11 ms·

The SimCity Planning Commission Handbook

124 points by Tiktaalik 11y ago

colanderman 11y ago
Wow, I wish they had something like this for the more modern SimCities. I was playing SimCity 3 or 4 and built a road going to a beach and to this day haven't figured out why no-one drove on it. It's hard to play a game that approximates reality enough that instruction manuals aren't provided, but differs just slightly enough to foil expectations.
- JoshTriplett 11y ago
  > It's hard to play a game that approximates reality enough that instruction manuals aren't provided, but differs just slightly enough to foil expectations. Agreed. For instance, it takes a while to find out that the "right" way to build a successful city in SimCity (and not necessarily in reality) is to never build a single tile of roadway, and instead construct an exclusively rail-based grid. On the other hand, some of its city planning lessons work very well: for instance, interleave residential and commercial every other 9x9 block (3x3 set of 3x3 zones, with a non-RCI zone in the middle), rather than separating residential and commercial, to avoid creating huge commutes. (Meanwhile, keep industrial far away from everything so it doesn't bother anyone.)
  - danharaj 11y ago
    Ideas of "right" in open-ended games where the goal is merely to keep going are always weird to me. I know exactly what you meant by putting it in quotes.
    - hguant 11y ago
      "Right" as in "more optimal", not "only correct solution".
      - JoshTriplett 11y ago
        More optimal only in the context of the game's engine and ruleset, which is what danharaj was saying deserved the quotes around "right".
        danharaj 11y ago
        Actually, I meant "right" in a weirder sense: The only goal of Sim City and many other games is to endure and persist. Any strategy that survives is a strategy that 'wins' Sim City. In what sense are some strategies more optimal than others? Usually they maximize some other measure of fitness, like land usage or average commute time. That's cool. I think it's perfectly reasonable to call efficient strategies 'right'. But calling something right means you know something is wrong, and the 'wrong' that comes with this 'right' includes strategies that survive. Clearly, there's room for more than one right.
- Tiktaalik 11y ago
  It would be great if future versions of SimCity and Cities:Skylines would embed more direct urban planning lessons in their games. This way players would learn what makes a city work properly. A problem is that most peoples' only knowledge of urban planning comes from looking around at their own town, and unfortunately most towns in North America are incredibly poorly designed. A SimCity player that bases their city on a typical North American one will often wind up with a dysfunctional and gridlocked town, just like real life.
  - DiabloD3 11y ago
    Cities: Skylines is an absolutely amazing game, but yeah, I wish there was more lessons. I keep discovering new things that I can do with it that, honestly, should have been taught to me early on.
- unexistance 11y ago
  reading the article, actually made me think of SimCity 4 & the game seems to be still following whatever the article / guide says... So I'm guessing the simulation just got better from time to time (except for that SimCity 2013) to reflect the real world, in which some gamers complain SimCity 4 is a bit too hard
  - Tiktaalik 11y ago
    SimCity and Cities: Skylines are still half stuck in 1950s era car oriented urban planning so they're not totally representative of the real world and modern urban planning. In these games public transportation options are limited, walkable public spaces such as pedestrian only streets and squares are not possible, and bike lanes do not exist. Additionally zoning is either residential, commercial or industrial, so there's no concept of mixed-use zoning (ie. commercial on the bottom of a building, residential on top) which you see everywhere. I'd love to see a smaller scale game that really focuses on these details. SimCity 4 and other games went in the other direction, building systems around how a metropolitan region of multiple cities would interact.
    - douche 11y ago
      SimTower sort of did this, within the context of a single skyscraper. I'm not sure if it is on GOG or anywhere else legitimate these days - odds are it might not be a simple matter to run on modern Windows, unless you want to spin up an XP VM. I spent way too many hours playing SimTower as a kid. It was pretty fun, especially if you took advantage of the infinite money cheat involving building a specific type of room in one certain place on the bottom of the level... Not bad for a game that was built around an elevator simulator http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/130563/the_designers_notebook_the_.php http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/130563/the_designers_n...
      - deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
      - mosheroperandi 11y ago
TheLoneWolfling 11y ago
