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SimCity Trains Bad Urban Planners
An anonymous reader writes "The global eco tech blog Worldchanging has a post commenting on about how SimCity borks urban planner ideas of how cities really work in the real world." From the entry: "While some of Lobo & Schooler's complaints arise from the fact that SimCity is built as a game -- the "God Mode," for example -- most derive from inability to modify the underlying model, whether to include mixed-use development (the ground-floor commercial/upper-floor residential buildings which help to make dense urban environments livable), to vary the demand ratings for various services, to make pedestrian travel more acceptable, or to alter the efficiency and availability of renewable power generation."
It's a game. It is as realistic as shooting evil devil-possessed demons on a martian base. It is not an urban-planning training tool, it's mild enternainment. This has as much credibility as extraterestrial rights campaigners complaining that Alf was lock in his room all the time and deprived of deeper socio-political stimulatory contact.
The pople who actually use SimCity as part of any real life planning scenario should be sacked. And forbidden to work on anything, ever again.
People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.
And here I was thinking that I could actually cause Godzilla to run through the city as New York's urban planner. *rolls eyes*
This is sort of like saying "Mario has taught children to hate the environment as they now stomp on turtles." Patently absurd.
Does Civilization train bad world leaders?
:P )
(No jokes about real people, please.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
Halo doesn't properly instruct future supersoldiers
Half-Life shows an unrealistic picture of the profession of a physics Ph.D.
Battlefield 1942 misrepresents the look and feel of Wake Island
I could go on.
Attention deficit disorder is a complicated issue, spanning several major... HEY LET'S GO RIDE BIKES!
(At least the original) Sim City was described by the developers as a toy, not a game, because you can't really win, but there are so many possibilities to play with it.
Yes, I'm nitpicking. But it's true.
I don't need a signature.
How tough is this - find an open source clone of SimCity and add your own rules. It's a game - why is it Will's fault that you're planning real life with it and real life doesn't work right? Come on, this is a non-story and those people are idiots.
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
It disturbs me that games like the Doom series, Enemy Territory et all are training poor mass murderers. I mean in those games, you get to die and come right back in the game within a minute. They are also learning that you can go right out, work by yourself, and still whack tons of the enemy.
Our young wanna be mass murderers are getting the wrong idea. We need more games that teach proper planning and team work. We need games that teach our youth to properly scout out locations... sometimes spending days getting to know the terrain. If indoors to search for alternate escape routes that must be blocked. We need to teach our youth how to work together to create the maximum body count. And we need to teach them that you don't get to come back once the police shoot you. Make the most of the one opportunity you get.
I blame our game makers for our lack of good mass murderers.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Actually, Paul Starr made the same basic complaints about the assumptions hidden in the underlying model of SimCity in a 1994 in The American Prospect, "The Seductions of Sim."
Enraged SimCity players around the globe respond to Lobo & Schooler by reaching menacingly for the bulldozer tool...
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
A German company, Glamus GmbH, together with the Weimar Bauhaus University and the traffic research department of DaimlerChrysler, created a game called 'Mobility', which does the simcity thing but really focuses on, well, mobility. English website
I'd hate to see the UI micromanagement needed to roll this functionality into SimCity. A separate game, SimTower (and it's unofficial sequel, Yoot Tower), was made that experimented with the concept, however.
Those who complain about affect & effect on
I'd rather have my urban planners trying to simulate real-world consequences of their actions instead of pulling a Soviet-style "The people need to woek harder to meet our expectations" kind of approach urban planners tend to prefer.
"Wow. Now THAT'S a lot of angry Indians." - Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer
This blog entry is more a statement that SimCity is not an accurate model for city planning, not an assault on its legitmacy as a form of entertainment. Its a good game but a poor design tool. Imagine Civil Engineers who design their bridges in Pontifex and you might understand the outrage.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
I live in Athens Greece, which must rank as one of the er less desirable high density population areas
in terms of green area (at least in Europe). But, if you pick the right place (like where I am now - no don't ask) it's pretty good even for a convinced ruralite like myself (from East Anglia UK).
Mixed business and accomodation keeps a city centre vibrant and alive. The alternative - seen widely in my homeland (the UK) is desolate wastelands filled with security cameras and muggers. This morning, I could have picked from
at least 5 or 6 bakeries within walking distance for my breakfast (yummy fresh bread). Actually,
I know which one I go to because I end up debating
football (soccer to you US people) before returning to the office... Life. Get one!
(no money here though).
Funny thing here. Nobody worries about muggers or rapists here. It (mostly) doesn't happen.
I wish urban planners would look more carefully at the mediterranean model. Just like diet, it seems to work (albeit sometimes painfully slowly for my tastes).
I can't blame games designers for designing games based on their local cultural predujices. But, I wish we could find ones that tell the whole story.
(Hint: Small pockets of the US aren't the US, let
alone the rest of the world).
Anybody who thinks we are living in some sort of paradise here, please note - it isn't. (Don't ever
expect to actually get paid for that work you did).
But the bread makes it all worthwhile (crunch, crunch).
