SIM

128

Vo

lum

e 1

6

How Sim City Changed theGame of PlanningEdwin GardnerThe God complex could acquirenew meaning for an upcominggeneration of architects andplan ners. Some of them played a ‘God game’ growing up calledSim City. It’s God’s point of viewminus the attitude. As teenagersthey learn ed to operate within the dynamic forces of their ownhome-grown cities. While theseboys and girls have exchangedthe sandbox for the constructionsite, Sim City has changed itsscope from city planning to socialengineering.

V16_FINAL.qxd:Opmaak 1 27-06-2008 07:32 Pagina 128

SIM

128

Vo

lum

e 1

6

How Sim City Changed theGame of PlanningEdwin GardnerThe God complex could acquirenew meaning for an upcominggeneration of architects andplan ners. Some of them played a ‘God game’ growing up calledSim City. It’s God’s point of viewminus the attitude. As teenagersthey learn ed to operate within the dynamic forces of their ownhome-grown cities. While theseboys and girls have exchangedthe sandbox for the constructionsite, Sim City has changed itsscope from city planning to socialengineering.

V16_FINAL.qxd:Opmaak 1 27-06-2008 07:32 Pagina 128

CIT

Y129

Vo

lum

e 1

6The next generation of architects, urbanists andplanners got their first lessons in their trade beforethey entered the university or the schools of theirrespective disciplines. They didn’t learn their firstlessons from a book, from their parents or a teacher.They learned it from a computer game, a computergame in which you couldn’t win, a game without aplot, a game without game over. Revolutionary at thetime, nobody could conceive that a game in whichwinning was not the objective would sufficientlyengage players, let alone become one of the biggesthits in the gaming industry. The game is Sim City.

I remember sitting in a small attic room fixatedon the monitor (black and white) of my XT computer(imagine a hard drive of ten megabytes and a workingmemory (RAM) of a fraction of a megabyte!). I satthere for hours on end, making a city, watching it grow,making the right configuration of residential, com -mercial and industrial zones, sprinkling in a gooddistribution of fire and police stations across the cityand keeping my citizens, or Sims as they are called,from rioting out of discontent with their mayor’spolicies. That’s what you were, the mayor, but alsomaster planner, urbanist and politician. In short, youwere God. Sim City in this sense was the birth of anew genre in gaming: the God Game, because youcould not only create everything, you could alsodestroy it. There was this dangerous array of buttonswith which you could unleash tornados, earthquakes,floods and even Godzilla like monsters upon your city.Yet even God has to play by rules. Although they canbe bent, they can’t be broken.

Sim City was the brainchild of game designerWill Wright. He designed the algorithms that guide thechoices in the game. There were many factors tocalculate: optimum ratios and the proximitys of thethree zone types, commercial, residential and industrial,to each other. So Sims like to live close to commerceand away from industry. Commerce wants good infra -structure; industry needs a huge power supply andflourishes best if you tweak the tax and pollution lawsin their favor. The kind of problems you’d solve asmayor included traffic congestion, budget worries(somehow there was never enough cash), power-gridfailures and crime. But the rules upon which the gamewas built weren’t purely Wright’s invention, he had ‘co-authors’ who are probably more familiar in the archi -tecture and planning circles. For Wright the inspirationmainly came from Jay Forrester’s Urban Dynamics1 andChristopher Alexander’s essay ‘A City is Not a Tree’.2

Since its initial release in 1989, Sim City has beencontinually developed. Sim City 2000 (1993), Sim City3000 (1999) and Sim City 4 (2003) evolved andexpanded over the years parallel to the explosion ofthe computer into our everyday lives. Sim City addedmore and more planning parameters, sustainableenergy options and added in addition to a flat top-down God view, birds eye views and eventually streetview and more God like tools such as terraforming.Yet the game’s basic premise remained the same. Inthe education of student planners and decision makersa Sim City analysis exercise has been used to helpstudents understand the dynamics of planning andgovernance. For example, David Lublin, Professor inthe Department of Governance at American University,explains how his students wrote papers analyzing the

games underlying principles. ’A fundamental aspectof the paper was to stress how it reflected real worldconditions, and what aspects were ignored or sent to a second plane.’3

Last year another incarnation of Sim City wasreleased: Sim City Societies. This time it’s a differentSim City. The rules of the game have changed. Wherethe object of desire in the game used to be the ‘thecity’, now it’s the ‘society’ it houses. What are the toolsand rules of Sim City in its new guise, where the God-like mayor has turned social master-planer? The gamerevolves around six societal energies: productivity,prosperity, creativity, spirituality, authority and know -ledge. These energies manifest themselves in thekinds of buildings you put in your city. A certain buildingembodies a certain program with regard to certainsocietal energies. The clown school is a happy fair -ground looking building, which will stimulate creativityaround it. The cryogenic prison is where you caneffectively exercise your authority and freeze unpro -ductive members of society.

