Is 'SimCity' Homelessness a Bug Or a Feature?

sarahnaomi writes: SimCity players have discussed a variety of creative strategies for their virtual homelessness problem. They've suggested waiting for natural disasters like tornadoes to blow the vagrants away, bulldozing parks where they congregate, or creating such a woefully insufficient city infrastructure that the homeless would leave on their own.

You can read all of these proposed final solutions in Matteo Bittanti's How to Get Rid of Homelessness, "a 600-page epic split in two volumes documenting the so-called 'homeless scandal' that affected 2013's SimCity." Bittanti collected, selected, and transcribed thousands of these messages exchanged by players on publisher Electronic Arts' official forums, Reddit, and the largest online SimCity community Simtropolis, who experienced and then tried to "eradicate" the phenomenon of homelessness that "plagued" SimCity."

Comments

SimCity 2000 available for free

[mcrbids]

I found this one on a trip down memory lane. Runs in a DOSBox and works great on my Win7 laptop! Yes, it's ENTIRELY LEGAL. you can get the download here.

Re: SimCity 2000 available for free

[Anonymous Coward]

Steam literally asks you when they want to take a hardware or software profile.

Re:SimCity 2000 available for free

[cas2000]

Origin may be basically a steam-wannabe, but it's without realising that the reason steam doesn't piss people off very much is that they're not arseholes about what they do - the DRM is minimal and mostly unobtrusive, and they ASK people if they want to participate in their surveys rather than just abuse the fact that their software is installed and simply steal the information.

Re:Does anyone care about SimCity2013?

[Sowelu]

Are...are you kidding? Cities XL is barely a game. It has some really nice features that were innovative for its time, like free-drawing roads, but a lot of its implementations are complete and utter BS. Like, you have to zone regions based on social class. Part of the challenge of SimCity is that you can't directly control that. Natural resources are garbage... the supply/demand graphs of different zones have hardly any bounce or buffer zone and your citizens move in with no intelligence at all. If you build twice as much unskilled-labor residential than you need--probably because you're trying to plan your city out early--people will SWARM in, and then whine about how there's not enough jobs. Even the very first SimCity game made people only move in if there were jobs (+/- a fudge factor). This is a really huge problem because you have to micromanage your zoning and build it a little bit at a time, rotating through all different kinds. You can't prebuild or everyone goes ballistic. Oh yeah, and road widths. God damn it, road widths. Hey great, I can upgrade this three-lane to a four-lane!...if I bulldoze everything along it, because the game cares about road width down to the foot, and you aren't allowed to build small roads with extra buffer on the side for future expansion. Dump tons of money now to build the nice roads, or you're hosed later.

All of this leads to extremely formulaic gameplay. There's not much variation in what works, and it feels tedious to do. I spent a lot of hours trying to find the fun, on a couple different versions, and it wasn't there. Went back to SC4.

Re:Which is stupider, the book or the game?

[Anonymous Coward]

I am not sure of the difference between the two programmes, but what failed in Dallas 10 years ago seems to be working in Salt Lake City now: http://thedailyshow.cc.com/videos/lntv3q/the-homeless-homed

Yeah, it is not the best source for news, but it is the only way I heard about it.