Best wishes from
not so sunny (rather cold at the moment)
Athens Greece.
Andy Allen.
...a Cluestick in the box. So these people can beat themselves over the fucking head with it.
More on News at 11 !!!
I am in a graduate planning program and I love playing SimCity. I don't think that the game has an effect on how I approach planning. I feel the exact opposite has occurred: I find myself hating aspects of the game that fail to reflect reality. The summary notes the lack of mixed use development. The game also fails in trip generation, physics, and connectivity. Despite its flaws, it's a fun diversion, so I play it.
I think that the "bad planners" that learn from SimCity might be those in muncipalities that do nothing but zoning; when a town relies on zoning without a comprehensive plan, design ordinance or any other form of "planning" you are left with the suburban sprawl and commercial strip development that plagues the American landscape. We need a revival of the City Beautiful movement, which some believe can be found in New Urbanism.
Use closely packed alternating residential and commercial zones to achive the same effect. Sims will effectively walk next door.
to vary the demand ratings for various services
Even a dictator can't change what people want, but there are some resolutions you can ennact to encourage or discourage tourism, or tech industry, for example.
To make pedestrian travel more acceptable Use closely packed R and C zones. Nothing you can do about industrial polution -- ever lived downwind from a fish processing plant? Even a small one, family owned one?
or to alter the efficiency and availability of renewable power generation
High altitudes have more wind, less cloudy days have more sunlight, otherwise that ability doesn't exist in the real world either.
It comes down to this: You can't change reality in the real world either. Sim Cities are already dictatorships (Although I think it would be more realisitc if they let you build a berlin-style wall). But, Sim City is designed to make you deal with the real world and yet you can still build eco-friendly cities if you grow them slowly, spending most of your funding on quality-of-life things like parks, mass transit, and police stations. The Maxis people understood this and wrote about it in the manual when they wrote the first version (which I also played).
The one irritating thing is that sims aren't willing to commute nearly as far as real people (they should be willing to drive farther). Also, it doesn't simulate how difficult it is to find parking in downtown areas with very high land values (high property values should encourge sims to use mass transit).
In conclusion, if man's natural instinct in Sim City is to mindlessly CONSUME EXPAND and DESTROY, maybe that is just man's instinct period.
Upstairs Dog, Downstairs People.
really work in the real world. Here's a fucking idea, lets use something that was meant to teach urban planning instead of a game that was meant for entertainment.
"It is a movie, of course, but it also presents a very unrealistic picture of archaeology. There are only so many Nazis left in the world to reclaim stolen artifacts from. Doing so takes years of training and delivering papers at conferences. Even established archaelogists rarely use a whip. Archaelogists spend far more time annoying businesses for building on grave sites than they do wearing a fedora. Also, Jones never sucks up to mentors or leaders in the field. How did he ever get a tenure track position at a leading university as the movie portrays without sniffing academic ass?
The image of Indiana Jones has gravely hurt the field of archaeology, and whether it will ever fully recover remains to be seen."
I like to run Sim-City in Libertarian mode, where you just turn it on and watch the city thrive all by itself.
I'm a planner, and at first glance the notion that Sim City affects the way we work seems silly. For one thing, nobody has that much control over the building of a community. It is a game, it is fun, but planners generally are more knowledgeable about reality (I hope).
The worry, if any, should be over non-planners taking the assumptions in the game to heart. Dealing with the public, there are a wide variety of assumptions out there about how planning works, and ideas on how it should work. Get enough people with an idea about something and that can spur a change in the way things work, whether for right or wrong.
But realistically I don't know how much Sim City affects planning as much as it reflects reality- mixed-use development is sadly vastly underbuilt in the US these days.
No, it's actually quite a bit more realistic then that. The logical extension of your black & white thinking is that only reality is realistic, thus negating any measure of what the entire concept of 'realistic' is all about.
It is a toy, but toys can teach us many things, because their behaviors model something bigger then themselves. The author's point in this article is that while SimCity has valid potential as a teaching tool, it has certain important flaws that must be made abundantly clear. The biggest of which is that the game is opaque, it's innerworkings are only known through experimentation and without any means to adjust the parameters of the model itself it only represents one side of what simulated models are all about.
Does SimCity produce poor planners? Yes. Most definitely. It uses models from the late 1800's and the early 1900's for its design.
9 74195X/qid=1101244541/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl 14/002-2287476-3846415?v=glance&s=books&n=5078 46
Yes, I know it is just a game, but tell me this, after playing the game for a while, didn't you start to asses your own city/town based on the judgements you would have made if you developed it?
If you really want to learn all you can about city planning, there is only one book you need to read:
The Death and Life of Great American Cities, by Jane Jacobs
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/067
The problem is, good city planning requires diversity, something that SimCity doesn't promote. But, on another hand, it would be very difficult for it to do so.
Even if you don't care about city planning or SimCity, you should still read this book.
Want to know why big box stores are bad? Want to know about how to win the war against cars? Want to know how to fix a slum?
Read this book and you will NEVER look at your city/town the same way again.