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> The game making it impossible to have a stable large city with low crime without dystopian modes of control absolutely communicates the ideology of the creato

> The game making it impossible to have a stable large city with low crime without dystopian modes of control absolutely communicates the ideology of the creators of the game, conscious or not. No, it "absolutely" does not. It could simply be a shortcoming of the developer's reach. You try to simulate a large city and get it a stable utopia! Do I have to remind you that this is something we've yet to accomplish in the real world, either. You expect a single game developer to do it successfully? Will Wright is (presumably) not a mayor, city planner, nor politician; he's a gamedev. Talented and famous, I'll grant you, but not infallible. And we're talking about a game he made 28 years ago from today, at the age of 33. SimCity 2000 isn't your typical illusion as many games are, either. It's trying to be a fairly accurate simulation of its time. Of course it embeds its creators biases, but it's not really trying to "convey a deep message" using an elaborate facade, like some games are, or theatre, for example. It's a sandbox.

sudosysgen 6y ago
You're missing the point of the author. In that game, people care more about still pretty low levels of crime than they care about their health, having a nice income, and so on. And in addition, that game has crime as something that's simply immutable and that you remove by totalitarian policing. I never said the game conveyed a deep message. I said that it conveyed the ideology of the creator. Those are very different things - often the second is accidental.
- hypertele-Xii 6y ago
  I'm still not buying it. The levels of care sims give to each attribute of the simulation could be the result of non-exhaustive game balance testing. They wanted to add crime. They wanted to make crime matter. They wanted something to combat crime, they added police. They tweaked values until it "felt good to play" and then shipped it - a commercial product on a budget and schedule. Zero people were likely employed to analyze how the game's systems might be perceived 30 years later.
  - sudosysgen 6y ago
    That's the entire thing about ideology - you don't do it consciously, for most people the dominant ideology is the unknown knowns. Video games are art. Adding crime in the way it was implemented is an artistic decision. Making crime dependent on policing instead of other, more realistic factors is also an artistic decision (and it's not true that police is the only way to handle crime from a gameplay perspective either). Balancing what exactly the sims are concerned about is also an artistic decisions. Artistic decisions, especially when they seem obvious, are often ideologically motivated without someone even realising it, and this is both what the writer of Polygon was touching on as well as explicitly on of the things the author of Magnasantis was targetting.

sudosysgen 6y ago

You're missing the point of the author. In that game, people care more about still pretty low levels of crime than they care about their health, having a nice income, and so on. And in addition, that game has crime as something that's simply immutable and that you remove by totalitarian policing. I never said the game conveyed a deep message. I said that it conveyed the ideology of the creator. Those are very different things - often the second is accidental.

hypertele-Xii 6y ago
I'm still not buying it. The levels of care sims give to each attribute of the simulation could be the result of non-exhaustive game balance testing. They wanted to add crime. They wanted to make crime matter. They wanted something to combat crime, they added police. They tweaked values until it "felt good to play" and then shipped it - a commercial product on a budget and schedule. Zero people were likely employed to analyze how the game's systems might be perceived 30 years later.
- sudosysgen 6y ago
  That's the entire thing about ideology - you don't do it consciously, for most people the dominant ideology is the unknown knowns. Video games are art. Adding crime in the way it was implemented is an artistic decision. Making crime dependent on policing instead of other, more realistic factors is also an artistic decision (and it's not true that police is the only way to handle crime from a gameplay perspective either). Balancing what exactly the sims are concerned about is also an artistic decisions. Artistic decisions, especially when they seem obvious, are often ideologically motivated without someone even realising it, and this is both what the writer of Polygon was touching on as well as explicitly on of the things the author of Magnasantis was targetting.