Tag Archives: Simcity

SimCity 5 coming soon

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It appears that Maxis plans to reboot the SimCity franchise:

Enter SimCity. No really, just SimCity, like when you remake an old-school movie and crib the name unadorned — simple, straightforward, unambiguous. Only this isn’t a remake, it’s “a true rebirth of the franchise,” according to publisher EA and developer Maxis’ press release.

There’s obviously still going to be a drive to make it as accessible as possible, but EA and Maxis claim the reboot “brings the depth of simulation that has been the series hallmark for more than two decades and marries it with next generation accessibility and a robust multiplayer mode, giving players the power to change a world together.”

The emphasis this time appears to be on multiplayer, judging from the initial info-dump. Imagine building “a world that co-exists alongside friends,” in which the choices you make in your city have “long-lasting repercussions that will extend beyond [your] city limits.” You’ll be grappling with “real global challenges such as climate change, the search for renewable resources and natural disasters,” and have to choose “whether to compete or collaborate” with your fellow metropolitan masons.

“Everything you see in the world we sim,” writes EA/Maxis. “Sims in each city will have jobs or can lose them, buy homes, be prosperous or be an economic drain on the city. SimCity is the city builder in which every choice powers real change that affects the character of your city, the state of your region and fellow players within the entire SimCity world. Original fans and newcomers alike will relish the opportunity to build visually and functionally unique cities that take on the character of their choices.”

You can watch the SimCity 5 trailer at the link above.

I grew up playing a lot of SimCity, particularly SimCity 2000 (though I have played plenty of all the other versions). For my money, that version was a great blend of complexity and gameplay. I think the trick for SimCity in the future is rediscovering or updating this balance: making it fun but also making it realistic. To me, the real genius of SimCity was taking real-life situations that we all know (we all live somewhere) and making an interesting game out of it. Along the way, a player would learn some principles about city planning. At the very least, you would learn about different zones and how to connect basic infrastructure (electricity and roads/trains in the original, later including water/pipes and mass transit) to all of the zones. At a more complex level, you could create intricate arrangements of land uses, mixing in civic structures like schools, city hall, parks, stadiums, marinas, and other goodies while having to balance a city budget. All of this could give a player feelings of creativity and control.

I know that people today talk about the “Madden effect” for football fans. The idea here is that through playing a realistic football game, fans learned about the intricacies of the game in a way that they wouldn’t get by watching games on TV or watching highlights on the news or on SportsCenter. For example, Madden players know the difference between different zone schemes in the defensive secondary or different pass routes. Is there a similar effect from SimCity? Would players know the different between a vibrant city and a disjointed place? (This makes me wonder: how many SimCity players built a whole map of suburban sprawl? You could do this in the game but it wasn’t really the point and the maintenance costs, usually per road piece or square of pipes or losing water pressure if it is pumped too far, would make it costly. Were the makers trying to make a point?) Going even further, are SimCity players better civic and social actors after learning more about how the urban world is put together?

You shouldn’t purchase your own town, even for $800k

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If you had a little extra cash, you might think about purchasing your own town. Scenic, South Dakota is available for $800,000:

So, what exactly do you get for your $800k? Quite a lot, actually. You’ll get a dance hall, a saloon, two jails, a train depot, two stores, and some more empty buildings…

True, the town won’t be mistaken for New York or even Green Acres. However, based on the pictures, it does have a certain Old West charm. One can almost picture John Wayne ambling down the street. It does look like a ghost town–and with fewer than 10 residents, it’s mighty close to becoming one.

But, before you rush to purchase this hotspot, you might want to consider the track record of those who purchase towns:

This isn’t the first time an entire town has gone up for sale. Some may remember actress Kim Basinger’s ill-fated purchase of Braselton, Georgia for $20 million. Basinger planned to turn the town into a tourist draw, complete with film festival. But things didn’t quite work out as she planned. She was later forced to sell the town at a huge loss due to financial problems of her own.

