When I mention that I’m working on a game about urban planning, the first reaction I get is often “oh, you mean like SimCity?”

Not exactly. SimCity is the most well-known city planning game/toy of all time. It teaches a particular brand of city-planning knowledge. You, as the planner, allocate resources across a grid in a technocratic (possibly totalitarian) exercise. Evaluating SimCity as rhetoric, it is probably one of the more persuasive pieces of media on urban planning ever designed (how many people have learned biases about siting toxic facilities by playing this game?).

But what exactly is learned by playing Sim City?

Succeeding at Sim City (just like any other game) involves learning and mastering the rules of a system.

The rules in this case, happen to be models of how a real city might work. SimCity insofar as it is a winnable “game” is a series of interrelated hidden assumptions for the player to discover through trial and error. Does building more police precincts reduce crime and civil unrest? Yes, according to SimCity. Is a low-tax base critical to popular support, also yes!

Paul Starr has a great article about the Congressional Budget Office and the Simcitification of actual government here.

One amusing demonstration of SimCity’s assumptions taken to their logical extremes Magnasanti, the project of architecture student Vincent Ocasla.

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