JS;DR (I do not mind it when JS is required for something that cannot be done without. I mind it when someone requires me to run an insecure, power-hungry obfuscated script to do something that can be done just as well without.)
- JoshTriplett 11y ago
  NoScript and similar are self-inflicted pain. Yes, content should work without JavaScript where possible, but at the same time, comments about it really don't need to show up on unrelated articles. In this case, the site in question is constructed entirely client-side using JavaScript. I'm not a huge fan of that approach, but complaining about it here (as opposed to with the site in question) is not helpful. The same comment could appear attached to any number of articles posted here, and it'd be equally content-free there.
  - afarrell 11y ago
    Posting messages about programmer behavior to a programmer message board is not acutely useful, but somewhat generally so.
  - TheLoneWolfling 11y ago
    I would, except that I couldn't without JS. Interesting catch-22 there. (Like people looking at website statistics collected using JS and then saying "see? Everyone runs JS")
    - J_Darnley 11y ago
      Since your GP post has been flagged I will post this here. JS;DR - nice, I'll be borrowing that one in future.
      - TheLoneWolfling 11y ago
        It's not mine - it's from http://tantek.com/2015/069/t1/js-dr-javascript-required-dead http://tantek.com/2015/069/t1/js-dr-javascript-required-dead
6t6t6 11y ago
I plaid a lot to SimCity when I was a kid but, having been raised in a European city, I always thought that my cities in the game could never look like a "real" city. About 15 years after, I found myself in a plane about to land in LA for the first time, with my face pressed to the window and thinking to myself: "LA is like the f* SimCity!!"
- lordnacho 11y ago
  This is so true. Where I grew up the roads are rarely exactly parallel, and the coastline is hard to replicate. There's highways and flyovers that weren't like the ones in the games. When I came to the US, particularly the towns that aren't by the coast, I thought SimCity! Apart from things being on a grid, there's also quite a lot of repetitive architecture. Schools look similar, utilities look similar, neighbourhoods are filled with the same houses. And all the big box stores are exact copies.
- mikeash 11y ago
  That is one of the first things my now-wife said to me when we picked her up from the airport the first time she came to the US. "It's just like SimCity!"
  - bitJericho 11y ago
    That was my exact thought when flying into Phoenix for the first time. I really want to try out this radial city though!!
- dangrover 11y ago
  Having grown up in Vermont and lived only in big coastal cities thereafter, I always felt the cities didn't look right. Then I moved to China and realized the same!
- 1_player 11y ago
  Which part of Europe? A lot of cities in Italy (and most of Europe) were Roman encampments (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castra https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castra) and they have a very square, ordinary layout I have always found boring. I have always been fascinated by other cities when a road starts to curve or a square pops out of nowhere. Walking through London is much more interesting than it was in Milan.
Terr_ 11y ago
I have fond memories of the Simcity 2000 manual as well... I ended up reading the whole thing obsessively while waiting for a new computer that had the minimum specs. (VESA BIOS extensions.)
- nitrogen 11y ago
  (VESA BIOS extensions.) Was your video card not supported by univbe.exe? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UniVBE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UniVBE
  - DiabloD3 11y ago
    Ahh, UniVBE, fixing weird VGA cards since forever. Funny how some of the most obscure parts of my childhood pop up.
  - ant6n 11y ago
    "UniVBE (short for Universal VESA BIOS Extensions) is a software driver that allows DOS applications written to the VESA BIOS standard to run on almost any display device made in the last 15 years or so." I wonder which 15 years this is referring to (i.e. ending what year)
    - nitrogen 11y ago
      I wonder which 15 years this is referring to (i.e. ending what year) That line is in the very first revision of the page, from 2006: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=UniVBE&oldid=49897111 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=UniVBE&oldid=4989...
flomo 11y ago
Thanks to this book, I actually received college credit for playing SimCity. (Or actually for writing a paper about the simulator, which was a cinch because the way to 'beat' the game was to build an elitist suburb.)
XYEaQMZJvS 11y ago
I love how dense some older games were. I still like the original Victoria by Paradox Studios, though that might be because I never quite have the video card to play Victoria II. Anyone remember SimEarth? Loved that stuff.
Tomte 11y ago
Damn, the one really cheap used copy on Amazon Marketplace is gone now… I was thinking about buying it two hours ago. But then again, I already have more books on my "to read" stack than I could possibly read 2015/2016. And it's not exactly a necessary book.
