4 ms·

Sim City lies, too. Real American "cities" (to use the term generously) are basically a parking lot with a mayor. https://humantransit.org/2013/05/how-sim-city

Sim City lies, too. Real American "cities" (to use the term generously) are basically a parking lot with a mayor. https://humantransit.org/2013/05/how-sim-city-greenwashes-parking.html https://humantransit.org/2013/05/how-sim-city-greenwashes-pa...

scarejunba 7y ago
What a weird tone for that article! Acts like the game developers were out to cheat people out of understanding reality.
- CalRobert 7y ago
  Well, I wouldn't say it's evil or anything (it's just a game) but it is a bit frustrating in a game calling itself a simulation. Also, it's humantransit, which specifically promotes walking, cycling, etc. so they're going to be understandably annoyed when the cited inspiration for plenty of city planners understates the negative impact of car dependence.
  - Nasrudith 7y ago
    Personally I wouldn't call it understating car dependence so much as underestimating the alternatives. Which reminds me of Cities Skylines and how they did the opposite for what was probably an amusing oversight. Foot paths are very good for traffic without congestion which makes perfect sense. What doesn't make sense is the complete lack of time or distance limit meaning the population will happily walk a massive pedestrian walkway the length of an entire sector. A somewhat more realistic way is to use subways to link your high density residences with no highway access to places like work and retail while leaving the roads for mostly delivery trucks and emergency services. Apparently Japanese developments were practically planned this way - adding to where a new subway loop and putting housing on top for synergy.
    - nicoburns 7y ago
      > What doesn't make sense is the complete lack of time or distance limit meaning the population will happily walk a massive pedestrian walkway the length of an entire sector. How far is sector? What would you consider reasonable walking distances? Something like 30mins regularly, 60-90mins occasionally?
      - DoreenMichele 7y ago
        Real world transit-oriented design in the US routinely uses either 1/4 mile or 1/2 mile for the radius from transit that most people can/will walk. I believe they estimate that it takes 15 minutes to walk a quarter mile and 30 minutes to walk half a mile. Single data point: I'm a pedestrian. I haven't owned a car in over a decade. I'm willing to walk up to 30 minutes regularly and farther occasionally. I also use public transit sometimes.
        asark 7y ago
        30 minutes for a half-mile? Is that the round-trip time or something?
        silversconfused 7y ago
        Potentially that amount of time would allow carrying some groceries with a screaming toddler in tow.
        DoreenMichele 7y ago
        No, that's little old ladies in street clothes hobbling as fast as they can. People walking as a mode of transit aren't competing with joggers for who gets there first. These times are for planning purposes. Of course, it's okay if you walk faster than that. But planning departments need to look at "Who will actually walk this?" And the answer is "Ordinary people will walk it if it isn't over 30 minutes, but 15 minutes is better. And that works at these distances." You see the most traffic from establishments within a quarter mile, and some additional traffic within the half mile radius but outside the quarter mile. It drops off steeply outside of the half mile radius.
- forgottenpass 7y ago
  Game design decisions made in the name of doing something fun instead of perfect makes it easy to churn out clickbait that paints the designer as monsters. There are entire publications kept afloat by rewriting that article all day every day.
mysterydip 7y ago
Check out this article: http://archive.vg/blog/retro-book-look-the-simcity-planning-commission-handbook-publ-1990 http://archive.vg/blog/retro-book-look-the-simcity-planning-... I have the book and can attest to the content. While SimCity has its biases, it originally had a lot of basis in reality.
- fwip 7y ago
  It has its basis in real models of reality. Unfortunately the original models are biased, and so too is SimCity's model of the model.
Reedx 7y ago
That's like saying Super Mario Bros. lies about jumping physics.
- seltzered_ 7y ago
  When a game attempts to mimick urban planning enough to inspire urban planners, it's a bit worrying if they might leverage experiences from it (despite the traditional education in urban planning/etc). See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19311003 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19311003 "From video game to day job: How ‘SimCity’ inspired a generation of city planners" (and my specific comment from then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19313380 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19313380 )
  - DoreenMichele 7y ago
    I think you are taking this too seriously. Star Trek inspired people to go work for NASA. I'm not hearing reports that NASA has gone to hell because everyone is commited to making Warp Drive a reality so we can make contact with the Klingons. Early iterations of SimCity would bring an alien invasion down on your head. I eventually concluded it was triggered by inadequate fire coverage. I have yet to hear a single city planner talk about needing more fire departments as a magical talisman to ward off alien invasions. I began playing SimCity because I was wondering if I might want to become an urban planner. It caused me to decide to get a Certificate in GIS because, good God, city planning would be so much better if we could handily look up the kind of data that is available on SimCity for making informed decisions if you take the time to look at it. I have serious health problems. Life got in the way. So far, I haven't worked professionally in this field. I did spend a lot of time on an urban planning forum for some years and founded a small subforum and was a low level moderator with limited moderating powers. So I've talked to actual professional planners, been to an urban planning conference, etc. Lots of city planners play(ed) SimCity. Every one of them I've spoken to seems well aware of its limitations and that the real world doesn't actually work that way.
