really what we want? Maximum growth is
| good for some things, but some of us will trade less
| growth for something else - either "more for me" (less
| taxes), or a "more services from everyone" (more taxes).
| I put both of the above in quotes because there is no way
| to capture all the subtitles of the complex trade offs
| involved here, and I hope you don't try to fight the
| strawmen I setup in my attempts.
|
| There is no agreement on what is good. Which is why
| politics is so complex.
| stale2002 wrote:
| > have a point that is optimal for growth, above or below
| which, they are bad for growth. As taxes approach zero,
| for instance, you live in a mad max society and nothing
| can grow because there is no stability.
|
| You are mis-equating a cost for a benefit, when it is
| instead that a cost is required to achieve a separate
| benefit.
|
| The point is that taxes are a cost. They are a cost that
| needs to be paid, in order to pay for certain things,
| such as government services.
|
| Setting taxes to 0 would not be bad for growth, because
| of taxes being 0.
|
| Instead, it is that having taxes be zero, means that we
| are unable to pay for government services. And the
| reduction in government services is what causes growth to
| go down.
|
| It is a subtle, but important distinction.
|
| And if you do not take into account this distinction,
| then you would come to the incorrect conclusion, that the
| government taxing people, and then wasting those
| resources entirely, could actually be good for growth,
| which is nonsense, outside of some extreme edge case
| situations, regarding extra-oridinary macro-economic
| scenarios.
| treeman79 wrote:
| What is a sufficient tax level to maintain security,
| external / internal threats, and basic dispute
| resolution.
|
| Basically a military so that you don't immediately get
| taken over by another country. A solid alliance may be a
| substitute for this.
|
| A police force so everything doesn't get burned to the
| ground each night. Some sort of court / judge/magistrate
| to decide on disputes.
|
| If you have those you have a stable county. Maybe brutal,
| maybe not. But a country. Everything else is a nice to
| have (hopefully)
|
| Tax rate can be 1-100% percent. At 100% everyone is
| essentially a slave. Revolution / collapse will happen
| quickly.
|
| America is around 50% or so.
|
| So the question is, what rate is "enough" to cover needs
| + reasonable wants.
| stale2002 wrote:
| > What is a sufficient tax level to maintain security,
| external / internal threats
|
| I don't think you read my post. I was saying that taxes
| are a cost, that are used to pay for things.
|
| They are not a benefit in and of themselves.
|
| The services are the benefit. And the taxes are the costs
| needed to pay for that benefit. But they are still a
| cost.
| mkr-hn wrote:
| SimCity itself was based on some questionable ideas about city
| planning.
|
| Polygon did a video and article:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_51_YJQpeg0
|
| https://www.polygon.com/videos/2021/4/1/22352583/simcity-hid...
| aaron-santos wrote:
| > Utopias in general are a great demonstration of man's hubris,
| and we have known that forever.
|
| This is a message that programming language designers and
| advocates need to hear. The idea that a better language can
| lead to better outcomes is itself utopian in the same way that
| better cities can lead to better outcomes. They both take a
| look at the substrate and extrapolate. Sure, there's an
| infinite number of ways to make a bad city, but we have to
| realize that's a different kind of thing.
| donatj wrote:
| > I highly doubt a game developed for activist conference is
| any more impartial.
|
| Or for that matter something I'd want to play.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-user-interfaces-to-s...
|
| >Will Wright on Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games
| (1996)
|
| [...]
|
| >Everyone notices the obvious built-in political bias, whatever
| that is. But everyone sees it from a different perspective, so
| nobody agrees what its real political agenda actually is. I don't
| think it's all that important, since SimCity's political agenda
| pales in comparison to the political agenda in the eye of the
| beholder.
|
| >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."
|
| [...]
| DonHopkins wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22851109
|
| DonHopkins on April 12, 2020 | on: Enemy AI: chasing a player
| without Navigation2D or...
|
| One trick is to spread the computation out over time, if you
| don't need to do it all at at once every frame. Since the enemies
| don't move that fast, a bit of delay might be good enough,
| depending on what you're tracking.
|
| SimCity has several layers like pollution, land value, etc, which
| slowly diffuse over time. But it only does that computation every
| so often, not every frame. It has a 16 phase simulation clock,
| and it scans the cells of the map in eight stripes over eight
| steps, then scans different layers like taxes, traffic and rate
| of growth decay, power, pollution and land value, police coverage
| and crime, population density, fire coverage and disasters, and
| the RCI valves. (That made it possible to run on a C64!)
|
| Chaim Gingold's SimCity Reverse Diagrams show how the different
| phases of "Simulate()" perform different kinds of analysis over
| time, and how the different map layers interact with each other.
|
| https://lively-web.org/users/Dan/uploads/SimCityReverseDiagr...
|
| >SimCity reverse diagrams, by Chaim Gingold (2016).
