Slashdot Mirror
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."
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!
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
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 Cluestick in the box. So these people can beat themselves over the fucking head with it.
"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."