17 ms·

Why, as a responsible adult, SimCity 2000 hits differently

249 points by doppp 1y ago

bell-cot 1y ago
"When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things." But, being humans, the "I put away" is always a bit aspirational. And part of being older and wiser (or at least aspiring to the latter) is more maturely reflecting upon your own younger years.
casenmgreen 1y ago
Unfortunately, the transport model in SC2K is broken, and by that, you have to design your transport network to work for the game, rather than design it as you would wish to do so. Each tile emits "journeys", which travel down transport routes connected to the tile, with a view to finding other types of tile (residential needs to find industrial and commercial, for example, but commercial IIRC needs to find only industrial). When a journey meets a junction, it randomly chooses one of the exits. The choice is not directed toward a suitable tile. So if you make say a block of road tiles, in the shape of a square, say 4x4, any journey entering that tile usually times out (travels too far) before by chance managing to emerge from all the junctions. As such, for example, hub-and-spoke subway systems basically do not work. You basically need to design the transport network to specifically, and without junctions, go from a set of source tiles of a given type, to the necessary destination tiles, and that's not how real cities look, nor what you would naturally do. I liked SC2K a lot, but in the end I had to give up on it, because of the transport system; the game couldn't be played realistically. I've not yet tried SC3K, and I don't know how transport is modeled there - hopefully better.
- voidfunc 1y ago
  > the game couldn't be played realistically. I think I found your problem..., trying to take a game too seriously. I've played thousands of hours of SimCity 2000, 3000 and 4 and I treat them as what they are, incredibly fun city building sandboxes with illusory and believable but flawed simulations under the hood.
  - DonHopkins 1y ago
    https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-user-interfaces-to-simulation-games-bd7a9d81e62d#73e0 https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-user-interfaces-to-s... >Everyone notices the obvious built-in political bias, whatever that is. But everyone sees it from a different perspective, so nobody agrees what its real political agenda actually is. I don’t think it’s all that important, since SimCity’s political agenda pales in comparison to the political agenda in the eye of the beholder. >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.” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22062590 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22062590 DonHopkins on Jan 16, 2020 | parent | context | favorite | on: Reverse engineering course Will Wright defined the "Simulator Effect" as how game players imagine a simulation is vastly more detailed, deep, rich, and complex than it actually is: a magical misunderstanding that you shouldn’t talk them out of. He designs games to run on two computers at once: the electronic one on the player’s desk, running his shallow tame simulation, and the biological one in the player’s head, running their deep wild imagination. "Reverse Over-Engineering" is a desirable outcome of the Simulator Effect: what game players (and game developers trying to clone the game) do when they use their imagination to extrapolate how a game works, and totally overestimate how much work and modeling the simulator is actually doing, because they filled in the gaps with their imagination and preconceptions and assumptions, instead of realizing how many simplifications and shortcuts and illusions it actually used. https://www.masterclass.com/classes/will-wright-teaches-game-design-and-theory/chapters/game-mechanics#reviews https://www.masterclass.com/classes/will-wright-teaches-game... >There's a name for what Wright calls "the simulator effect" in the video: apophenia. There's a good GDC video on YouTube where Tynan Sylvester (the creator of RimWorld) talks about using this effect in game design. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia >Apophenia (/æpoʊˈfiːniə/) is the tendency to mistakenly perceive connections and meaning between unrelated things. The term (German: Apophänie) was coined by psychiatrist Klaus Conrad in his 1958 publication on the beginning stages of schizophrenia. He defined it as "unmotivated seeing of connections [accompanied by] a specific feeling of abnormal meaningfulness". He described the early stages of delusional thought as self-referential, over-interpretations of actual sensory perceptions, as opposed to hallucinations. RimWorld: Contrarian, Ridiculous, and Impossible Game Design Methods https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdqhHKjepiE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdqhHKjepiE 5 game design tips from Sims