iwwr 11y ago
We could argue that modern town planning is in fact infected with a Sim City spirit (or Sim City captured that existing spirit): artificial separation between "commercial" and "residential areas" with miles and miles of separation between them, and car-centric in the extreme. The Sim City world is one where you have to ask permission for everything. Development is prohibited by law unless the benevolent town planner opens up an area with little colored rectangles. But you can only build one type of building and can't mix & match because the top-down view of the planner blurs out the complexity at the ground level. Sim City does have a redeeming feature, favoring urban density. Traditional planning is more aligned with creating loose, low-density, detached abodes, with great separation and height restriction and far away from any semblance of economic activity: shops, factories and commercial space. Having to support an infrastructure (necessarily a car infrastructure) in these forms is tremendously inefficient and can be considered as a great cost on societies that found out about planning before most cities got established (early 20th century).
- gohrt 11y ago
  It's long been hip to blame SimCity for creating bad urban design. However: SimCity reflects ideas as much as it plants ideas: zoning existed before SimCity. SimCity promoted intermingled Commercial and Residential zones (traffic was lighter if they were nearer) with pollutant Industrial zones far away from the rest, and SimCity highly promoted mass transit over cars.
  - ascagnel_ 11y ago
    Most SimCity games indirectly went against mass transit, or at least the idea of building it up in phases, based on its traffic model. A Sim's route was defined as a path from point A to point B, and a maximum time. If the maximum time was reached, the route was a failure and would reflect as increased congestion. If a Sim encountered mass transit along its route, it would attempt to take it using the same pathing algorithm as car travel. However, if the route failed while using mass transit, it would never try it again, even as mass transit service expanded and new bus and subway lines/stations were added. The most recent SimCity was supposed to be more realistic in its route planning and simulation by giving each Sim a home, a workplace, etc., and repeating routes on a daily basis instead of a random sampling of routes, but this didn't make it into the final game.
yread 11y ago
Interesting article. I was interested in views on the newer simcities and found these articles interesting: http://planyourcity.net/2013/09/20/sim-city-through-the-eyes-of-a-city-planner/ http://planyourcity.net/2013/09/20/sim-city-through-the-eyes... - this city planer concludes that there are a lot of options and the mechanics are interesting but it oversimplifies things and gives the player god-like powers http://www.fastcoexist.com/1681515/using-the-new-sim-city-6-urban-planners-battle-for-bragging-rights http://www.fastcoexist.com/1681515/using-the-new-sim-city-6-... -this was a "tournament" between various urban think tanks and journalists and points out how all of them took the short term benefits with casinos, oil and sewage over sustainable livable cities that they advocate. http://todigra.org/index.php/todigra/article/view/31/36 http://todigra.org/index.php/todigra/article/view/31/36 - this a scientific article compares the rules in Simcity Societies to the work of controversial urban theorist Richard Florida
DonHopkins 11y ago
Here's some more SimCity documentation and reference material: https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/tree/master/MicropolisCore/documentation https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/tree/master/Micropol... And various SimCity source code: https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis
imauld 11y ago
Related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTJQTc-TqpU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTJQTc-TqpU
SZJX 11y ago
I think one point that doesn't really make sense to me is the strict separation of R/C/I zones and the land plot pricing curve for them. Surely nowadays nobody wants to live exactly in the city center? And it makes no sense to put industrial zones in the city center either. Most rich people obviously live in suburbs and downtown areas are not very safe in any sense. Also the strict separation of industry being external-orientated and commerce being internal-oriented seems way too simplistic and childish. Surely many industrial products also sell to the city itself, and many commerces are nationwide even international ones? Unless you restrict the definition of "commerce" to "things like local restaurants". I'd say the notions of the game are maybe a kind of too old, and seriously any of these "reality simulation" games for extremely complex systems are bound to miss the reality by some distance. The same goes for Football Manager etc. Playing them for fun is OK, but taking them too seriously is bound to disappoint and frustrate you to no end.

