BigJKO

SimCity: The City Simulator

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Still, it's a common problem in the software industry. Companies rarely want to pay for talent (it's more or less the "my nephew is good with computers; how hard can it be"). The Video game industry just makes it worse by stripping away any sense of job security. Although similar stuff also happens in the VFX industry.

So yeah, talent will pursue careers in other directions were "shipping less that 3m units in 6 months" doesn't result in a studio closure.

 

I don't know what you're trying to say here. On average, software developers in the tech sector make a lot more than their compatriots in game industry and work far less hours. By a lot more, I mean you can expect a place like Apple or Google to pay you almost twice as much as a game developer in base salary.

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I don't know what you're trying to say here. On average, software developers in the tech sector make a lot more than their compatriots in game industry and work far less hours. By a lot more, I mean you can expect a place like Apple or Google to pay you almost twice as much as a game developer in base salary.

 

That's simply because video games are a prestige industry, as in what sounds more fun and more like what you wanted to do since you were a kid: Make video games, or improve a graph search algorithm? It kind of sucks a bit, there's enough money there to pay devs, at least triple A devs, as much as Google or Microsoft; but why pay more than you have to? At least for most, Valve apparently pays as well as any big tech company, which is why they can headhunt talent from any other developer. But most big publishers don't even care who makes their games, so there too there's no reason for them to pay more than they do right now.

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That's simply because video games are a prestige industry, as in what sounds more fun and more like what you wanted to do since you were a kid: Make video games, or improve a graph search algorithm? It kind of sucks a bit, there's enough money there to pay devs, at least triple A devs, as much as Google or Microsoft; but why pay more than you have to? At least for most, Valve apparently pays as well as any big tech company, which is why they can headhunt talent from any other developer. But most big publishers don't even care who makes their games, so there too there's no reason for them to pay more than they do right now.

That's a huge part of it, but it's not the only reason. Most game jobs also generate a lot less money. Valve generates a huge amount of revenue; most independent developers do not. Mine sure doesn't. Game studios tend to be smaller and shut down much more frequently than tech firms, with the exception of tiny tech startups. But tech startups at least have the potential of being cushioned by big VC investment, which in games is really only possible for very specific kinds of studios (and less so than a few years ago). Games, in part because they are entertainment products, are hugely unpredictable financially. Of course nobody can ever predict the financial performance of any product, but entertainment is subject to subjective taste and cultural whims even moreso, I believe.

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Does anyone know if bulldozing someones home, either directly or through plopping a post-modern sculpture park or whatever on top of it, has a negative effect on the surrounding area, like «omg the mayor has gone crazy! Will my house be next?!» I often find great spots for hospitals and schools, but they're already taken – should I feel bad about evicting a couple of people, or will the neighborhood simply rejoice at their new next-door library?

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As far as I can tell, plopping a new structure on a residential zone has no effect on public opinion. Not sure what happens if you just bulldoze an occupied house, but I know that bulldozing an abandoned one will actually increase everyone's opinion of you.

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I don't think the neighbours care. I've been bulldozing like crazy. This game is fun but man the server stuff drives me wild. One of the cities in my region will not seem to save any of the building I do, so I'm kind of stuck progress-wise. 

 

Is there any interest in a North America-West region? I would like to try the multilayer stuff with non-randoms. 

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Actually does anyone know if the intra-region stuff even works? It seems very erratic: like sometimes I seem to be able to buy/sell excess power, and other times not. The same goes for workers: sometimes I seem to be able to get workers from other towns, and then all of a sudden it seems to stop working. I can't tell if I'm playing the game wrong or if that feature just isn't working. 

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Does anyone know if bulldozing someones home, either directly or through plopping a post-modern sculpture park or whatever on top of it, has a negative effect on the surrounding area, like «omg the mayor has gone crazy! Will my house be next?!» I often find great spots for hospitals and schools, but they're already taken – should I feel bad about evicting a couple of people, or will the neighborhood simply rejoice at their new next-door library?

 

I haven't noticed any negative effects. Just the wave of euphoria that ripples through the neighborhood when I place fancy parks in the area. You should obviously place the structures over houses whose occupants are not happy with your efforts.