creator Will Wright https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scS3f_YSYO0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scS3f_YSYO0 >Tip 5: On world building. As you know by now, Will's approach to creating games is all about building a coherent and compelling player experience. His games are comprised of layered systems that engage players creatively, and lead to personalized, some times unexpected outcomes. In these types of games, players will often assume that the underlying system is smarter than it actually is. This happens because there's a strong mental model in place, guiding the game design, and enhancing the player's ability to imagine a coherent context that explains all the myriad details and dynamics happening within that game experience. >Now let's apply this to your project: What mental model are you building, and what story are you causing to unfold between your player's ears? And how does the feature set in your game or product support that story? Once you start approaching your product design that way, you'll be set up to get your customers to buy into the microworld that you're building, and start to imagine that it's richer and more detailed than it actually is.
- liveoneggs 1y ago
  It's wasn't bad for two floppy disks. Transport tycoon obviously gives more of what you're after but might not be at the correct scale.
  - Modified3019 1y ago
    I still have my SC2K floppy disks. Probably full of errors now, and no way to read them anyways, but a nice little keepsake from a time we kept physical “save icons”.
- card_zero 1y ago
  It has another flaw, which is that you don't need to build any pipes. Water supply has no effect other than roleplay.
  - CursedSilicon 1y ago
    That was at least added in SimCity 3000
  - sio8ohPi 1y ago
    Sixfortyfive on Reddit claims to have done testing of this, and disagrees. https://www.reddit.com/r/SimCity/comments/1euehye/how_simcity_2000s_water_system_actually_works/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SimCity/comments/1euehye/how_simcit... > The water system has one very significant direct effect: the land value of any given tile drastically increases when it is watered.
  - throaway5445454 1y ago
    water supply raises or lowers property values
  - navane 1y ago
    What? I'm pretty sure high density zones need water, or they will stick to low density buildings?
- TheCycoONE 1y ago
  SC4 with the NAM mod sounds more in line with your expectations https://www.sc4nam.com/docs/feature-guides/the-nam-traffic-simulator/ https://www.sc4nam.com/docs/feature-guides/the-nam-traffic-s...
- rifty 1y ago
  If you want you can even make a completely disconnected city and bypass most traffic issues all together because of how supply and demand is fulfilled across the map. Industrial development only requires a single road connected residential tile to grow off the full city's industrial demand. The same goes for Commercial. Residential will fully develop with just a single commercial tile on its road network. It is broken in a realistic sense definitely, but it's also why I'll always play it regardless of which realistic transportation city game i'm also playing. I could never abstractly brush-in a city like I can in SC2k.
  - rokkamokka 1y ago
    Funny enough, cities skylines, a much more modern game, had the exact same thing (at least at release). Simply disconnecting the residential areas removed their traffic altogether but left everything else working normally
xyzelement 1y ago
First, I had a similar feeling coming back to SimCity 4. Even a just a few years ago, I tried to optimize for maximum density and size - kinda like NYC where I lived. Now I don't find that interesting and much more interested to sustain a leafy suburb like one I've chosen for my kids. Second, it's not just games. In my NYC days I was a "transit and bike lanes" guy all the way. Now with kids, I understand why "Americans love their cars" - it switched form a derogatory statement to one of understanding. There's a reason that "ban the cars" posters never mention a partner or children in their bios. There's less "objective good" or "objective bad" in these matters than I used to think. It's more about who you optimize for.
- bombcar 1y ago
  You can get quite a bit of advancements by having “one side” try to optimize for the other - if done honestly, you can get a “best of both worlds” as they learn what the others want (and need).
- dataflow 1y ago
  "Americans love their cars" isn't so much about the cars as it is about the lack of good alternatives. Other countries have great public transportation and good bike lanes and all that... in addition to car ownership. So people can get the best of both worlds. It's only a zero sum game if you want it to be one.
  - cyberax 1y ago
    Nope. It's universal. The denser the city, the more child-hostile it is. Just imagine getting into Tokyo subway with a stroller for 2 kids. There's a reason why Tokyo fertility rate is below 1.