124 points by Tiktaalik 11y ago

Wow, I wish they had something like this for the more modern SimCities. I was playing SimCity 3 or 4 and built a road going to a beach and to this day haven't figured out why no-one drove on it. It's hard to play a game that approximates reality enough that instruction manuals aren't provided, but differs just slightly enough to foil expectations.

JoshTriplett 11y ago
> It's hard to play a game that approximates reality enough that instruction manuals aren't provided, but differs just slightly enough to foil expectations. Agreed. For instance, it takes a while to find out that the "right" way to build a successful city in SimCity (and not necessarily in reality) is to never build a single tile of roadway, and instead construct an exclusively rail-based grid. On the other hand, some of its city planning lessons work very well: for instance, interleave residential and commercial every other 9x9 block (3x3 set of 3x3 zones, with a non-RCI zone in the middle), rather than separating residential and commercial, to avoid creating huge commutes. (Meanwhile, keep industrial far away from everything so it doesn't bother anyone.)
- danharaj 11y ago
  Ideas of "right" in open-ended games where the goal is merely to keep going are always weird to me. I know exactly what you meant by putting it in quotes.
  - hguant 11y ago
    "Right" as in "more optimal", not "only correct solution".
    - JoshTriplett 11y ago
      More optimal only in the context of the game's engine and ruleset, which is what danharaj was saying deserved the quotes around "right".
      - danharaj 11y ago
        Actually, I meant "right" in a weirder sense: The only goal of Sim City and many other games is to endure and persist. Any strategy that survives is a strategy that 'wins' Sim City. In what sense are some strategies more optimal than others? Usually they maximize some other measure of fitness, like land usage or average commute time. That's cool. I think it's perfectly reasonable to call efficient strategies 'right'. But calling something right means you know something is wrong, and the 'wrong' that comes with this 'right' includes strategies that survive. Clearly, there's room for more than one right.
Tiktaalik 11y ago
It would be great if future versions of SimCity and Cities:Skylines would embed more direct urban planning lessons in their games. This way players would learn what makes a city work properly. A problem is that most peoples' only knowledge of urban planning comes from looking around at their own town, and unfortunately most towns in North America are incredibly poorly designed. A SimCity player that bases their city on a typical North American one will often wind up with a dysfunctional and gridlocked town, just like real life.
- DiabloD3 11y ago
  Cities: Skylines is an absolutely amazing game, but yeah, I wish there was more lessons. I keep discovering new things that I can do with it that, honestly, should have been taught to me early on.
unexistance 11y ago
reading the article, actually made me think of SimCity 4 & the game seems to be still following whatever the article / guide says... So I'm guessing the simulation just got better from time to time (except for that SimCity 2013) to reflect the real world, in which some gamers complain SimCity 4 is a bit too hard
- Tiktaalik 11y ago
  SimCity and Cities: Skylines are still half stuck in 1950s era car oriented urban planning so they're not totally representative of the real world and modern urban planning. In these games public transportation options are limited, walkable public spaces such as pedestrian only streets and squares are not possible, and bike lanes do not exist. Additionally zoning is either residential, commercial or industrial, so there's no concept of mixed-use zoning (ie. commercial on the bottom of a building, residential on top) which you see everywhere. I'd love to see a smaller scale game that really focuses on these details. SimCity 4 and other games went in the other direction, building systems around how a metropolitan region of multiple cities would interact.
  - douche 11y ago
    SimTower sort of did this, within the context of a single skyscraper. I'm not sure if it is on GOG or anywhere else legitimate these days - odds are it might not be a simple matter to run on modern Windows, unless you want to spin up an XP VM. I spent way too many hours playing SimTower as a kid. It was pretty fun, especially if you took advantage of the infinite money cheat involving building a specific type of room in one certain place on the bottom of the level... Not bad for a game that was built around an elevator simulator http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/130563/the_designers_notebook_the_.php http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/130563/the_designers_n...
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - mosheroperandi 11y ago

TheLoneWolfling 11y ago

JS;DR (I do not mind it when JS is required for something that cannot be done without. I mind it when someone requires me to run an insecure, power-hungry obfuscated script to do something that can be done just as well without.)

