Slashdot Mirror
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."
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."
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.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
It sure is a good thing that players' behavior as modeled in games has no effect whatsoever on their offline behavior, or in any way informs us about their attitudes toward the real world. That might be disconcerting.
host the Olympics?
If this dude is morally outraged by the way people play Sim City I can only hope someone alerts them to the way people play Dwarf Fortress.
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.
The homeless people are who lived in all the neighborhoods of players who no longer play the game due to being locked out by intrusive DRM.
A limited run of 99 copies of How to get Rid of Homeless is available from Bittanti's Concrete Press via Amazon. Volume I is $150 and Volume II is $70.
Like anyone's going to pay $220.00 for a collection of reddit posts ...
They lost their way after SimCity 4 + Rush Hour. For aficionados of previous versions of the game, read the reviews first, it'll save you money. As for the "books", you can get the raw posts from reddit and the Simcity site.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Clearly your city needs a better welfare and education system, and perhaps a work incentive scheme.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
That game has more problems than just the homeless population.
So does the author:
Bittanti says that it's impossible to distinguish between videogames and America in the same way that Jean Baudrillard thought it was impossible to distinguish between Disneyland and America. The book, he told me, is about simulation and its discontents, the unexpected convergence and collapse between reality and simulation.
"To me video games are the so-called 'real America,'" he said. "The real America operates according to a video game logic, and that game logic is neo-liberalism, and that absolutely manifests in San Francisco, that to me is the epicenter of inequality. In San Francisco you either have a Tesla and you drink a seven dollar cappuccino or you're homeless in the streets."
I think he's been playing games too long. SimCity's reality distortion field claims another victim, which is amazing because it's crap compared to its' predecessors.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Nope
signed
northern canada
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.
Are we now going to say it's incorrect for a city simulator to present the player with problems that currently occur in actual real cities?
We used to forcibly institutionalize mentally ill people instead of kicking them out on the street en mass to fend for themselves. A significant portion of what we call "homeless" have mental health and substance abuse issues, of course. Is releasing them to life in the streets more compassionate or humanitarian than confining them to an institution where they can actually get some help? I'm not sure there's an easy answer there, to be honest. In my neck of the woods, people are getting robbed and assaulted on the streets by homeless people on a pretty regular basis. It's not a good situation for anyone.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
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As long as there are people starving and going mad in the streets
Mental health problems are far more likely to be the cause of homelessness than the reverse.
And I encounter someone who is mentally ill on the street, I'm not sure what you think I could do for them that the social workers and the police couldn't.
Note to self: Avoid Santa Monica. Non-zero probability of encountering strange person trying to make an obscure point while disguised as a homeless person.
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.
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Given that a lot of homeless people have a mental illness and/or are addicted to drugs, that is not surprising.
Then perhaps the package should have included health care, such as a psychiatric evaluation and warm turkey treatment (first dose 1 minute later each day) for any chemical dependence.
"Personally, I just don't care to contribute to a system/country that I find vomit-inducing and am pretty comfortable sleeping under a bridge."
Yeah, so I read your blog - you were arrested for holding burglary tools and appearing to be high and when you got out the first thing you did was score some weed, got high, then at some point got some schrooms, got high, then complained about the homeless life, etc. You sir, are in my opinion, a bullshit artist and your homeless has nothing to do with solidarity; I believe it has everything to do with you being in need of some serious mental help. Of course, I'm pretty sure you won't see it that way. Please, get yourself some help, you don't have to live with substance abuse issues and you don't appear to need to be a burglar to make a living if you actually are a programmer. Good luck, man.
The real answer is to make certain that all people have good quality housing without regard for their ability to pay. More than ever human labor is being replaced and devalued. Work related education is not an answer when jobs do not exist. And for those than can do the math it is cheaper to buy a poor person a home and keep it up for him than to slap him in jail or prison. It is an issue similar to medical care. It is far cheaper to simply give a poor person a whiz bang medical policy for free than to pay his bills when he is sick and at the emergency room door. But if we compromise and give the poor inadequate insurance coverage they will still end up at the emergency room. Oddly the way to save money can be to spend money more freely.
To me video games are the so-called 'real America,'" he said. "The real America operates according to a video game logic, and that game logic is neo-liberalism, and that absolutely manifests in San Francisco, that to me is the epicenter of inequality. In San Francisco you either have a Tesla and you drink a seven dollar cappuccino or you're homeless in the streets."
I think he's been playing games too long. SimCity's reality distortion field claims another victim, which is amazing because it's crap compared to its' predecessors.
Ever lived in San Francisco? Sounds pretty close to reality to me. Not everyone who isn't rich is homeless in the streets, though. Some of them are students with rich parents, but they themselves aren't technically rich yet. They just look rich with their Audi and their expensive clothes and new phone every year. While the rank and file who make the seven dollar cappucinos, flip the burgers and whatnot are stacked up five or six to a house with people living in hallways and closets.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The bugs, and people glossing over the basic info on homeless made them much more of a problem. Homeless only really became a problem with going up to the largest cities. Traffic would snarl resulting in people not getting enough work resulting in homeless. Homeless would build up in that scenario until traffic got under control. Getting rid of homeless was only an issue if you recklessly upgraded everything. Homeless need a level 1 business that needs workers to get out of becoming homeless. If you have too many people and not enough jobs these jobs will be filled by people with homes. I've yet to see a scenario where I changed the economy to level 1 businesses with a surplus of jobs that didn't slowly remove the homeless without going all Machiavellian. Though Machiavellian is a much faster route.