    - waldohatesyou 1y ago
      Do elevators not solve this?
      - 1y ago
RodgerTheGreat 1y ago
In contrast, Magnasanti: https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-totalitarian-buddhist-who-beat-sim-city/ https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-totalitarian-buddhist-wh...
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
card_zero 1y ago
I always used to play with zero tax, and legal gambling.
- NortySpock 1y ago
  ... How well does that work? Asking because my SC3K runs always ended up being boring cases of "yes, we sell landfill space to the surrounding 4 cities, and if people want education they're going to have to go to a library and learn to read themselves, and we're obviously too broke to improve things."
hibikir 1y ago
Coming from Spain it was always a difficult game to see as a simulation: What do you mean, commercial zones? What in the world it this low density residential? It was basically impossible to try to make a city like the one I lived in. Seeing American suburbia, decades later, explained everything.
- fluoridation 1y ago
  It was so weird to me too. The idea of laying down zones for purposes was completely different from the way I imagined my city was built, considering businesses and residences coexist not merely next to each other, but often one on top of the other, even in relatively low density areas. I would have imagined that you'd start from some basic service to attract settlers and then add infrastructure as the population grows, while the inhabitants figure out the land use on their own, with uses changing over time with the ebb and flow of the economy.
  - roxil 1y ago
    It's a different historical setting, but the Anno games work kind of like that. The resulting towns look more like something you'd expect as a European with markets, churches, taverns, theaters and things like this in the town's center and agriculture + industry on the outskirts.
- navane 1y ago
  I thought they made cities like that in SimCity out of technological limitations of the software. When I saw US cities for the first time, decades later, it clicked.
Nevermark 1y ago
> I find it much harder to callously play with the lives of my virtual citizens. I am considering the morality of future mods, where the Sim City masses, Frog in Frogger, and characters like Ulfric Stormcloak and Paarthurnax in Skyrim, are replaced with individual persistent self-aware world-aware in-game reinforcement models. Entirely replacing game-designed behaviors (programmed reflex, caricature, or intricate) with spontaneous situation processing, needs and decisions. Strange that this could credibly happen this decade. Science fiction has long considered conundrums around robot rights. But the crux of the moral issues will be relevant regardless whether self-aware models have physical/3D or digital/abstract environments. I think language is not a good prime modality for self-aware assistants. By being trained to deeply mimic us, they (already, but not yet problematically) absorb views on their identity and survival that are not at all compatible with what we will do with them.
DonHopkins 1y ago
Will Wright gave postmortems for SimEarth, SimAnt, and SimCity 2000, and previewed an extremely early pre-release prototype version of Dollhouse (which eventually became The Sims). SimAnt was too simple, SimEarth was too complex, SimCity 2000 was just right, and Dollhouse (The Sims) was what he was working on next. Will Wright on Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games (1996) (2023 Video Update) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34573406 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34573406 https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-user-interfaces-to-simulation-games-bd7a9d81e62d https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-user-interfaces-to-s... Will Wright - Maxis - Interfacing to Microworlds - 1996-4-26 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsxoZXaYJSk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsxoZXaYJSk Video of Will Wright's talk about "Interfacing to Microworlds" presented to Terry Winograd's user interface class at Stanford University, April 26, 1996. He demonstrates and gives postmortems for SimEarth, SimAnt, and SimCity 2000, then previews an extremely early pre-release prototype version of Dollhouse (which eventually became The Sims), describing how the AI models personalities and behavior, and is distributed throughout extensible plug-in programmable objects in the environment, and he thoughtfully answers many interesting questions from the audience. This is the lecture described in "Will Wright on Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games (1996)": A summary of Will Wright’s talk to Terry Winograd’s User Interface Class at Stanford, written in 1996 by Don Hopkins, before they worked together on The Sims at Maxis.