JoshTriplett 11y ago
NoScript and similar are self-inflicted pain. Yes, content should work without JavaScript where possible, but at the same time, comments about it really don't need to show up on unrelated articles. In this case, the site in question is constructed entirely client-side using JavaScript. I'm not a huge fan of that approach, but complaining about it here (as opposed to with the site in question) is not helpful. The same comment could appear attached to any number of articles posted here, and it'd be equally content-free there.
- afarrell 11y ago
  Posting messages about programmer behavior to a programmer message board is not acutely useful, but somewhat generally so.
- TheLoneWolfling 11y ago
  I would, except that I couldn't without JS. Interesting catch-22 there. (Like people looking at website statistics collected using JS and then saying "see? Everyone runs JS")
  - J_Darnley 11y ago
    Since your GP post has been flagged I will post this here. JS;DR - nice, I'll be borrowing that one in future.
    - TheLoneWolfling 11y ago
      It's not mine - it's from http://tantek.com/2015/069/t1/js-dr-javascript-required-dead http://tantek.com/2015/069/t1/js-dr-javascript-required-dead

6t6t6 11y ago

I plaid a lot to SimCity when I was a kid but, having been raised in a European city, I always thought that my cities in the game could never look like a "real" city. About 15 years after, I found myself in a plane about to land in LA for the first time, with my face pressed to the window and thinking to myself: "LA is like the f* SimCity!!"

lordnacho 11y ago
This is so true. Where I grew up the roads are rarely exactly parallel, and the coastline is hard to replicate. There's highways and flyovers that weren't like the ones in the games. When I came to the US, particularly the towns that aren't by the coast, I thought SimCity! Apart from things being on a grid, there's also quite a lot of repetitive architecture. Schools look similar, utilities look similar, neighbourhoods are filled with the same houses. And all the big box stores are exact copies.
mikeash 11y ago
That is one of the first things my now-wife said to me when we picked her up from the airport the first time she came to the US. "It's just like SimCity!"
- bitJericho 11y ago
  That was my exact thought when flying into Phoenix for the first time. I really want to try out this radial city though!!
dangrover 11y ago
Having grown up in Vermont and lived only in big coastal cities thereafter, I always felt the cities didn't look right. Then I moved to China and realized the same!
1_player 11y ago
Which part of Europe? A lot of cities in Italy (and most of Europe) were Roman encampments (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castra https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castra) and they have a very square, ordinary layout I have always found boring. I have always been fascinated by other cities when a road starts to curve or a square pops out of nowhere. Walking through London is much more interesting than it was in Milan.

Terr_ 11y ago

I have fond memories of the Simcity 2000 manual as well... I ended up reading the whole thing obsessively while waiting for a new computer that had the minimum specs. (VESA BIOS extensions.)

nitrogen 11y ago
(VESA BIOS extensions.) Was your video card not supported by univbe.exe? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UniVBE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UniVBE
- DiabloD3 11y ago
  Ahh, UniVBE, fixing weird VGA cards since forever. Funny how some of the most obscure parts of my childhood pop up.
- ant6n 11y ago
  "UniVBE (short for Universal VESA BIOS Extensions) is a software driver that allows DOS applications written to the VESA BIOS standard to run on almost any display device made in the last 15 years or so." I wonder which 15 years this is referring to (i.e. ending what year)
  - nitrogen 11y ago
    I wonder which 15 years this is referring to (i.e. ending what year) That line is in the very first revision of the page, from 2006: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=UniVBE&oldid=49897111 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=UniVBE&oldid=4989...

flomo 11y ago

Thanks to this book, I actually received college credit for playing SimCity. (Or actually for writing a paper about the simulator, which was a cinch because the way to 'beat' the game was to build an elitist suburb.)

XYEaQMZJvS 11y ago

I love how dense some older games were. I still like the original Victoria by Paradox Studios, though that might be because I never quite have the video card to play Victoria II. Anyone remember SimEarth? Loved that stuff.

