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."
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.
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."
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
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.
Because that's what city planners do.
That wouldn't be much fun, would it? In a game with no points, there's no point in doing something that's not fun.
When real world city planners zone property, they don't give vague percentages and "let the market decide" utilization. They usually set up some form of bureaucracy that requires each building modification or change of use to go through some permit and approval process. I doubt that would make for much of a fun game. (Though Douglas Adams did try once.)
I think we are arguing at cross-purposes here. The original article was critical of SimCity for being a bad "simulation" when its marketed scope is to be a "toy" or "game." Nitpicking SimCity to make it more accurate would only reduce the fun factor of the game. At the same time, some abstractions (the early bias towards public transit verses roads) and artificial challenges (all-or-nothing zoning) were introduced to make players think about the underlying ideas conveyed by the game.
Those who complain about affect & effect on