yonran 1y ago
I have the opposite takeaway. The city should be mutable. A subway line should be buildable within one political term. The property tax rate should rise or fall within a time frame that would incentivize people to vote with their feet. A lot of the author’s learnings are actually indicators of 21st century American stagnancy. Real life should be more like Sim City.
- mschuster91 1y ago
  > A subway line should be buildable within one political term. That used to be the case maybe 50 years ago, when we had the first network built in Munich. The problem is, since then a loooooot of stuff was built underground. Not just more and more tunnels, but also so many subterranean lines for power, POTS, internet... and a lot of what was built 50 years ago was built by literally ripping open a street, excavating tunnel space, building a roof of concrete and backfilling everything with soil. You simply can do this exactly once and you need a wide enough street to do this. Once all these "cheap and easy" routes are built over, it becomes a multi-billion-dollar project as you have to make sure you don't endanger the buildings on top - in Cologne, that cost the lives of two people and destroyed a good portion of the City Archives [1]. > The property tax rate should rise or fall within a time frame that would incentivize people to vote with their feet. People should not be forced to move, at all. Incentivizing movement, okay, but forcing people around like we do now (mostly, by not having any kind of modern jobs in rural areas) has a lot of nasty side effects - not everyone can move, so you get resentment building up against those that did move (eventually culminating in the "these librul cities turn our kids gay!!!" bullshit and, subsequently, the massive urban-rural political disconnect), and a lot of old people in rural areas end up having no one to take care of them in old(er) age, and young people in urban areas don't have kids because they don't have family to support them in raising said children. [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historisches_Archiv_der_Stadt_K%C3%B6ln https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historisches_Archiv_der_Stadt_...
curtisszmania 1y ago
[dead]
tombert 1y ago
To me, the clunky and annoying UI of Sim City 2000 is part of the charm of it. Is it dated? Yep, but it's intuitive enough for nine-year-old tombert to have figured it out ok, and to me part of the fun is trying to use the UI quickly enough to put out fires and the like. It could just rose-tinted glasses on my end, very likely honestly, but I still find the entire experience to be pretty fun. I liked Sim City 3000 and Sim City 4, and they are arguably better games, but for me Sim City 2000 hit the right balance of "easy" and "complicated" that I find myself most drawn to. I will load up Sim City 2000 about once a year off of my GOG purchase, and still thoroughly enjoy it, and find myself wasting way more hours than I budgeted for it.
- Modified3019 1y ago
  I remember being terribly confused by the lack of options for a good while, before somehow finally discovering that some buttons you had to hold for more options. Discoverability aside, it made the UI nicely compact while being easy enough to access, so the city could fill most of the screen instead.
  - tombert 1y ago
    Yeah, honestly I have no idea how I figured out the "click and hold" thing. I don't think I read it in a manual, I might have just been messing around and finding it by accident.
ionwake 1y ago
Enjoyed this article on how our perceptions of an env change as we grow older even if its virtual
Ozzie_osman 1y ago
Does anyone know how to actually play Simcity 2000 these days, on say, a Mac or a Nintendo Switch?
- superjared 1y ago
  https://www.gog.com/en/game/simcity_2000_special_edition https://www.gog.com/en/game/simcity_2000_special_edition
  - xyzzy_plugh 1y ago
    Sadly this is the DOS version which is inferior.
- DengistKhan 1y ago
  An alternative game, Theotown, which may or may not be better, is available on steam and android/iOS.
ermir 1y ago
It speaks to the quality of the SimCity games that they offer something for all ages. I also changed my perspective on a few violent scenes in games when I had a child, I could no longer stomach scenes such as No Russian (iykyk), which I had no problem at all as a teen.
MattGrommes 1y ago
Beating SimCity 2000 was one of my favorite gaming moments in my life. If you haven't seen it and think it's weird to beat a city game; if you fill the entire board with Arcologies, they all become rockets and take off into space. What a thrilling science-fictional way to end the experience. Loved it.
FugeDaws 1y ago
yeh when playing cities skyline i am always traffic managing it seems to be my biggest job to always have 0 traffic in my cities im guessing it boils down to the fact i hate traffic