Tomte 11y ago

Damn, the one really cheap used copy on Amazon Marketplace is gone now… I was thinking about buying it two hours ago. But then again, I already have more books on my "to read" stack than I could possibly read 2015/2016. And it's not exactly a necessary book.

iwwr 11y ago

We could argue that modern town planning is in fact infected with a Sim City spirit (or Sim City captured that existing spirit): artificial separation between "commercial" and "residential areas" with miles and miles of separation between them, and car-centric in the extreme. The Sim City world is one where you have to ask permission for everything. Development is prohibited by law unless the benevolent town planner opens up an area with little colored rectangles. But you can only build one type of building and can't mix & match because the top-down view of the planner blurs out the complexity at the ground level. Sim City does have a redeeming feature, favoring urban density. Traditional planning is more aligned with creating loose, low-density, detached abodes, with great separation and height restriction and far away from any semblance of economic activity: shops, factories and commercial space. Having to support an infrastructure (necessarily a car infrastructure) in these forms is tremendously inefficient and can be considered as a great cost on societies that found out about planning before most cities got established (early 20th century).

gohrt 11y ago
It's long been hip to blame SimCity for creating bad urban design. However: SimCity reflects ideas as much as it plants ideas: zoning existed before SimCity. SimCity promoted intermingled Commercial and Residential zones (traffic was lighter if they were nearer) with pollutant Industrial zones far away from the rest, and SimCity highly promoted mass transit over cars.
- ascagnel_ 11y ago
  Most SimCity games indirectly went against mass transit, or at least the idea of building it up in phases, based on its traffic model. A Sim's route was defined as a path from point A to point B, and a maximum time. If the maximum time was reached, the route was a failure and would reflect as increased congestion. If a Sim encountered mass transit along its route, it would attempt to take it using the same pathing algorithm as car travel. However, if the route failed while using mass transit, it would never try it again, even as mass transit service expanded and new bus and subway lines/stations were added. The most recent SimCity was supposed to be more realistic in its route planning and simulation by giving each Sim a home, a workplace, etc., and repeating routes on a daily basis instead of a random sampling of routes, but this didn't make it into the final game.

yread 11y ago

Interesting article. I was interested in views on the newer simcities and found these articles interesting: http://planyourcity.net/2013/09/20/sim-city-through-the-eyes-of-a-city-planner/ http://planyourcity.net/2013/09/20/sim-city-through-the-eyes... - this city planer concludes that there are a lot of options and the mechanics are interesting but it oversimplifies things and gives the player god-like powers http://www.fastcoexist.com/1681515/using-the-new-sim-city-6-urban-planners-battle-for-bragging-rights http://www.fastcoexist.com/1681515/using-the-new-sim-city-6-... -this was a "tournament" between various urban think tanks and journalists and points out how all of them took the short term benefits with casinos, oil and sewage over sustainable livable cities that they advocate. http://todigra.org/index.php/todigra/article/view/31/36 http://todigra.org/index.php/todigra/article/view/31/36 - this a scientific article compares the rules in Simcity Societies to the work of controversial urban theorist Richard Florida

DonHopkins 11y ago

Here's some more SimCity documentation and reference material: https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/tree/master/MicropolisCore/documentation https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/tree/master/Micropol... And various SimCity source code: https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis

imauld 11y ago

Related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTJQTc-TqpU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTJQTc-TqpU

SZJX 11y ago

I think one point that doesn't really make sense to me is the strict separation of R/C/I zones and the land plot pricing curve for them. Surely nowadays nobody wants to live exactly in the city center? And it makes no sense to put industrial zones in the city center either. Most rich people obviously live in suburbs and downtown areas are not very safe in any sense. Also the strict separation of industry being external-orientated and commerce being internal-oriented seems way too simplistic and childish. Surely many industrial products also sell to the city itself, and many commerces are nationwide even international ones? Unless you restrict the definition of "commerce" to "things like local restaurants". I'd say the notions of the game are maybe a kind of too old, and seriously any of these "reality simulation" games for extremely complex systems are bound to miss the reality by some distance. The same goes for Football Manager etc. Playing them for fun is OK, but taking them too seriously is bound to disappoint and frustrate you to no end.