
From video game to day job: How ‘SimCity’ inspired a generation of city planners - burritofanatic
https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-simcity-inspired-urban-planners-20190305-story.html
======
filesystemdude
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
worst thing in the world and a conspiratorial worldview - no thanks, I'll just
go back to my sims.

~~~
TheGRS
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.

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

~~~
TheGRS
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.

------
seltzered_
This article is a lighthearted and doesn't talk about the underlying models
behind simcity. Would recommend also reading:

[https://logicmag.io/06-model-metropolis/](https://logicmag.io/06-model-
metropolis/) \- which talks about simcity's inspiration from Jay Forrester's
'Urban Dynamics" and it's flaws.

Also, [https://placesjournal.org/article/a-city-is-not-a-
computer/](https://placesjournal.org/article/a-city-is-not-a-computer/) ,
which is something I've been meaning to read & contrast alongside Geoffrey
West's works (
[https://www.ted.com/talks/geoffrey_west_the_surprising_math_...](https://www.ted.com/talks/geoffrey_west_the_surprising_math_of_cities_and_corporations)
).

There's also a recent interview between an urban planner in portland (the
citybeautiful youtube channel) and a developer at cities:skylines:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7c5pSCgbZ84](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7c5pSCgbZ84)

~~~
AlexTWithBeard
The talks are nice.

The articles are very disappointing though.

The first one claims that Jay Forrester's urban model was wrong, because it
produces right-wing/libertarian results. I may disagree with libertarians too,
but that's not how you criticize a scientific model. How about some concrete
stuff?

The second article is just bland. It asks a very good question: what should we
optimize for when constructing a city? And then proceeds talking about
different things none of which helps to answer the original question. The only
takeaway: a city must have a library. A good thought, but not an eye-opener.

~~~
panic
The argument isn't about results—it's that the model itself was built on
ideological assumptions instead of anything empirical.

~~~
AlexTWithBeard
Well, I tried to find out what these ideological assumptions were, but:

 _There were no neighborhoods, no parks, no roads, no suburbs, and no racial
or ethnic conflicts._ \- surely a simplification, but doesn't sound
ideological.

 _Tax contributions of poor people are lower_ \- well, again, this is probably
a mathematical fact, rather than an ideological.

~~~
Arn_Thor
The ideological problem is assuming that all these factors don't matter—that
taxes and zoning are the only factors that matter.

Some very fundamental examples of what's missing: Selective policing affects
incarceration rates, neighborhood ethnic makeup affects city budgets which in
turn affect land values and safety (Flint water crisis and other pollution)
which in turn affect economic prospects and future tax income, what goes on in
city A in terms of taxation and opportunities affects neighboring city B, it's
assumed that traditional zoning policies generate the most land value which is
incorrect in many cases, it ignores how public spending on infrastructure
affects economic opportunities in the short an long term..

~~~
Iv
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.

~~~
Arn_Thor
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

~~~
Iv
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.

------
andys627
It's crazy how much SimCity cities look like the cities we've built for the
last 75 years. Our cities really can be simplified to a game "fun" for someone
to dive in right away. My thesis is that cities are oversimplified and
stratified into easily separable blocks because they're easier to
"industrialize" that way. This is causing crazy transportation requirements
and isolation. If we mixed uses up a bit we could save on transportation
overhead and be exposed to more things. The driver of this SimCity pattern of
development is undoubtedly the single occupancy automobile. Sprawl works best
for the car and the car works best for sprawl. Denser, mixed up uses work best
with walking, biking, and transit. Conspiracy theorist in me says the auto
industry influenced city planning from the ground up because they could profit
off of it. Who profits when you walk more? Well, everyone... healthier bodies,
healthier minds, more efficient transportation, etc. etc. etc.

~~~
InitialLastName
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.

~~~
nkrisc
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 case.

~~~
DonHopkins
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.

~~~
woolvalley
Couldn't we solve this with a percentage type for zoning, or adding a "mixed
commerical/residential" zone? UI wise that shouldn't be any more complicated.

Or you can change the zoning into japanese zoning, where the UI can stay
simple as you escalate the permission level of a zone.
[https://code.uberinternal.com/T2597239](https://code.uberinternal.com/T2597239)

~~~
chucksmash
Seems like you've accidentally posted the wrong link.

