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."