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

Re:SimCity 2000 available for free

[Anonymous Coward]

It's also available on GOG, albeit not free, but with no need to have Origin.

Not a problem

[Blaskowicz]

Better to have homeless people on welfare in the streets rather than only drunken frat boys, small criminals and drug addicts. Problem in the US is you don't give them enough welfare (or at all) and no healthcare, hell homeful people at full time min wage employment don't even have healthcare. Nationalise all the evul healthcare companies (this cuts red tape), make the price of medicines drop, make welfare easier to get (less red tape) and redistribute the half a trillion or so you've saved in welfare.

Re: Not a problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Considering the "productive" people are hoarding up all the work and basically forcing as many people as they can to be unproductive...

Re:Not a problem

[Anonymous Coward]

This simply isn't true. If were simply a question of the amount of resources available, then the U.S. is not much different than any other developed country. San Francisco in particular has a more progressive homeless outreach program than almost any other city in the entire world--if the homeless population hadn't doubled in the past 15 years, we'd have already housed every last homeless person in the city.

The problem with homelessness in America is complex, but it mostly comes down to two things: 1) you have to jump through a ridiculous amount of hoops to get assistance, and 2) the people most vulnerable to falling into homelessness (i.e. those with mental illness or disorders) are the least capable of jumping through those hoops.

We have lots of hoops because of two things: 1.a) our patchwork of federal, state, and municipal programs and 1.b) the American idea of self-help and individualism. The source of 1.a is obvious. 1.b is problematic not because our ideas of self-help and our belief that America is a meritocratic land of opportunity is fundamentally bad. As an American I'm aware of and conscious of my own emphasis on these qualities, and I frankly I like that I'm that way. The problem is that too many Americans don't realize that these ideas are just cultural preferences, and are not connected to reality. They're aspirations rather descriptions of our society. Because people don't realize this, they think that self-help is easier than it is. To admit that self-help isn't very easy is in some sense a denial of the vision of America they hold in their head.

As for #2, since we've dismantled our mental institutions we've abandoned a huge segment of our population in dire need of state assistance. We did that for two reasons, 2.a) money and 2.b) concern with freedom. Regarding 2.a, I think it's fair to say that we're losing more wealth thanks to our failure to address these problems. Regarding 2.b: it's true that the government once abusively used it's power to commit people to mental institutions without them having committed a crime. From the perspective of a society obsessed with individual liberty, that's an abhorrent state of affairs. However, the problem with mental illness and disorders (of all varieties, not simply clinical illness) is that it's fundamentally in conflict with our assumptions about free will, as well as with an economic approach (personal incentives, costs, etc) to the problem. We need to adjust the way we resolve this conflict and become more comfortable with the idea of _forcing_ people into assistance. And we need to realize that the moral of hazard of "handouts" is nowhere near as significant as it would be if we were all perfectly rational actors, _especially_ when we're giving handouts to those people at the very bottom.

Re:Not a problem

[Anonymous Coward]

In a perfect capitalist free market, there should never be any unemployment because wages should always adjust to a level that achieves full employment.

Not really, no. Even a cursory look at example supply and demand charts invariably show that supply and demand almost always meet somewhere lower than maximum supply. The law of diminishing returns gives a hint why. Further, you can pay the worst employees less and less because of their lackluster performance until the point that employees slowly or quickly starve to death. Finally, full employment would create massive liquidity issues which would have a yoyo effect on wages; a short-term shortage could double wages and a short-term surplus could cause wages to halve. This because 100% (or near 100%) consumption of a good tends to result in great elasticity--the risk of famine, perhaps, or the possibility to resell to others at a higher rate.

In any case, this but one of many reasons why the whole notion of people being able to support themselves wholly even in theory is rubbish.

Re:Not a problem

[blackomegax]

The ACA was cooked up by a republican thinktank and forced down the democrats throats as a 'compromise' to single-payer, for the sole benefit of insurance companies, and now you get to blame democrats for your problems. Perfect.

Re:Does SimCity allow you to....

[Anonymous Coward]

... burkas of LINEN ...

Men don't wear burqas, so I don't know how this stops terrorism.

Give a man a uniform, he's the boss. Give a man a bible/quoran, he's right. Give a man a gun, he owns the unarmed.

not just a game

[cas2000]

the thing that most players don't realise about games like simcity (and other "simulation" games including civilisation and clones, the sims, and many others) is that they're not just simulations, they're also propaganda tools with a particular model of how reality is, or should, be.

for the most part, these games push the theology of "meritocratic" free market laissez-faire capitalism - with the deserving rich being those who worked hard and the undeserving poor being worthless lazy slobs. this simulates american moralising and judgemental opinions fairly well, but not the real world.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Games versus reality

[BitZtream]

I write this while homeless in Santa Monica, CA

Yet, you can somehow manage to post on slashdot.

Your priorities are puzzling to say the least.

Re:SimCity 2000 available for free

[xclr8r]

Does it allow installation to continue if you decline data collection?

Re:You blogged as a doper and thief in Oct/Nov 201

[Anonymous Coward]

Just because you are in a jam and feel it's ok to steal something to survive, it doesn't mean you don't owe something in return to work off that debt. If you steal food from me because you are starving, fine, but you better help me replace that food. Don't expect to take out of need without ever feeling like you owe a debt.