------
standardUser
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.

~~~
Sohcahtoa82
> 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.

I feel the opposite.

I think SimCity's charm is just nostalgia. C:S is definitely more of a
simulation, as it simulates individual vehicles, including commercial traffic.
All the SimCity games before SC4 used a statistical model for traffic, and
SC4's path finding was very unlikely to use highways and mass transit without
a mod.

And with mods, you can make C:S look like a photo [0], or add outlights to
make it look like Borderlands [1].

[0]
[https://www.reddit.com/r/CitiesSkylines/comments/axhrg7/stre...](https://www.reddit.com/r/CitiesSkylines/comments/axhrg7/streets_of_coru%C3%B1a_a_nova/)

[1] [https://imgur.com/a/GY7Tn](https://imgur.com/a/GY7Tn)

~~~
gph
I don't think that's quite what the OP meant by sandbox vs. simulation.

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.

~~~
InitialLastName
> I never felt like I could fail at C:S

This. The only times I've irreparably crashed a city in C:S is when I've been
purposefully going for achievements like "<50% unemployment for 6 months".

~~~
_ah
There was a"making of" interview with the C:S devs a while back. They stated
that they intentionally made the game easier because it was more fun that way.

------
DonHopkins
>That issue speaks to a larger criticism of “SimCity”: Wright's vision imposed
an old-school approach to city-building, influenced by Robert Moses and the
Chicago school. For those early urban planners, and in “SimCity,” there were
binary solutions to problems. To lower crime rates, build police stations. If
people complain about traffic, build more roads. If you need space to build a
freeway or a stadium, raze working-class neighborhoods.

Will Wright explained the motivation behind the vast oversimplifications he
made in the design of SimCity, in "Will Wright on Designing User Interfaces to
Simulation Games (1996)":

[https://medium.com/@donhopkins/designing-user-interfaces-
to-...](https://medium.com/@donhopkins/designing-user-interfaces-to-
simulation-games-bd7a9d81e62d)

>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.”

Also, here's a talk about "Micropolis: Constructionist Educational Open Source
SimCity" which discusses educational applications of SimCity:

[https://medium.com/@donhopkins/har-2009-lightning-talk-
trans...](https://medium.com/@donhopkins/har-2009-lightning-talk-transcript-
constructionist-educational-open-source-simcity-by-don-3a9e010bf305)

------
darkpuma
Here's a video of an urban planner playing Sim City 2000, and commenting on
the various ways in which it's accurate or inaccurate:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUQaCoxybW8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUQaCoxybW8)

------
sct202
If anything SimCity, makes transit heavy options seem really easy to build.
Building a new subway in the game is easier (and not very expensive) than re-
doing a grid of roads in an area that's already developed.

------
billfruit
Perhaps this type of simulation may one day help us choose better town
planners; perhaps one day may even give us an alternate method of choosing
administrators. How radical will it be in a Mayoral election, to see how
different candidates will perform in a simulation, and the voters will be able
to compare their scores and gain much more insight into how the prospective
candidates shall perform.

~~~
sverige
That actually happened at least once, of course, with disastrous results for
one of the candidates.

[https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/11/24/1717221/-Can-
you...](https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/11/24/1717221/-Can-you-trust-a-
mayor-who-can-t-win-SimCity)

------
trevor-e
This reminds me of how I got into programming by playing Starcraft: Brood War.
If anyone is familiar with the Use Map Settings game mode, you could program
your own scenarios using a Map Editor that came included, eg a Tower Defense
map.

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.

~~~
honkycat
Yep, this is how I got into programming.

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!

------
burritofanatic
It really is something. I remember a friend from childhood who gave me a
pirated copy of the original Sim City. He's now a city planner in Los Angeles.

------
tiff_seattle
This bridge in Alexandria Egypt must have been inspired by SimCity.

[http://i.imgur.com/YbrJG2h.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/YbrJG2h.jpg)

~~~
sqd
What's the point of this bridge??

~~~
tatami
It looks like the bridge is only in one direction, making the whole like a
roundabout.

But why on earth do they need six lanes per direction?

------
JoblessWonder
My mother worked in city planning/government and at a conference Maxis was
giving out copies of their brand new game, Sim City 2000. It was a great way
to get the kids of these professionals (or the professionals themselves) into
both gaming and city planning.

