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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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There's really not a lot of correlation between success and productivity.
Sure there's some, but not as much as you might think.
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.
1.a) our patchwork of federal, state, and municipal programs and 1.b) the American idea of self-help and individualism.
And reason c: People are worried someone might abuse the system. For some reason, people like the idea that it is better to let 9 guilty men go than an innocent man go to prison, so promote the idea of a justice system that makes it harder to get convicted (or at least used to...), but think it is better to let 9 people starve so one person can't scam his way into a small amount of money and crappy way of life.
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No, the truth is uglier than that. A society committed to "self-help and individualism" would strive to ensure opportunities are available to anyone who cares to take them, no matter where they happen to be, and that one can actually risk failing without also risking homelessness. Such societies exist, and are typically derided as "nanny states" by Americans - because compensating for human frailties and failings is what it takes to actually make it possible for people to follow their own path and seek their dreams.
Someone once said US's problem is that everyone thinks they're a temporarily embarassed millionaire. But that leaves out a key fact: everyone thinks they're a temporarily embarassed millionaire who wants to ensure they can stomp on those below them, once they get to the top, and votes accordingly. Thus the seemingly irrational support from middle class to policies destructive to said middle class. It's a self-made hell.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
There is also an incredible lack of knowledge about other systems. The choice isn't between working people starving on the streets and French style socialism where every job and employer has tons of regulation and tons of worker classifications along with huge welfare payments.
I've come to enjoy the Japanese system. It has a fundamental thread of responsibilitythat resonates with me and a strong sense of EVERYONE pays something, even the guy with 0 income for an extended period. It may not be much (20 bucks a month for health insurance) but you are legally required to get it and pay for it. The state will watch out for you, as long as you always fulfill your own responsibilities to society.
And yeah, if you go cheap and try to save 20 bucks don't get sick because you are expected to show an ability to pay immediately (but you can always get back into the state program by paying all your owed back premiums).
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
Like other countries we have people that camp on welfare because it's easier than working.
I do agree with the substance of your post, but what do you mean by welfare? The United States doesn't really have any unconditional cash transfer programs, which is what most people think of when they hear the term "welfare." TANF for example is restricted to families with children, has a lifetime limit of 60 months of benefits for any individual and recipients must have a job within 24 months of joining the program. After doing a bunch of research on our means-tested social programs, I just don't see how it would be possible for a single, able-bodied, working-age individual to satisfy all their needs using federal transfers alone.
I also don't think it's far to call social insurance programs "welfare." They're insurance policies operated by government, with mandatory premiums garnished from wages. You have to have paid the premiums to get the benefits.
Where the US differs greatly is that our programs are abused at the top as well.
Agree 100%, though I don't think the US is alone worldwide in this regard, even if it stands out among OECD members.
.: Semper Absurda
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
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.