The iconic building game known as SimCity, in which one can build a city from the ground up, has enchanted a whole generation of gamers. When it first came out, in 1989, it was an astonishingly fresh concept. The designer, Will Wright, admitted that he was influenced by the urban theorist Jay Forrester and by the work of an architect and scholar named Christopher Alexander. SimCity is the creation not only of a master builder but also of Wright’s imagination. And though it is often seen as merely a “game,” it has serious undertones and provides far more than just entertainment. Elucidating the process of urbanization in this seemingly naive but profound operation makes for many addictive “a-ha!” moments. It was an early “wow.”
Universe of Opportunities
I first started playing SimCity, a popular ’90s computer game, when I was a little kid. You are the “mayor” of a city you’ve founded, and you’re given a blank canvas on which to build. You start with a few essentials: roads, power lines, and a water supply. From there, you can do just about anything. You can build an airport, an opera house, a football stadium. And you can also do some very weird stuff, stuff that could only happen in a computer game. That’s the beauty of SimCity. It lets you play God, and it lets you be obsessive.
The initial municipality that I put together was a careless assortment of homes, workplaces, and thoroughfares, all crafted with the starry-eyed credulity of someone new to urban planning. I look back now, and what leaps out to me visually is the memory of watching my townspeople figures go up and up—even though I now realize that the tools I was addicted to were designed to be almost infinitely flexible, to not fail, and, as such, not to gratify the user fully.
A particularly bright memory I have is when I tried to play around with setting up a “grid city.” I planned each block very carefully, trying to make sure that the residential areas were really close to the commercial ones and that the industrial parts of town were off in a corner by themselves to contain the dirty air and other health hazards within an unfortunate few parts of an otherwise happy, healthy city. But then, as my city kept growing, I started to slow down and notice what I call “grid fatigue” when I looked at the urban sprawl. Boredom was starting to set in, and Sim boredom led to cheating. Except, I tried not to cheat. Not this time.
Released a couple of years later, in 1993, SimCity 2000 was the revolutionary successor of the original SimCity, which set the standard in city-building games. SimCity 2000 improved upon the first installment and had many more levels of depth than the original. The isometric graphics, in addition to the almost countless amount of things you could do in your city, made the game appear to be a level on top of the original, with its atmosphere still nearly as fun as its predecessor. The months that I played SimCity 2000 almost certainly affected how I view city-building now.
How SimCity Has Evolved
My strategy with SimCity has changed as the game itself has changed. Innovative features along with tuned-up mechanics have been introduced with each new version, which not only make the game more interesting but also deepen the gameplay experience. The 1999 version, SimCity 3000, saw much-improved graphics and more sophisticated simulation elements. These many more additions allowed for even greater amounts of creativity and control—so I, as a player, could undertake to balance the sometimes competing demands of growth and sustainability within the city that was now under my control.
An unforgettable component of SimCity 3000 was the ability to foster (or impair) “neighborly relations” and establish resource and service agreements between neighboring cities. The unforgiving, if wryly amusing, strategic common sense of the classic Maxis building model held powerful sway over this game, and it was indeed wondrously addictive. (I say “addictive” in the most complimentary sense). Those who have enjoyed and loved this game over the years can vouch for the fact that reciprocal regionalism has often paid high dividends in SimCity. In contrast, determined disregard of the imperatives of “give and take” can have some extremely unsound and comical results, both for the player of the game and those who may be watching.
SimCity 4, which came out in 2003, took the urbanization game up another level. It had a new simulation engine and made a great leap toward “regional gameplay.” This meant the creation of more intricate and complex cities. The energy I invested in building productive new metropolises was rewarded by the as-yet-unsurpassed urban model—particularly when it came to Soleil atop a roof at sunrise. The fine boys and girls over at Maxis had dialed the overall enjoyment level to 11. They also implemented an invention of mine that I hadn’t yet patented: switching from city to city within a region.
A certain metropolis in SimCity 4 is etched into my memory. I had plotted its every development phase in the most scrupulous of ways, from what sort of zones went where, what sort of transportation my citizens would use, and whether or not public utilities would be privately owned or part of the municipal budget. Traffic was a persistent problem, and simple solutions, like a new network of roads, only made it worse. My metropolis seemed to function in a very realistic, if accelerated, manner, and every decision I made truly was an “executable strategy.” I was able to slowly ramp up the overall efficiency of my city by simulating social policy in a number of ways, and it worked in a fashion that was very satisfying to my gaming experience.