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Actually does anyone know if the intra-region stuff even works? It seems very erratic: like sometimes I seem to be able to buy/sell excess power, and other times not. The same goes for workers: sometimes I seem to be able to get workers from other towns, and then all of a sudden it seems to stop working. I can't tell if I'm playing the game wrong or if that feature just isn't working. 

 

Yeah, I built a nuclear plant in one city and soon after that demolished the coal plant that had been providing electricity for both cities in the other. I couldn't get electricity in the city that used to have a coal plant in a long time because the game didn't recognize that there was (excess) electricity in the other.

 

Of course, soon after I got that issue sorted out, the alarms went off. Apparently, the personnel in the nuclear plant wasn't qualified enough. I didn't have time to react to the situation because I was deciding where to put my mayor's mansion, and the reactor core melted. Typical.

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This extremely blows.  Also, Toblix your profile is private.

What does that mean? I'm pretty sure people can add me on Origin – OR CAN'T THEY?!

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Man the moment-to-moment game play in this game is so fun. Once it actually starts working reliably it's going to be awesome. My origin is isawdasein if anyone want's to add me. 

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There's weird stuff with the sim AI. They seem to take the shortest straigh-line route from point A to point B, regardless of the quality of the road and the density of traffic. So a sim who has to decide whether to take route A, which is a slightly shorter dirt road congested with traffic, or to take route B, which is a slightly longer, completely empty, six-lane avenue, will always choose route A. It also appears that sim's don't have "homes" or set jobs. A sim will go to the nearest workplace that matches their education level, and will then go to the nearest residential building that matches their income level. It's very strange. 

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There's weird stuff with the sim AI. They seem to take the shortest straigh-line route from point A to point B, regardless of the quality of the road and the density of traffic. So a sim who has to decide whether to take route A, which is a slightly shorter dirt road congested with traffic, or to take route B, which is a slightly longer, completely empty, six-lane avenue, will always choose route A. It also appears that sim's don't have "homes" or set jobs. A sim will go to the nearest workplace that matches their education level, and will then go to the nearest residential building that matches their income level. It's very strange. 

 

So at least some of the vaunted GlassBox simulation is smoke and mirrors? That's disappointing.

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Seeing as the game is a bit more stable, I'm starting a big region in North America West 1. My origin username is isawdasein. Message me for an invite. 

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I haven't bought the game because 1) super expensive and 2) always-on-we'll-rename-your-cities-DRM is dumb, but one thing I've been thinking about is whether as a quasi-representational game that purports to have at least a tangential connection to reality, Sim City has some sort of social responsibility to model things in a certain way. For instance, a while ago I listened to one of the PC Gamer UK podcasts where they talked about Sim City, and they all had a bit of a laugh when one of them mentioned that their Sims were rioting because the taxes, at 20%, were waaaaaaaay too high. They laughed because of course for people living in the UK (or in lots of European countries, for instance), a 20% tax is hardly riot-worthy. They just laughed at it, without commenting at all, but it went into my brain...

 

...and it stayed there largely undisturbed until I read this tweet which led to this blog post which led to this article, the upshot of which is that Sim City has a very car-centric design, in fact much more so than Sim City 4 as far as I can tell. The game subtly and in a lot of cases blatantly pushes you to make the sorts of cities that are pretty American in character, in that they are car-centric to a ridiculous degree...

 

(This connects to stuff Chris said about European city builders vs. American city builders, in one of the latest Idle Thumbs episodes but also in a much older one when the topic first came up.)

 

...so eventually I did think about it, and I think I come down on it right where molleindustria comes down on it: this game is propaganda, and evil propaganda, for things like car companies that have for decades systemically stunted and destroyed America's deployment of sustainable public transit in favor of making sure Americans buy personal cars to get around. And of course our American cities are planned for people who drive. And this is pretty clearly bad, for the environment and for people who can't afford cars or can't drive them and for all the people dying in car crashes and for general efficiency, I suppose. It's not just the car companies - the tax example from the PC Gamer UK podcast is just as illustrative of the general principle.