    - DonHopkins 7y ago
      You're right in general, except there are outliers. (Or outliars ;) Unfortunately SimCity has actually inspired some weak minded, incompetent, deeply ignorant, anti-intellectual politicians. "We need a leader, not a reader." https://www.huffpost.com/entry/herman-cain-999-sim-city_n_1008952 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/herman-cain-999-sim-city_n_10... >“We encourage politicians to continue to look to innovative games like SimCity for inspiration for social and economic change,” said Katsarelis. “While we at Maxis and Electronic Arts do not endorse any political candidates or their platforms, it’s interesting to see GOP candidate Herman Cain propose a simplified tax system like one we designed for the video game SimCity 4.” -Kip Katsarelis, a senior producer for Maxis https://theweek.com/articles/480983/herman-cains-999-plan-inspired-by-simcity https://theweek.com/articles/480983/herman-cains-999-plan-in... >How well did the 9-9-9 plan work in SimCity? "Running SimCity 4 on its default tax setting was a disaster waiting to happen," says Bridgette P. LaVictoire in Lez Get Real. Unless you used a cheat code, "you ran out of money pretty fast, in fact, and had to go deep into debt." But even if it had worked, there's a pretty huge difference between running a fake city and the most powerful nation on earth. Also, notes TIME's Newman, "Sim City 4 features meteors, UFOs, and robot attacks, which would probably mess up most attempts at realistic modeling." https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/fjelstud/herman-cain-stole-his-9-9-9-plan-from-simcity https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/fjelstud/herman-cain-st... >According to the Republican presidential candidate's revolutionary plan, corporate income taxes, personal income taxes, and national sales tax rates would each be 9%. Seems smart and original, right? Wrong. Reporters have unearthed an astonishing similarity between Cain's 9-9-9 Plan and SimCity 4's default tax scheme. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/10/herman-cains-9-9-9-plan-works-well-simcity/336808/ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/10/herman-... >So while most have likened Cain's 9-9-9 plan to a pizza commercial promotion, they now have a new origin story. And as DealBook's Will Alden (formerly of HuffPost), tweets, "If you're gonna rip a tax plan from a video game you could definitely do worse than SimCity." https://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2011/10/14/herman-cains-9-9-9-plan-straight-out-of-simcity/#52f29c153b73 https://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2011/10/14/herman-ca... >The Cain camp remains resolute however responding to the SimCity comparisons by saying “everyone likes 9-9-9.” While that might be true for some, unfortunately there aren’t any cheat codes to make the math work in real life. https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/438561-trump-joked-military-should-come-up-with-a-herman-cain-style-9-9-9 https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/438561-trump-jok... >Trump joked military should come up with a Herman Cain-style '9-9-9 plan' for border: report https://www.washingtonpost.com/powerpost/pelosi-slams-trumps-fed-picks-as-totally-unsuited-unqualified/2019/04/11/8dfebc5c-5c5e-11e9-842d-7d3ed7eb3957_story.html?utm_term=.04b28766b99c https://www.washingtonpost.com/powerpost/pelosi-slams-trumps... >Trump summoned Cain to the meeting, and then told the military brass that they needed to come up with a “9-9-9” plan for the border. The joke fell flat.
DoreenMichele 7y ago
All mental models are imperfect and have their limitations. If you understand that explicitly upfront, simulations have their uses. You only get in trouble if you are trying to accomplish something in the real world and being told "Your conclusion is wrong. That sounds nice in theory, but the real world doesn't work that way." And your response is to double down on "But the simulation says...!!!!" instead of going back to the drawing board and checking your assumptions and mental models. This is a general forum with a lot of programmers and other professionals. Most people here are not professional city planners. I have a Certificate in GIS. At one time, I was studying to be an urban planner. So I actually have some idea of how this stuff works in the real world. I also play SimCity. My SimCity example was to say "If you want to understand this concept a little better without getting enough education to become an urban planner, you can loosely simulate this in this readily available game. Here's the way to do that."
DonHopkins 7y ago
https://medium.com/@donhopkins/designing-user-interfaces-to-simulation-games-bd7a9d81e62d https://medium.com/@donhopkins/designing-user-interfaces-to-... Some muckety-muck architecture magazine was interviewing Will Wright about SimCity, and they asked him a question something like “which ontological urban paradigm most influenced your design of the simulator, the Exo-Hamiltonian Pattern Language Movement, or the Intra-Urban Deconstructionist Sub-Culture Hypothesis?” He replied, “I just kind of optimized for game play.”
tootie 7y ago
This is why I can never leave NYC.
DonHopkins 7y ago
The Robust-First Distributed City Generation rule for the Moveable Feast Machine does a pretty good simulation of spontaneous urban sprawl / gray goo. (Check out when he cuts a hole in the wall at 1:40!) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkSXERxucPc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkSXERxucPc Robust-first Computing: Distributed City Generation A rough video demo of Trent R. Small's procedural city generation dynamics in the Movable Feast Machine simulator. See http://nm8.us/q http://nm8.us/q for more information. Apologies for the poor audio!