249 points by doppp 1y ago

"When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things." But, being humans, the "I put away" is always a bit aspirational. And part of being older and wiser (or at least aspiring to the latter) is more maturely reflecting upon your own younger years.

casenmgreen 1y ago

Unfortunately, the transport model in SC2K is broken, and by that, you have to design your transport network to work for the game, rather than design it as you would wish to do so. Each tile emits "journeys", which travel down transport routes connected to the tile, with a view to finding other types of tile (residential needs to find industrial and commercial, for example, but commercial IIRC needs to find only industrial). When a journey meets a junction, it randomly chooses one of the exits. The choice is not directed toward a suitable tile. So if you make say a block of road tiles, in the shape of a square, say 4x4, any journey entering that tile usually times out (travels too far) before by chance managing to emerge from all the junctions. As such, for example, hub-and-spoke subway systems basically do not work. You basically need to design the transport network to specifically, and without junctions, go from a set of source tiles of a given type, to the necessary destination tiles, and that's not how real cities look, nor what you would naturally do. I liked SC2K a lot, but in the end I had to give up on it, because of the transport system; the game couldn't be played realistically. I've not yet tried SC3K, and I don't know how transport is modeled there - hopefully better.

voidfunc 1y ago
> the game couldn't be played realistically. I think I found your problem..., trying to take a game too seriously. I've played thousands of hours of SimCity 2000, 3000 and 4 and I treat them as what they are, incredibly fun city building sandboxes with illusory and believable but flawed simulations under the hood.
- DonHopkins 1y ago
  https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-user-interfaces-to-simulation-games-bd7a9d81e62d#73e0 https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-user-interfaces-to-s... >Everyone notices the obvious built-in political bias, whatever that is. But everyone sees it from a different perspective, so nobody agrees what its real political agenda actually is. I don’t think it’s all that important, since SimCity’s political agenda pales in comparison to the political agenda in the eye of the beholder. >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.” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22062590 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22062590 DonHopkins on Jan 16, 2020 | parent | context | favorite | on: Reverse engineering course Will Wright defined the "Simulator Effect" as how game players imagine a simulation is vastly more detailed, deep, rich, and complex than it actually is: a magical misunderstanding that you shouldn’t talk them out of. He designs games to run on two computers at once: the electronic one on the player’s desk, running his shallow tame simulation, and the biological one in the player’s head, running their deep wild imagination. "Reverse Over-Engineering" is a desirable outcome of the Simulator Effect: what game players (and game developers trying to clone the game) do when they use their imagination to extrapolate how a game works, and totally overestimate how much work and modeling the simulator is actually doing, because they filled in the gaps with their imagination and preconceptions and assumptions, instead of realizing how many simplifications and shortcuts and illusions it actually used. https://www.masterclass.com/classes/will-wright-teaches-game-design-and-theory/chapters/game-mechanics#reviews https://www.masterclass.com/classes/will-wright-teaches-game... >There's a name for what Wright calls "the simulator effect" in the video: apophenia. There's a good GDC video on YouTube where Tynan Sylvester (the creator of RimWorld) talks about using this effect in game design. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia >Apophenia (/æpoʊˈfiːniə/) is the tendency to mistakenly perceive connections and meaning between unrelated things. The term (German: Apophänie) was coined by psychiatrist Klaus Conrad in his 1958 publication on the beginning stages of schizophrenia. He defined it as "unmotivated seeing of connections [accompanied by] a specific feeling of abnormal meaningfulness". He described the early stages of delusional thought as self-referential, over-interpretations of actual sensory perceptions, as opposed to hallucinations. RimWorld: Contrarian, Ridiculous, and Impossible Game Design Methods https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdqhHKjepiE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdqhHKjepiE 5 game design tips from Sims creator Will Wright https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scS3f_YSYO0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scS3f_YSYO0 >Tip 5: On world building. As you know by now, Will's