When asked what he thought people could learn from SimCity, Will Wright said that “it’s kind of hopeless to approach simulations like that, as predictive endeavors.
While Urban Dynamics was meant to be taken very seriously, SimCity was never meant to be a super realistic simulation, à la the flight simulators that are used to train pilots. At the same time, he was happy to write articles for libertarian magazine Reason using his computer based analysis to broadly argue against social policies and their counterproductive effects. Any conclusions it made couldn’t be assumed to fit for a particular city unless the model was adjusted to account for its specific situation. When criticized by urban planners and anti poverty activists, Forrester would protest that his model was merely a tool for understanding how cities worked. None of the people in the city belonged to racial, ethnic or gender categories and it left out any representation of the city’s geography, like neighborhoods or parks. Forrester’s arguments enabled the Nixon Administration to claim that its plans to slash programs created to help the urban poor and people of color would actually, counterintuitively, help these people.” “Indeed, Moynihan was an enthusiastic proponent of Forrester’s work and recommended Urban Dynamics to his fellow White House officials. Baker noted in his article Model Metropolis, this strain of thought was quite similar to that of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, an advisor to President Nixon. Despite the seemingly neutral veneer of its formulas, the book concludes that many of the social policies meant to help cities are in fact detrimental to their success. This book attempted to turn the idea of a city into a computer model, and then used that model to test social policies. It became a game about simulating cities after he started reading more on urban planning, specifically, the book Urban Dynamics, by Jay Wright Forrester. The story starts with Will Wright, who came up with the idea for a city-building game after he discovered how fun it was just building the levels in his first video game, Raid on Bungeling Bay.
Simcity 4 vs simcity 5 series#
In the video above, I unboxed the secret ideology hiding in the formula that built SimCity, and how that’s reflected in one of the most popular gaming series of all time. But any simulation is only as good as the model it’s built on, and the model underpinning SimCity has quite the history.
On the surface, they appear to be exactly what they say: a simulation of a city. The kind of game your non-gaming uncle has probably spent hundreds of hours in. The kind of game that appears in school curriculums. City simulators like SimCity are serious games - the kind that gets coverage well beyond the video game press.
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