For some reason, people have a disproportionate trust in city-building game designers' view of civic planning. Magnasanti is meaningful because it exposes some

For some reason, people have a disproportionate trust in city-building game designers' view of civic planning. Magnasanti is meaningful because it exposes some of the biases and simplifications that pervade the genre. The reason certain strategies work in city-building games isn't because they're realistic simulations of how cities function and those strategies would work in real life, it's because it's a game made by human designers who decided that that's a strategy that should work, or made certain assumptions (that may or may not be true) while designing the game's systems that allow the strategy to work. See also Polygon's "The ideology hiding in SimCity’s black box": https://www.polygon.com/videos/2021/4/1/22352583/simcity-hidden-politics-ideology-urban-dynamics https://www.polygon.com/videos/2021/4/1/22352583/simcity-hid... Some select quotes: > How SimCity’s hidden ideology affects the people who play it is difficult to untangle. An article from 1992 quotes a player saying “I became a total Republican playing this game,” and even modern versions of the game contain oddly conservative viewpoints, including a preference for regressive taxation. > On more than one occasion, politicians have been “tested” in the game to see how well they can manage a pretend city.