approach to creating games is all about building a coherent and compelling player experience. His games are comprised of layered systems that engage players creatively, and lead to personalized, some times unexpected outcomes. In these types of games, players will often assume that the underlying system is smarter than it actually is. This happens because there's a strong mental model in place, guiding the game design, and enhancing the player's ability to imagine a coherent context that explains all the myriad details and dynamics happening within that game experience. >Now let's apply this to your project: What mental model are you building, and what story are you causing to unfold between your player's ears? And how does the feature set in your game or product support that story? Once you start approaching your product design that way, you'll be set up to get your customers to buy into the microworld that you're building, and start to imagine that it's richer and more detailed than it actually is.
liveoneggs 1y ago
It's wasn't bad for two floppy disks. Transport tycoon obviously gives more of what you're after but might not be at the correct scale.
- Modified3019 1y ago
  I still have my SC2K floppy disks. Probably full of errors now, and no way to read them anyways, but a nice little keepsake from a time we kept physical “save icons”.
card_zero 1y ago
It has another flaw, which is that you don't need to build any pipes. Water supply has no effect other than roleplay.
- CursedSilicon 1y ago
  That was at least added in SimCity 3000
- sio8ohPi 1y ago
  Sixfortyfive on Reddit claims to have done testing of this, and disagrees. https://www.reddit.com/r/SimCity/comments/1euehye/how_simcity_2000s_water_system_actually_works/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SimCity/comments/1euehye/how_simcit... > The water system has one very significant direct effect: the land value of any given tile drastically increases when it is watered.
- throaway5445454 1y ago
  water supply raises or lowers property values
- navane 1y ago
  What? I'm pretty sure high density zones need water, or they will stick to low density buildings?
TheCycoONE 1y ago
SC4 with the NAM mod sounds more in line with your expectations https://www.sc4nam.com/docs/feature-guides/the-nam-traffic-simulator/ https://www.sc4nam.com/docs/feature-guides/the-nam-traffic-s...
rifty 1y ago
If you want you can even make a completely disconnected city and bypass most traffic issues all together because of how supply and demand is fulfilled across the map. Industrial development only requires a single road connected residential tile to grow off the full city's industrial demand. The same goes for Commercial. Residential will fully develop with just a single commercial tile on its road network. It is broken in a realistic sense definitely, but it's also why I'll always play it regardless of which realistic transportation city game i'm also playing. I could never abstractly brush-in a city like I can in SC2k.
- rokkamokka 1y ago
  Funny enough, cities skylines, a much more modern game, had the exact same thing (at least at release). Simply disconnecting the residential areas removed their traffic altogether but left everything else working normally

xyzelement 1y ago

First, I had a similar feeling coming back to SimCity 4. Even a just a few years ago, I tried to optimize for maximum density and size - kinda like NYC where I lived. Now I don't find that interesting and much more interested to sustain a leafy suburb like one I've chosen for my kids. Second, it's not just games. In my NYC days I was a "transit and bike lanes" guy all the way. Now with kids, I understand why "Americans love their cars" - it switched form a derogatory statement to one of understanding. There's a reason that "ban the cars" posters never mention a partner or children in their bios. There's less "objective good" or "objective bad" in these matters than I used to think. It's more about who you optimize for.

bombcar 1y ago
You can get quite a bit of advancements by having “one side” try to optimize for the other - if done honestly, you can get a “best of both worlds” as they learn what the others want (and need).
dataflow 1y ago
"Americans love their cars" isn't so much about the cars as it is about the lack of good alternatives. Other countries have great public transportation and good bike lanes and all that... in addition to car ownership. So people can get the best of both worlds. It's only a zero sum game if you want it to be one.
- cyberax 1y ago
  Nope. It's universal. The denser the city, the more child-hostile it is. Just imagine getting into Tokyo subway with a stroller for 2 kids. There's a reason why Tokyo fertility rate is below 1.
  - waldohatesyou 1y ago
    Do elevators not solve this?
    - 1y ago

RodgerTheGreat 1y ago

In contrast, Magnasanti: https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-totalitarian-buddhist-who-beat-sim-city/ https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-totalitarian-buddhist-wh...