------
amatecha
I'm surprised, as I often notice things in a given city and think "hmmm seems
like someone in city planning never played SimCity"! haha ;) .. like when
multi-million-dollar highway construction projects which take 10 years are
built to usage levels measured at the start of the project, not for what the
projected population/needs will be way down the line...

------
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.

~~~
duado
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.

------
mikmeh
I still play, the mod scene for SC4 is great. There are bike lanes now and all
the parking lots you could want. You can easily build American suburban
shopping centers with acres of beautiful cement.

When I was in high school I went to city counsel meetings, was active in youth
in gov't, and even met the city manager. All because I loved playing SimCity
for much. We never had a computer powerful enough to play SC2k so I saved and
bought a Sega Saturn and the AT keyboard adapter and spent hours playing on
that.

------
john-radio
So what career should I seek out if I love to play the game Opus Magnum?

~~~
Pryde
Well, obviously you'd be a phenomenal alchemist. As soon as you find that job
opening, let me know, I'll be applying as well!

------
aboutruby
My favorite is the 9% tax that a presidential candidate wanted to have and
that was based on SimCity.

e.g. 9% personal income tax, 9% federal sales tax, and a 9% corporate tax.

------
bane
Given its popularity, tech minded players and complete failure of Maxis as a
steward of the game, I'm incredibly surprised a popular and well maintained
Open Source city sim hasn't appeared[1]

1 - I'm aware of Lincity, OpenCity and OpenSC2k, but none of them are popular
and/or are recreations, not full-up new city makers.

~~~
soup10
successful open source game dev is pretty rare. i don't know why, but i'd
guess mostly that polishing a game to modern standards is a heck of a
grind.(not to mention artists aren't really keen on working for free either)
There's plenty of half-baked open source games...

~~~
zanny
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.

------
unicornporn
I think they read [https://logicmag.io/06-model-
metropolis/](https://logicmag.io/06-model-metropolis/) and were wise enough to
give their article a more click friendly headline.

------
GuillaumeBrdet
I can't deny that SimCity was quite an awesome game at the time. I can see how
it might have inspired some architect.

------
XaspR8d
I don't get the feeling that SimCity suggests that car-centric solutions are
the "right" answers. My interpretation always was that it shows you how ideal
mass transit solutions were but why economic pressure could keep them from
working. Ultimately it seemed like the message was that pure capitalism was
biased towards solutions that just barely met the citizens' needs.

The lack of parking lots was always an obvious bias, though a reasonable game
design choice considering the visual appeal. I remember when SimCity 4 modders
started making more buildings with "correct" parking lots (and other scaling
aspects), it was so contrastive with the built-ins that people often either
rejected it, or worked to acquire enough custom buildings that they could turn
off _all_ the default ones, which required a pretty staggering number of
assets.

~~~
darkpuma
Mass transit enthusiasts would probably love OpenTTD. Instead of managing a
city, you manage a transit company that operates ships, planes, trucks, buses,
and most of all trains.

Cities grow as you serve them with more mass transit, which maybe is more
optimistic than real life, but on the other hand the game also teaches you
that tearing up half the city to install a massive train yard is very
expensive and will make local politicians furious with you, requiring you to
bribe them with cash (or reforestation campaigns..) if you want to continue
construction in their city.

Unfortunately it's missing subways, but the trams provided by community
extensions are a pretty decent substitute.

~~~
billfruit
While OpenTTD is a fun for a time, I think the Rail Road Tycoon (Esp 2 and 3)
are more detailed games, with a simulated stock market and financial system,
where one realizes that though through a well planned rail network and well
maintained rolling stock, you could stay afloat and expand some, greater
personnel wealth is more often and more easily obtained through creative ploys
in the financial markets.

~~~
darkpuma
OpenTTD's economics is fundamentally flawed, it's trivial to have billions of
dollars before long, meaning you never have to worry about money again
(although local authorities will still hassle you for too much demolition.) It
would be nice to see the economic system revamped completely, but I don't
think it's a high priority for anybody. I think most of the fun in the game is
in the finer logistics of optimal rail networks, particularly junctions and
switching, not so much the money management.