 

The general principle is that Sim City purports to represent reality - of course, it does so in a pared down, stylistic sense, as you can speed up time, turn on tilt shift, etc. - and in doing so it makes statements about how things are and how things must be that you can't really argue with. You can't tell Sim Citizens to stop rioting because their taxes are perfectly reasonable in many parts of the world. You can't tell your Sim Citizens to stop thinking about things in terms of commuting in a car from their curvy road suburbs to the commercial downtown and then back again. You can't break the confines of the simulation to introduce alternative conceptions of reality that might be more conducive to certain political outlooks because the game just doesn't acknowledge that reality.

 

(This is not to say Sim City is one big regressive piece of shit - from what I can tell, and from what was the case in the past games, it still has stuff like education raising property values and so on. The point is a more general one, which is that games like Sim City say things about reality, and I think they have a responsibility to think about what they say and why they say it.)

 

The big takeaway point, I think, is about systemic connections and how the world works. I might be optimistic in saying this, but I suspect the vast majority of deep political disagreement depends on empirical premises. People who are radically opposed in both personalities and policy proposals will fight to the death (sometimes even literally) to get their way, but I think the vast majority of this could be mitigated if everyone were on the same page about, for instance, the actual effects of raising taxes or investing in schools or building public transit instead of investing in wider roads to drive on. I don't think that would solve everything, but in a hypothetical magic world where everyone had access to the same results, I think we'd see a convergence in opinion on what ought to be done.

 

And that is why games like Sim City have a responsibility - because they take place in a magical computerized fairy tale land where we do have a complete convergence of opinion about the empirical fact of the matter. The game decides it for us! Is investing more money in education, or raising taxes to 20%, or building more public transit, the way to make a city thrive? It's not a confusing morass of conflicting studies in Sim City land. It's easy to find out! Just do it, and then load your save game and try the other thing to see the difference. (Maybe the always-on DRM makes this impossible, but still, you get the idea.) So if Sim City decides that public transit is an option but that cities must still be fundamentally car-centric and depend ultimately on the bandwidth of their roads - if Sim City decides that taxes above 15% are unreasonable and bound to cause riots - if Sim City decides that education is or isn't helpful or that police are or aren't useful or something - Sim City is saying that it is like this, in the Sim world and, approximately, in the real world. The game thus has a responsibility to try to actually mirror the real world, where European cities gets by just fine with high taxes and narrow roads in a way that Sim Cities don't.

 

The counterargument would probably be that Sim City is a fantasy, and it's on them to make up whatever parameters they want. If Sim City takes place in an alternate universe where 20% taxes are riot taxes and road bandwidth is the main determining factor of a city's success, then so be it. I'm dubious of this argument. I think the appeal of Sim City would be much lessened if everyone knew that it were just a made up series of systems rather than an abstraction of real world systems. One of the blog posts I linked above links to some articles talking about people using Sim City for urban planning-esque purposes - not actually planning cities, of course, but testing out theories and so on. This Gamasutra article got a lot of press and the entire thing is predicated on the idea that Sim City provides at least a halfway decent representation of how things play out in real life. I think that's the generally accepted take on Sim City, and if it wants to load itself up with (what I take to be) regressive crap about how cars are the future, then I think it's Sim City's duty to say something like "this game is pure fantasy and not representative at all of real life." I don't think Sim City wants to do that, and so I think Sim City needs to maybe not pretend like cars and low taxes are the way that cities must function.

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Goddammit, one of the first things I would have tried in that game is make a super-green city :( Great post, Tycho.

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I'm increasingly convinced that Simcity simulates a dystopic collectivist future. There is no private property: all sims of a certain class will simply drive to the first available residence and move in for the night; each day a different house. There are no careers: all sims of a certain education level drive to the nearest job; each day a different job. There are no families: each sim will pick up whichever child is the closest; each day a different child. It's incredibly Orwellian, if you stop to think about it. 

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Weirdly, the new Sim City seems to be doing better as a simulation of a toy/model than as a simulation of a city. It's not The City Simulator. It's The City Simulator Simulator. The tilt-shift aesthetic? Clearly meant to convey the idea that these aren't actual cities, they are just models. The tiny city limits? Not a problem - they're silly if you're building an actual city, but just like model railroad train sets have implausibly small loops that the train goes around forever, model city simulations are tiny microcosmic cities that exist for looking at. The fact that the Sims have some sort of weird dystopian lifestyle where things are simulated just enough to make the city look real but nowhere near enough to convince you that real people live there? Perfectly alright if what is being simulated is just a life-like model rather than life itself!