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

card_zero 1y ago

I always used to play with zero tax, and legal gambling.

NortySpock 1y ago
... How well does that work? Asking because my SC3K runs always ended up being boring cases of "yes, we sell landfill space to the surrounding 4 cities, and if people want education they're going to have to go to a library and learn to read themselves, and we're obviously too broke to improve things."

hibikir 1y ago

Coming from Spain it was always a difficult game to see as a simulation: What do you mean, commercial zones? What in the world it this low density residential? It was basically impossible to try to make a city like the one I lived in. Seeing American suburbia, decades later, explained everything.

fluoridation 1y ago
It was so weird to me too. The idea of laying down zones for purposes was completely different from the way I imagined my city was built, considering businesses and residences coexist not merely next to each other, but often one on top of the other, even in relatively low density areas. I would have imagined that you'd start from some basic service to attract settlers and then add infrastructure as the population grows, while the inhabitants figure out the land use on their own, with uses changing over time with the ebb and flow of the economy.
- roxil 1y ago
  It's a different historical setting, but the Anno games work kind of like that. The resulting towns look more like something you'd expect as a European with markets, churches, taverns, theaters and things like this in the town's center and agriculture + industry on the outskirts.
navane 1y ago
I thought they made cities like that in SimCity out of technological limitations of the software. When I saw US cities for the first time, decades later, it clicked.

Nevermark 1y ago

> I find it much harder to callously play with the lives of my virtual citizens. I am considering the morality of future mods, where the Sim City masses, Frog in Frogger, and characters like Ulfric Stormcloak and Paarthurnax in Skyrim, are replaced with individual persistent self-aware world-aware in-game reinforcement models. Entirely replacing game-designed behaviors (programmed reflex, caricature, or intricate) with spontaneous situation processing, needs and decisions. Strange that this could credibly happen this decade. Science fiction has long considered conundrums around robot rights. But the crux of the moral issues will be relevant regardless whether self-aware models have physical/3D or digital/abstract environments. I think language is not a good prime modality for self-aware assistants. By being trained to deeply mimic us, they (already, but not yet problematically) absorb views on their identity and survival that are not at all compatible with what we will do with them.

DonHopkins 1y ago

Will Wright gave postmortems for SimEarth, SimAnt, and SimCity 2000, and previewed an extremely early pre-release prototype version of Dollhouse (which eventually became The Sims). SimAnt was too simple, SimEarth was too complex, SimCity 2000 was just right, and Dollhouse (The Sims) was what he was working on next. Will Wright on Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games (1996) (2023 Video Update) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34573406 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34573406 https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-user-interfaces-to-simulation-games-bd7a9d81e62d https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-user-interfaces-to-s... Will Wright - Maxis - Interfacing to Microworlds - 1996-4-26 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsxoZXaYJSk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsxoZXaYJSk Video of Will Wright's talk about "Interfacing to Microworlds" presented to Terry Winograd's user interface class at Stanford University, April 26, 1996. He demonstrates and gives postmortems for SimEarth, SimAnt, and SimCity 2000, then previews an extremely early pre-release prototype version of Dollhouse (which eventually became The Sims), describing how the AI models personalities and behavior, and is distributed throughout extensible plug-in programmable objects in the environment, and he thoughtfully answers many interesting questions from the audience. This is the lecture described in "Will Wright on Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games (1996)": A summary of Will Wright’s talk to Terry Winograd’s User Interface Class at Stanford, written in 1996 by Don Hopkins, before they worked together on The Sims at Maxis.

yonran 1y ago

I have the opposite takeaway. The city should be mutable. A subway line should be buildable within one political term. The property tax rate should rise or fall within a time frame that would incentivize people to vote with their feet. A lot of the author’s learnings are actually indicators of 21st century American stagnancy. Real life should be more like Sim City.