Micro-Management as an Addictive Behavior
The micro-management that SimCity offers is powerfully addictive. One can place each building that makes up a city individually, and these can be fine-tuned down to the last little bit. They can be tweaked even more when one considers that each little bit can be found in the Data Layers and Data Maps screens, where a multitude of buttons can be selected to summon up particular outcomes. From there, a player can take the setup and place the buildings or buttons into the Information Engine screen to generate something like a linear storytelling narrative.
I remember an especially intense play session during which I was preoccupied with wringing the utmost productivity from my metropolis’s public sector. For hours on end, I placed and re-placed fire stations, police precincts, and hospitals throughout my city, compulsively perfecting their locations and quantities. I adjusted budgets, re-routed roads, and undertook the massive urban renewal projects necessary for achieving what I came to realize was an essentially impossible goal: optimal service coverage. The deluge of notifications and streaming data served up by the game’s many feedback systems had me enthralled.
How a city manages its economy is another area where micro-management is important. Keeping a city in the black is a tough job—especially when you have to do it without resorting to the tortuous methods that our actual mayors often use. The budgeting puzzle is compelling stuff. Its figures can be stared at in the way a chess player stares at a position on a board. The challenge of achieving and maintaining an almost limitless range of variables in some sort of dynamic equilibrium makes for a deep game.
SimCity provided me with an experience I will never forget when I was able to successfully pull my eponymous metropolitan area back from the brink of bankruptcy. My SimCity had been growing too fast for me to keep up financially, and many of the high-cost public works my Sims had demanded left my treasury deeply in debt. “Negative cash flow” soon became the phrase of the day. Still, like a good public servant, I wasn’t ready to let my city go bust. I rolled up my sleeves and got to work.
The dynamic, ever-changing world of SimCity is what makes it so compulsive to play and sets it apart from a lot of other ‘God’ games. It’s a game that is constantly challenging you to overcome the problems that can be created in part by your own imagination and in part by the natural course of events within the game itself. Mine was not the first city to be hit by a series of natural disasters, but one reason that emergence from the game is often next to impossible, apart from pure game addiction, is that no two cities in any gamer’s story are ever the same.
Lessons and Reflections from the Real World
Over the years, playing SimCity has proven to be not just an engaging pastime but also a learning experience. It was and remains a trailblazer among computer games for the way it has players inhabit a virtual world and live out urban-planning fantasies. In my mind, that’s a big part of its educational value. Players have the chance to live out the dream of managing a city, and that’s not just some random city but one that comes from the mind of the player.
SimCity offers an essential lesson about the long-term nature of urban planning. Decisions made for the short term without this context in mind can lead to serious problems like urban decay and traffic. The game also offers a kind of urban-planning laboratory in which the player can then see his or her plans play out in the SimCity life. The laboratory’s value comes from a set of boundaries and a defined cause-and-effect relationship. SimCity, therefore, offers this critical-thinking experience in a form not typical of video games—a chance to explore the dynamics of urban growth without the risk of causing real urban decay.
SimCity shows how all the parts of an urban system in a city are linked and interact at different levels, and how strategic decisions have trade-offs and payoffs. This kind of problem-solving is extremely valuable in communities that play the game, but I think that designing the game in the first place shows off the skills of systems engineers—especially ones that have a particular concern for the things they build and how those things will affect the people that use them. After all, many things we consider to be “social problems” are just bad urban engineering, bus stop-bench design, or something similar that the long arm of the government can’t and shouldn’t always solve, certainly not right in the first draft.
SimCity is valuable because it teaches its players the art of being and bouncing back. They are no match for the Mother Nature of the game. No player can fight or prevent the tornadoes, earthquakes, fires, and riots that are thrown at them. These events cannot be gamed or overturned. They simply have to be withstood and then dealt with. The outcome of a city’s dealing with these kinds of disasters in the game can be seen as a measure of the player’s governing, managerial and problem-solving abilities.
By allowing its players to preside over these kinds of governing fantasies, SimCity also teaches them one of the most crucial life lessons of all. Looking back at the many years I spent playing SimCity, I am amazed at the profound influence this largely innocuous game has had on me. The game kindled in me a passion for urban planning and serious thoughts about a career in the field. I love the idea of building a city from scratch and controlling all the details that go into it—shaping every street, defining growth policies, placing just the right building here, or just the right set of trees there. I’ve found few things more satisfying. Yet, amazingly, I’ve not built a real one!
To sum it up, SimCity is more than a game. On the surface, it might seem like just another simulation game, but in reality, it’s much more than that. SimCity is—almost—a world in itself. It provides an enthralling environment where you can dive right in and forget about everything else. Yet, at the same time, it’s a world that intelligent and curious people can’t help but learn from, either. If you’re the maker/manager personality type that a lot of us are, you’ve probably put an absurd amount of time into sim citying at some point in your life. To you, the lessons from SimCity are worth their weight in gold.