In contrast to the old Sim City where a citygrows from a sketchy composition of interlaced withinfrastructure and tweaked by tax policies, now youmust choose a combination of buildings which radiatea cocktail of social energies to effect the city and its citizens. Instead of architecture following society,now society follows architecture. The script of the cityis no longer just the interrelation of the functionalitiesof zones, electricity, laws and taxes, but an organismwith citizens as its blood cells. Citizens are pumpedthrough society’s multiple hearts: its working places,its housing and its venues. These multiple heartsirradiate citizens with the six social energies becausein the end your citizens are society. In the real worldone could say that most of these social energies aremore or less balanced, but in the game you can reallyforce your society in certain directions, from Orwelliandystopia to artist colonies and suburban utopia todictatorial hyper-capitalism. It’s all possible, but theoperating system under which the six social energiesfunction is still the market economy, and in this gameeven God needs money. In this case it’s up to Godhow many hours he wants his citizens to work per day,how many days a week, and how he will keep hiscitizens at it. If citizens are unhappy and go on strike,God’s tools for countering this are ‘venues‘: theaters,malls, theme-parks, but also gulags. These are basicallydifferent ways to condition your society, some morebenevolent, others more authoritarian. So what kindof God are you?

Although the game won’t say if you’re evil orgood, there are enough clues in the esthetics your citydevelops. Generic music will change, all of a suddenCCTV cameras spring up on the facades of yourbuildings and the ambient color of the city changesfrom bright blue skies to a murky brown haze. Sowhile you’re exercising your social engineering skills,the game designers have built in some mood engi -neering of their own. In addition to the esthetic hints,your conscience is played upon by your citizens. Eachone indicates their mood on an individual happinessscale. So how would you feel if your society consistedof a happy few successful industrialists exploiting the city’s workers who are on the verge of depressionin the factories and sweatshops of the elite?

V16_FINAL.qxd:Opmaak 1 27-06-2008 07:33 Pagina 129

130

Vo

lum

e 1

6

V16_FINAL.qxd:Opmaak 1 27-06-2008 07:33 Pagina 130

131

Vo

lum

e 1

6Sim City lets you learn about certain dynamics

which are also active in the real world. In this case itlets you learn about the dynamics of a society, but ofcourse this simulation also has a source code whichlimits the kind of things we can learn from it. The marketeconomy is a given for instance, but what is perhapsmore noteworthy is that the esthetics of the gamegive an implicit judgment. This isn’t a problem really.The Orwellian perspective is communicated as some -thing bad, although few will have a problem with this.More problematic is that the transparent facades orsunny skies may not necessarily cover an open andbalanced society. Singapore is nice on the surface,but the regime that hides behind that surface is lessbenevolent than its façade. Although the game allowssocial conflict, you, the player, remain instrumental in bringing this about through building specific venuesin a context that conflicts with it.

Therefore I propose an update for Sim CitySocieties: a feature called neighbors. Nearby cities,outside of your view in the game and built by othergamers who upload and share their cities and connectthem to each other influence your game play. In thisupdate players would be confronted with refugees(economic as well as political) leaving or coming toyour city, what kind of immigration policy will you putin place? Perhaps your citizens have reached perfecthappiness, but somehow they are missing something,what will they do, where will they go? Will your open-minded city fall victim to populism, or will you be thefirst to successfully establish a genuine utopia?

These considerations once again raise criticalquestions for the game designers as well as its players.The designers will have to write rules that govern thegame, and in this case not buildings radiating socialenergies and contaminating the blood vessels of asocietal organism also known as your city. In this casethey have to write the script of human behavior itselfand calculate the basis upon which individuals makedecisions. Would Maslow’s pyramid suffice? Shouldemotions, intelligence and memory play a part? Whatwould happen if your citizens were actually able tolearn?

And what would a gamer take from playing thisgame, especially those who may one day becomeplanners and architects? What if their citizens fled to a neighboring city and learned about communismcame back and spread the word? What if communismseemed a very tempting alternative in contrast to theregime you’ve been exercising over them? What ifyour people declared you, the gamer, the God of thegame, dead? What if they supported regime changeand installed a new government? Perhaps societiesdo have a moment of game over. What would you,future architect, learn from that? Would you learn thatyou can lose, but can’t win? Or that no matter theresult your computer always anew: ‘New Game?’

1 Jay W. Forrester, Urban Dynamics, Cambridge, MA (MIT Press) 1969.

2 Christopher Alexander, ‘A City is Not a Tree’, ArchitecturalForum, no. 1 and 2, 1965.

3 Daniel G. Lobo, ‘Playing with Urban Life’, in: Borries, Walz and Böttger (Eds.) Space Time Play. Basel/Boston(Birkhäuser) 2007.

The top- down city view in the city editor, Sim City on the Macintosh (1989)

Citizens request lobby for money to build a stadium, Sim City on the PC (1989)

An overview of info-graphic maps and timelinedisplaying: population density, growth rate,crime rate, traffic density, power grid and landvalue, Sim City on the PC (1989)

V16_FINAL.qxd:Opmaak 1 27-06-2008 07:33 Pagina 131