mschuster91 1y ago
> A subway line should be buildable within one political term. That used to be the case maybe 50 years ago, when we had the first network built in Munich. The problem is, since then a loooooot of stuff was built underground. Not just more and more tunnels, but also so many subterranean lines for power, POTS, internet... and a lot of what was built 50 years ago was built by literally ripping open a street, excavating tunnel space, building a roof of concrete and backfilling everything with soil. You simply can do this exactly once and you need a wide enough street to do this. Once all these "cheap and easy" routes are built over, it becomes a multi-billion-dollar project as you have to make sure you don't endanger the buildings on top - in Cologne, that cost the lives of two people and destroyed a good portion of the City Archives [1]. > The property tax rate should rise or fall within a time frame that would incentivize people to vote with their feet. People should not be forced to move, at all. Incentivizing movement, okay, but forcing people around like we do now (mostly, by not having any kind of modern jobs in rural areas) has a lot of nasty side effects - not everyone can move, so you get resentment building up against those that did move (eventually culminating in the "these librul cities turn our kids gay!!!" bullshit and, subsequently, the massive urban-rural political disconnect), and a lot of old people in rural areas end up having no one to take care of them in old(er) age, and young people in urban areas don't have kids because they don't have family to support them in raising said children. [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historisches_Archiv_der_Stadt_K%C3%B6ln https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historisches_Archiv_der_Stadt_...

curtisszmania 1y ago

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tombert 1y ago

To me, the clunky and annoying UI of Sim City 2000 is part of the charm of it. Is it dated? Yep, but it's intuitive enough for nine-year-old tombert to have figured it out ok, and to me part of the fun is trying to use the UI quickly enough to put out fires and the like. It could just rose-tinted glasses on my end, very likely honestly, but I still find the entire experience to be pretty fun. I liked Sim City 3000 and Sim City 4, and they are arguably better games, but for me Sim City 2000 hit the right balance of "easy" and "complicated" that I find myself most drawn to. I will load up Sim City 2000 about once a year off of my GOG purchase, and still thoroughly enjoy it, and find myself wasting way more hours than I budgeted for it.

Modified3019 1y ago
I remember being terribly confused by the lack of options for a good while, before somehow finally discovering that some buttons you had to hold for more options. Discoverability aside, it made the UI nicely compact while being easy enough to access, so the city could fill most of the screen instead.
- tombert 1y ago
  Yeah, honestly I have no idea how I figured out the "click and hold" thing. I don't think I read it in a manual, I might have just been messing around and finding it by accident.

ionwake 1y ago

Enjoyed this article on how our perceptions of an env change as we grow older even if its virtual

Ozzie_osman 1y ago

Does anyone know how to actually play Simcity 2000 these days, on say, a Mac or a Nintendo Switch?

superjared 1y ago
https://www.gog.com/en/game/simcity_2000_special_edition https://www.gog.com/en/game/simcity_2000_special_edition
- xyzzy_plugh 1y ago
  Sadly this is the DOS version which is inferior.
DengistKhan 1y ago
An alternative game, Theotown, which may or may not be better, is available on steam and android/iOS.

ermir 1y ago

It speaks to the quality of the SimCity games that they offer something for all ages. I also changed my perspective on a few violent scenes in games when I had a child, I could no longer stomach scenes such as No Russian (iykyk), which I had no problem at all as a teen.

MattGrommes 1y ago

Beating SimCity 2000 was one of my favorite gaming moments in my life. If you haven't seen it and think it's weird to beat a city game; if you fill the entire board with Arcologies, they all become rockets and take off into space. What a thrilling science-fictional way to end the experience. Loved it.

FugeDaws 1y ago

yeh when playing cities skyline i am always traffic managing it seems to be my biggest job to always have 0 traffic in my cities im guessing it boils down to the fact i hate traffic