And Basinger isn’t alone. As an article from MSN points out, many have purchased towns only to see that the dream of “owning their own zip code” turn into a nightmare. It’s one thing to be a landlord and have to fix a renter’s leaky faucet. It’s another to be responsible for an entire town of faucets (and toilets, and electricity, and crime prevention, and, and, and…)

This article makes owning a town sound difficult. While this story suggests owners get tripped up by infrastructure, I would think the interactions with residents and other people might even be more problematic. Think back to the experience of company towns in America: places like Pullman, Illinois may have been efficient (and profitable?) but eventually didn’t work. Even in a small place like Scenic, the owner would have to interact with existing residents and take full responsibility for decisions.

Perhaps the gameplay of SimCity would help illustrate the issue: in the early days of the game, it was easy to grow a community and Simcity 2000 offered well-known cheat codes that allowed the mayor to do whatever you want (with unlimited money). But with more recent iterations of the game, it is easier to get bogged down in real matters: paying for infrastructure like roads and water and dealing with the concerns of your citizens and advisers. In the end, even small communities have a lot to take care of in order to get up and running and the services and amenities (and taxes/fees) have to be agreeable to residents.

Are there any “successful” examples of wealthy individuals purchasing a town and maintaining or improving the community? Are there any management companies that would handle these responsibilities for a wealthy owner?

The origins of Oregon Trail

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While looking at a column that included some thoughts about the book American Grace, I stumbled across the story of how the computer game Oregon Trail became a sensation. Here is what happened in those early days:

Minnesota’s City Pages tells the story of the game’s early days, when it was an underground sensation, played only by Minnesota schoolkids through a teletype machine installed in a janitor’s closet.

The Oregon Trail — a computer game in which players go on a simulated wagon journey out West, making key decisions along the way (take the Donner Pass or go around?) — was invented by a group of nerdy, computer-programming public school teachers in 1971. It was originally conceived as a board game, but Don Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann, and Paul Dillenberger (all Minnesotans) quickly realized its potential as a computer game, and spent two weeks programming it on a middle-school teletype terminal. Their students played the game without a screen, by taking turns pecking out commands on the console, which forwarded them on by telephone to a mainframe computer; the game’s prompts (“You have dysentery”) came out of a printer. In subsequent years, the game was accessed by kids statewide through the same method.

Everything changed in 1978, after a handwritten bid was submitted by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak of Apple Computer, then just two years old. Apple IIs were installed in schools throughout Minnesota, and the game was rewritten in the form in which millions of students have encountered it since then. Over the past 40 years, 65 million copies have been sold, making The Oregon Trail the most widely played educational game of all time. Nowadays, you can play it on your iPhone for 99 cents.

The Oregon Trail wasn’t just one of the first computer games — it was, as City Pages’ Jessica Lussenhop points out, “one of the first simulation computer games.” In fact the emphasis, for its creators, was on simulation. Looking back, one of the most striking things about the game is its accuracy: The programmers pored over actual settlers’ journals to figure out exactly how often players should break their wagon wheels, get sick, or meet helpful Native Americans, and painstakingly integrated those probabilities into the game. The Oregon Trail made pioneer history more fun — but it also made it more accurate.

Another innovation brought to you by Apple.

In conversations with other people my age, many of whom grew up playing Oregon Trail at school or at home, there is both joy and nostalgia when anyone brings up this game. Looking back it, it isn’t terribly complicated, the graphics were limited, and I’m not sure how much we actually “learned.” Perhaps it was the fact that it was a video game that one was allowed to play at school (along with other beloved games like Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?). However, I must ask: by playing this educational game and the others that followed, have students become more knowledgeable? Have these games contributed to rising educational achievement? (I think the answer to both of these is probably no or the impact is very limited.)

It is also interesting to see this idea that Oregon Trail was one of the first simulation games. I have long been a player of a few of these games, most notably Simcity, starting with a 386 version on a monochrome screen.