Overall, the fetishization of "nothing in the simulation that's not physically in the game" seems to have been chosen precisely in order to make it the best Simulation Simulation possible rather than the best simulation possible. To actually model a real city, it's completely infeasible to model each and every Sim Citizen to any degree of fidelity. So, of course Sim City isn't a city simulator! It must be a simulation of a simulation, because to model each and ever simulated entity with its own, in-game representation is to give pride of place to the simulation itself. What is important in your game? Surely not actual people - it's the simulations of actual people! And these simulations must be treated with the utmost verisimilitude. You cannot fake the simulations. You must recreate each simulation in exacting detail.

The cherry on top? All the social bullshit is perfectly understandable if they are simulating a bunch of simulations, in this case a bunch of simulations that interact socially. You want a high scoring simulation or something? That makes perfect sense, in a way, if you can work out some metric to compete on. So Sim City recreates that feeling by including its always-on social stuff to allow the high scoring functions to work. A high scoring city, though? That's a little preposterous at best and

- cities aren't contests, they're where people live.

So, Sim City shouldn't be named Sim City. It should be named Sim Sim City. The aesthetic, the design, the social aspects... they all point towards that single conclusion.

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I'm going to give the very boring computer science response to this one. The simple truth is that computers aren't sentient and simulations still needs to be written by human beings through some combination of research and preconceived notions, under limited time and processing constraints.

A lot of the "hey, my Sims don't live at a fixed location" and "the pathfinding isn't perfect" issues can be attributed to processing constraints. The lack of transport options is *probably* not an elaborate conspiracy, but likely a cut feature due to time constraint. The taxation stuff falls somewhere in between, both being difficult to simulate and being a lower priority (and therefore cut) feature.

(Worth noting that, if anything, Maxis tend to create fairly liberal simulations. For example, The Sims had gay/lesbian relationships since the first game)

At some level, all simulations have built-in assumptions, have some level of "smoke and mirrors". These assumptions are interesting to examine because they reflect the people who created the simulation. But is it any surprise that a group of American developers would make America-centric assumptions on how cities work? Further, is it any surprise Sim City was designed as a Video game first, and simulation second?

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The problem isn't that the simulation isn't perfect - the problem is that they've limited cities to tiny sizes and removed a lot of stuff that was in Sim City 4 because their focus seems to be on "everything simulated must actually exist in the world," which is super cool if the actual Sims lead actual lives, but when it turns out the Sims don't act like people at all, then the question is, why bother simulating them with such a high degree of fidelity? Why not cut corners and allow us to build an actual metropolis, like Sim City 4 did?

(And I know Maxis tends to make "liberal" games in the sense that The Sims did not pretend homosexuality doesn't exist, and even in the sense that solar/wind/hydroelectric power was a great option in Sim City 2000, but... the new Sim City doesn't have any gay people and it's pretty regressive in a lot of ways, and my issue isn't about whether the games are liberal or conservative: the issue is with how they choose to model reality and what statements they make about how things must be if they are to function. So what if the game isn't heteronormative? It's a city builder, not a relationship builder, and the city builder should get transportation right, like, for example, Sim City 4: Rush Hour partially did...)

This applies to the politics, too. I don't care why Maxis made a game that suggests that cities need to be built like it's 1950 and that taxes can never reach 20% without riots. I'm sure it is for a mixture of technological reasons and cultural ignorance about other parts of the world/assumptions that it's America's way or the highway. That doesn't excuse them at all! If I make American-centric assumptions about how cities work, but them I make "Sim City" instead of "Sim American City" and I even sell a deluxe edition that lets people build European-themed cities then I have a duty to model the whole world in my game, not just America.

edit: also it is a little unclear to me what your post is responding to. I took it to be mostly responding to my stuff about responsibility in modeling the world. To the extent you were responding to I Saw Dasein's point about the weird lives sims leave or my point about how the game is a simulation of a simulation rather than a simulation of a city, I think the proper response is to point out the fact that whether or why technical considerations result in some game or another does not change at all what the game means, which is a realm where things like aesthetics, implied narrative, and user experience are all that matters.

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