scarejunba 7y ago

What a weird tone for that article! Acts like the game developers were out to cheat people out of understanding reality.

CalRobert 7y ago
Well, I wouldn't say it's evil or anything (it's just a game) but it is a bit frustrating in a game calling itself a simulation. Also, it's humantransit, which specifically promotes walking, cycling, etc. so they're going to be understandably annoyed when the cited inspiration for plenty of city planners understates the negative impact of car dependence.
- Nasrudith 7y ago
  Personally I wouldn't call it understating car dependence so much as underestimating the alternatives. Which reminds me of Cities Skylines and how they did the opposite for what was probably an amusing oversight. Foot paths are very good for traffic without congestion which makes perfect sense. What doesn't make sense is the complete lack of time or distance limit meaning the population will happily walk a massive pedestrian walkway the length of an entire sector. A somewhat more realistic way is to use subways to link your high density residences with no highway access to places like work and retail while leaving the roads for mostly delivery trucks and emergency services. Apparently Japanese developments were practically planned this way - adding to where a new subway loop and putting housing on top for synergy.
  - nicoburns 7y ago
    > What doesn't make sense is the complete lack of time or distance limit meaning the population will happily walk a massive pedestrian walkway the length of an entire sector. How far is sector? What would you consider reasonable walking distances? Something like 30mins regularly, 60-90mins occasionally?
    - DoreenMichele 7y ago
      Real world transit-oriented design in the US routinely uses either 1/4 mile or 1/2 mile for the radius from transit that most people can/will walk. I believe they estimate that it takes 15 minutes to walk a quarter mile and 30 minutes to walk half a mile. Single data point: I'm a pedestrian. I haven't owned a car in over a decade. I'm willing to walk up to 30 minutes regularly and farther occasionally. I also use public transit sometimes.
      - asark 7y ago
        30 minutes for a half-mile? Is that the round-trip time or something?
        silversconfused 7y ago
        Potentially that amount of time would allow carrying some groceries with a screaming toddler in tow.
        DoreenMichele 7y ago
        No, that's little old ladies in street clothes hobbling as fast as they can. People walking as a mode of transit aren't competing with joggers for who gets there first. These times are for planning purposes. Of course, it's okay if you walk faster than that. But planning departments need to look at "Who will actually walk this?" And the answer is "Ordinary people will walk it if it isn't over 30 minutes, but 15 minutes is better. And that works at these distances." You see the most traffic from establishments within a quarter mile, and some additional traffic within the half mile radius but outside the quarter mile. It drops off steeply outside of the half mile radius.
forgottenpass 7y ago
Game design decisions made in the name of doing something fun instead of perfect makes it easy to churn out clickbait that paints the designer as monsters. There are entire publications kept afloat by rewriting that article all day every day.

