While the birth of SimCity brought city-building into the realm of knowledge available to young gamers, the genre has managed to age with their audience, growing in complexity as technology made more minute simulation possible.
Although not everything SimCity taught us turned out to be accurate, the game’s balancing of human behavior and civil engineering taught us much about the world without our even realizing it.
It’s hard to say how the new rebooted SimCity from Maxis will mold young minds in the coming years, but if history repeats itself, a new generation of players will see the world in entirely new ways.
Here are The 5 Lessons SimCity Taught Us.
Special Interest Groups Can Be Dangerous
It happens to every SimCity player: you’re humming along, building a bustling town into a thriving metropolis, when one of the game’s ‘Advisors’ pops on screen. ‘With an increase in high-income families,’ the supposedly trustworthy advisor tells us, ’tax rates should be increased to fund public transportation for citizens in need.’
Seems like a no-brainer; you got it, friendly sage! Seconds later, yet another bespectacled advisor - whom you trust implicitly - shows up to explain that wealthy residents are enraged by the tax hikes, and will move out of the city if they aren’t lowered. And thus, we learned for the first (but not last) time that special interest groups are paid to look out for their own backers, not the big picture.
A tough lesson, but an explanation for why politicians have an entire team of ’experts’ - not to gain their accrued knowledge, but often to balance out their respective biases.
The Rich Must Be Courted
Forgive our young minds for not quite grasping the idea that money doesn’t change everything about a person’s reality. We just weren’t capable of seeing how the improvements in urban planning and upscale restaurants, and the decrease in business tax tied to the arrival of ’the rich kid’ in our homeroom class. Rich people have to live somewhere, right?
Wrong. While SimCity proves that lower to middle-class businesses and homes will crop up just about anywhere over time, courting the wealthy families and entrepreneurs never happens by accident. Schools, luxuries, lower crime rates, and more have all been downright required to attract the wealthy.
So when we noticed - as adults - the efforts our city government made to improve the ‘standard of living’ and ‘desirability’ of our neighborhoods, we knew it wasn’t for us, but for the absurdly wealthy people we weren’t A blow to our self esteem, but a lesson nonetheless.
A Police State Isn’t A Happy One
It’s an absolute must in any picturesque, 1950s-era small town: a well-dressed policeman perpetually on hand to diffuse any crime before it can even be committed. But these days, crime has overwhelmed the city police force’s abilities to protect their citizens. If only the police budget was higher, the problem would be solved!
We blame our Leave it to Beaver-shaped sensibilities for thinking that placing a policeman on every street corner, and providing whatever funding was needed, was the path to a paradise. As it turns out, ‘police state’ and ‘utopia’ aren’t interchangeable phrases. In SimCity 3000 and 4, An abundance of police even leads to citizen unrest.
Surprisingly, that isn’t because our cities were dens of criminal activity. In reality, citizens grow to feel afraid and oppressed, given that the police will do just about anything to maintain order (as they see it), and have the numbers to boot.
Utopias Just Aren’t Possible
Utopia (yoÍžoˈtÅpÄ“É™; noun): “An ideally perfect place, especially in its social, political, and moral aspects.”
It’s the logic that exists in the mind of every child (and some full-grown politicians): if everyone just thought the same, believed the same things, and was provided for, everyone would be happy!
Unfortunately, cities need people to exist; and people don’t usually agree on everything. Even if they do, they likely won’t agree with their government on every necessary spending measure or price. SimCity taught us that more often than not, freedom and happiness comes at the cost of someone else’s, whether it’s worth it in the long run or not.
One SimCity player did manage to build a stable, self-sufficient society free of crime and unrest. It was a Buddhist totalitarian fascist state where citizens lived to 50, but it worked.
Population Growth Shaped The World
As the population in any urban center starts to grow, a SimCity player is faced with a challenge: redesign existing living spaces, or expand (assuming you’re not going for the Dredd 3D style of city planning).
Congratulations player! You’ve just learned one of the fundamental reasons for Empire and colonization, and the main differences between North American and European cities. As humanity emerged and developed civilizations, the biggest challenge soon became finding room for everyone to live.
For Europe, this meant founding colonies (and ultimately, restructuring major cities), whereas North Americans enjoyed an endless sea of green tiles onto which they ‘went West, young men!’ So the next time you’re claiming that suburban expansion can’t come soon enough, or sitting in traffic in London or New York, remember: somewhere there’s a Mayor asleep at the keyboard. Our advice? Invest in Arcologies.
Conclusion
Who knew video games could actually teach such formative anthropological theories, all hidden under a layer of maniacal city planning? We’ll never look at them the same again.
The next generation of SimCity could teach an entirely new batch of young gamers what makes society tick, so maybe Maxis should think about that the next time they design a game that sends an entire civilization off-line when an internet connection drops…
Any lessons you learned from a simulated city that you’d like to add to our list? Name them in the comments.
SimCity is available now for the PC.
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Follow me on Twitter @andrew_dyce.