|
| >These reverse diagrams map and translate the rules of a complex
| simulation program into a form that is more easily digested,
| embedded, disseminated, and and discussed (Latour 1986).
|
| >If we merge the reverse diagram with an interactive approach--
| e.g. Bret Victor's Nile Visualization (Victor 2013), such
| diagrams could be used generatively, to describe programs, and
| interactively, to allow rich introspection and manipulation of
| software.
|
| >Latour, Bruno (1986). "Visualization and cognition". In:
| Knowledge and Society 6 (1986), pp. 1- 40.
|
| >Librande, Stone (2010). "One-Page Designs". Game Developers
| Conference. 2010.
|
| >Victor, Bret (2013). "Media for Thinking the Unthinkable". MIT
| Media Lab, Apr. 4, 2013.
| scyzoryk_xyz wrote:
| SimCity shaped how I see many aspects of how the world was
| constructed, especially as a child.
|
| The author mentions how Dziga Vertov and the French New Wave
| subverted the tools of the medium to expose the lie at the core
| of cinema. These ideas then circulated and transformed cinema to
| the core.
|
| Seeing these strange games used as examples is a great parallel.
| It is logical conclusion that we really are in the midst of a
| somewhat similar big leap in gaming and simulation, both as a
| tool and an artform.
| [deleted]
| aidenn0 wrote:
| That screenshot looks like "Raid on Bungling Bay." I had no idea
| sim-city was inspired by the level editor for that.
| GenerocUsername wrote:
| Stopped reading when the author began complaining about SimCity
| not including enough Race Relation management features.
| birdyrooster wrote:
| There is only one line which mentions race, and it does so in
| context with class, "In SimCity race and class conflicts are
| sanitized."
|
| The author of the article didn't even push a race based agenda
| (clearly class oriented) and the parent commenter is projecting
| onto it.
|
| Americans and their insane racial culture is causing people
| like the parent commenter to disengage from reality.
| medicineman wrote:
| Rent free.
| dragontamer wrote:
| A family friend of mine got her start in life in a trailer
| park.
|
| A lot of these city-builder games assume that "higher land
| values" is better, because land values == better tax revenue.
| But is that really what we should be optimizing for in these
| games? A city without trailer parks / low-cost housing is a
| city where my friend wouldn't stand a chance at all.
|
| The power-gamer in SimCity 2000 ignores hospitals and schools.
| Because life-expectancy doesn't lead to any tax benefits, and
| school / education counts don't seem to have any real effect on
| the city either.
|
| At some point, the game "stops reflecting reality", and when
| that illusion disappears, some players no longer find the game
| interesting. I personally am a power-gamer, I've never held
| that "illusion of reality" in any game I've ever played (be it
| SimCity, Civ, or whatever). I play these games to have fun and
| understand that there's almost no political or social
| commentary associated with the game design decisions.
|
| ----------
|
| But other people play these games hoping to "roleplay" a City's
| Mayor, or to "roleplay" the emperor of a Civilization. For
| these people, realism is a highly important trait.
|
| Alas: most games are not realistic at all. The games that do
| seek realism (ex: Hearts of Iron) are too complex for the
| typical person to pick up on.
|
| -------
|
| I think its fair for people to look at SimCity and say "well...
| that's not realistic. The game doesn't have the right
| incentives in the right places". Because frankly: it doesn't.
| Its just an incomplete viewpoint into city building.
|
| Even Cities: Skylines has a similar issue.
|
| ----------
|
| Games like "Two Point Hospital" are better, because its all
| clearly a joke. So the game is clearly a game. Curing clown's
| disease is funny and clearly not what happens in Hospitals. You
| better understand the game in the abstract: patients seek a
| diagnosis. The GP takes a guess, and sends the patient to a
| diagnosis room (X-Ray or other machine). The diagnosis room
| gives another result, and the doctor either is confident in
| treatment or needs additional diagnosis machines to make a
| better guess.
|
| Or... you just remove all the diagnosis rooms and force doctors
| to send patients in for treatment because treatment makes more
| money. Lulz. Then when the patients inevitably die to these
| poorly made decisions, you get a bunch of janitors with vacuum
| cleaners to clean up the ghosts.
|
| But yeah, it makes the most money (because you have the highest
| throughput of patients), so its the "Power gaming" move in Two
| Point Hospital.
| Hammershaft wrote:
| I mean, it's a dynamic in the actual formation of cities in
| North America. I think the purpose here is less that SimCity
| should model all of these complex social dynamics that formed
| modern cities, and more that SimCity should not advertise
| itself as a model of reality, and should explicitly clarify
| that it is based on a faulty and simplified model.
| rowlandrose wrote:
| Developers of simulation games could publically state what biases
| they put in their ruleset, and even release multiple rulesets
| with different biases. Maybe a rule-set editor could be included.
| What would my city look like if people generally put up with
| taxes? Or if people hated them? Or if education was a quick
| solution to crime, or a less guaranteed one?
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