mysterydip 7y ago

Check out this article: http://archive.vg/blog/retro-book-look-the-simcity-planning-commission-handbook-publ-1990 http://archive.vg/blog/retro-book-look-the-simcity-planning-... I have the book and can attest to the content. While SimCity has its biases, it originally had a lot of basis in reality.

fwip 7y ago
It has its basis in real models of reality. Unfortunately the original models are biased, and so too is SimCity's model of the model.

Reedx 7y ago

That's like saying Super Mario Bros. lies about jumping physics.

seltzered_ 7y ago
When a game attempts to mimick urban planning enough to inspire urban planners, it's a bit worrying if they might leverage experiences from it (despite the traditional education in urban planning/etc). See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19311003 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19311003 "From video game to day job: How ‘SimCity’ inspired a generation of city planners" (and my specific comment from then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19313380 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19313380 )
- DoreenMichele 7y ago
  I think you are taking this too seriously. Star Trek inspired people to go work for NASA. I'm not hearing reports that NASA has gone to hell because everyone is commited to making Warp Drive a reality so we can make contact with the Klingons. Early iterations of SimCity would bring an alien invasion down on your head. I eventually concluded it was triggered by inadequate fire coverage. I have yet to hear a single city planner talk about needing more fire departments as a magical talisman to ward off alien invasions. I began playing SimCity because I was wondering if I might want to become an urban planner. It caused me to decide to get a Certificate in GIS because, good God, city planning would be so much better if we could handily look up the kind of data that is available on SimCity for making informed decisions if you take the time to look at it. I have serious health problems. Life got in the way. So far, I haven't worked professionally in this field. I did spend a lot of time on an urban planning forum for some years and founded a small subforum and was a low level moderator with limited moderating powers. So I've talked to actual professional planners, been to an urban planning conference, etc. Lots of city planners play(ed) SimCity. Every one of them I've spoken to seems well aware of its limitations and that the real world doesn't actually work that way.
  - DonHopkins 7y ago
    You're right in general, except there are outliers. (Or outliars ;) Unfortunately SimCity has actually inspired some weak minded, incompetent, deeply ignorant, anti-intellectual politicians. "We need a leader, not a reader." https://www.huffpost.com/entry/herman-cain-999-sim-city_n_1008952 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/herman-cain-999-sim-city_n_10... >“We encourage politicians to continue to look to innovative games like SimCity for inspiration for social and economic change,” said Katsarelis. “While we at Maxis and Electronic Arts do not endorse any political candidates or their platforms, it’s interesting to see GOP candidate Herman Cain propose a simplified tax system like one we designed for the video game SimCity 4.” -Kip Katsarelis, a senior producer for Maxis https://theweek.com/articles/480983/herman-cains-999-plan-inspired-by-simcity https://theweek.com/articles/480983/herman-cains-999-plan-in... >How well did the 9-9-9 plan work in SimCity? "Running SimCity 4 on its default tax setting was a disaster waiting to happen," says Bridgette P. LaVictoire in Lez Get Real. Unless you used a cheat code, "you ran out of money pretty fast, in fact, and had to go deep into debt." But even if it had worked, there's a pretty huge difference between running a fake city and the most powerful nation on earth. Also, notes TIME's Newman, "Sim City 4 features meteors, UFOs, and robot attacks, which would probably mess up most attempts at realistic modeling." https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/fjelstud/herman-cain-stole-his-9-9-9-plan-from-simcity https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/fjelstud/herman-cain-st... >According to the Republican presidential candidate's revolutionary plan, corporate income taxes, personal income taxes, and national sales tax rates would each be 9%. Seems smart and original, right? Wrong. Reporters have unearthed an astonishing similarity between Cain's 9-9-9 Plan and SimCity 4's default tax scheme. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/10/herman-cains-9-9-9-plan-works-well-simcity/336808/ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/10/herman-... >So while most have likened Cain's 9-9-9 plan to a pizza commercial promotion, they now have a new origin story. And as DealBook's Will Alden (formerly of HuffPost), tweets, "If you're gonna rip a tax plan from a video game you could definitely do worse than SimCity." https://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2011/10/14/herman-cains-9-9-9-plan-straight-out-of-simcity/#52f29c153b73 https://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2011/10/14/herman-ca... >The Cain camp remains resolute however responding to the SimCity comparisons by saying “everyone likes 9-9-9.” While that might be true for some, unfortunately there aren’t any cheat codes to make the math work in real life. https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/438561-trump-joked-military-should-come-up-with-a-herman-cain-style-9-9-9 https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/438561-trump-jok... >Trump joked military should come up with a Herman Cain-style '9-9-9 plan' for border: report https://www.washingtonpost.com/powerpost/pelosi-slams-trumps-fed-picks-as-totally-unsuited-unqualified/2019/04/11/8dfebc5c-5c5e-11e9-842d-7d3ed7eb3957_story.html?utm_term=.04b28766b99c https://www.washingtonpost.com/powerpost/pelosi-slams-trumps... >Trump summoned Cain to the meeting, and then told the military brass that they needed to come up with a “9-9-9” plan for the border. The joke fell flat.