Besides, south park already addressed the final solution to the homeless question:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Basically you just entice them to move to another city.
Basically you just entice them to move to another city.
This technique is a significant contributor to the Bay Area's homelessness problem.
.: Semper Absurda
I know my sig says "hire me", but I have had offers in real-life and turned them down because I didn't agree with the what/how the employer produced.
I took a two minute glance at your blog. I read your comment here and a little bit of your other writings. You sound like you have a decent level of intelligence. I am gonna go out on a limb and assume that you are young (20 - 30). At some point in your life you are going to realize your wasted potential. When that moment of clarity hits you,... it is going to hit you like a stone to the head.
Part of 'being a man' is doing the work you don't want to do. It is the daily struggle so you can provide for a family; not living under a bridge so your values can remain intact. We are all idealistic at some point in our lives, but, there comes a time to grow up. Don't wait until it is too late.
my $.02
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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.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Doing what you don't want to do is the very definition of wasting rather than realising your potential.
I can understand why someone who didn't grow up in the Bay and who hasn't spend much time outside of certain districts would have that impression.
I grew up in Santa Cruz, and I've been to SF dozens of times. I lived there for about a year. I know many people who live there. It's you that's ignorant as to how people live in SF.
About 25% of San Franciscan households have incomes above $100,000 and about 13% are poverty-level or below.
How is a "household" defined? If you put five kids making minimum wage into a house, that's a household with income above $100,000, but everyone in that house is still in poverty.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Hanging out in a library reading and posting on Slashdot is probably a hell of a lot more fun than sitting on a park bench in the rain.
"Don't let businesses run homeless people off who are trying to get out of the cold"
Damn right. Screw those bourguois minimum wage kids trying to make it through school cleaning vomit and filth out of bathrooms by people who view the coffee shop where they warmed up as the enemy!
Can't reason with crazy.
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.
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.
I may be able to shed some light. I volunteered at a soup kitchen once, and when we were serving a whole room full of people, I noticed a couple of them had laptops. While I cannot know the exact reason, I had made a few guesses myself. I guessed that maybe a relative or a friend had given it to them, or they may have acquired it during a more plentiful portion of their lives, or an old laptop from the garbage that people start to throw out not so uncommon these days. So I would say it would be possible for a laptop to be in the possession of the homeless' stash.
As for priorities, I would say that being connected to the rest of the world, even though if only online, would be a great way for someone homeless to stay mentally sane and updated on the world and perhaps find access to support programmes or odd jobs. Without a support tools, it is very hard for somebody homeless to re-enter society. Thus, I would say that our homeless friend who posted on slashdot's priorities make sense to me.
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I'm a bit stunned that this comment is modded to a +5. I suddenly have a lot more respect for the homeless than I do slashdotters. After all, they've managed to befuddle slashdotters with their amazing abilities to get online, despite being poor.
I've been where you are now. What I don't understand is, why are you arguing with the fools here ?
Most people simply lack the capacity to comprehend where you are simply because their life experiences and their own limitations prevent them from understanding. Not only are they not going to be of any assistance, their comments are going to be detrimental. They'll simply never understand. Why bother with them ? They are idiots.
You seem perfectly coherent, articulate, and intelligent to me. So what if you have a less than ideal personality right now ? That doesn't have to be a permanent state any more than living on the street does, not for you it doesn't.
The wealth of experience and understanding that you already have surpasses the average persons by far at this point. Accept help wherever you can get it. It doesn't matter what people's motivations are! Just take whatever you can get right now until you reach the goal of getting off the street. Other people's opinions are entirely insignificant. What and who you are now does not have to be what you are in a year, five years, ten years. That's what some people will never get. People change and evolve all the time.
Given what you've described you've been through, I wouldn't be surprised that you are suffering from PTSD to some extent. You need to get stable. You need a decent place to stay. You need decent nutrition and something to do consistently. Go for those things, accept the help that you can, and keep trying. It can take a long time to heal, but you need to; your'e too intelligent and articulate to stay in the situation you're in now, and your ability to help people will be exponentially enhanced.
I hope I haven't offended you. You just remind me so much of where I was nearly 25 years ago. I'm married now, I have friends that value me, and I'm able to help people. A LOT of people. Sometimes I look back and am amazed I survived. It would have been a whole hell of a lot easier if I'd just accepted help more often than I did. When I finally did, everything changed; not overnight, but gradually everything got better. Every little doubt that I had about myself and my limitations (which I might point out were put on me by fools) was dissolved over time.
Get out of the trap, never forget that you were in the trap, and help others when you're able, to get out of the trap.
And recognize that the comments made by fools here are part of the trap, too.