DoreenMichele 7y ago

All mental models are imperfect and have their limitations. If you understand that explicitly upfront, simulations have their uses. You only get in trouble if you are trying to accomplish something in the real world and being told "Your conclusion is wrong. That sounds nice in theory, but the real world doesn't work that way." And your response is to double down on "But the simulation says...!!!!" instead of going back to the drawing board and checking your assumptions and mental models. This is a general forum with a lot of programmers and other professionals. Most people here are not professional city planners. I have a Certificate in GIS. At one time, I was studying to be an urban planner. So I actually have some idea of how this stuff works in the real world. I also play SimCity. My SimCity example was to say "If you want to understand this concept a little better without getting enough education to become an urban planner, you can loosely simulate this in this readily available game. Here's the way to do that."

DonHopkins 7y ago

https://medium.com/@donhopkins/designing-user-interfaces-to-simulation-games-bd7a9d81e62d https://medium.com/@donhopkins/designing-user-interfaces-to-... Some muckety-muck architecture magazine was interviewing Will Wright about SimCity, and they asked him a question something like “which ontological urban paradigm most influenced your design of the simulator, the Exo-Hamiltonian Pattern Language Movement, or the Intra-Urban Deconstructionist Sub-Culture Hypothesis?” He replied, “I just kind of optimized for game play.”

tootie 7y ago

This is why I can never leave NYC.

DonHopkins 7y ago

The Robust-First Distributed City Generation rule for the Moveable Feast Machine does a pretty good simulation of spontaneous urban sprawl / gray goo. (Check out when he cuts a hole in the wall at 1:40!) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkSXERxucPc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkSXERxucPc Robust-first Computing: Distributed City Generation A rough video demo of Trent R. Small's procedural city generation dynamics in the Movable Feast Machine simulator. See http://nm8.us/q http://nm8.us/q for more information. Apologies for the poor audio!