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How Sim City Changed the Game of Planning Edwin Gardner The God complex could acquire new meaning for an upcoming generation of architects and planners. Some of them played a ‘God game’ growing up called Sim City. It’s God’s point of view minus the attitude. As teenagers they learned to operate within the dynamic forces of their own home-grown cities. While these boys and girls have exchanged the sandbox for the construction site, Sim City has changed its scope from city planning to social engineering.

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How Sim City Changed the Game of Planning Edwin Gardner The God complex could acquire new meaning for an upcoming generation of architects and planners. Some of them played a ‘God game’ growing up called Sim City. It’s God’s point of view minus the attitude. As teenagers they learned to operate within the dynamic forces of their own home-grown cities. While these boys and girls have exchanged the sandbox for the construction site, Sim City has changed its scope from city planning to social engineering.

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games underlying principles. ’A fundamental aspect of the paper was to stress how it reflected real world conditions, and what aspects were ignored or sent to a second plane.’3 Last year another incarnation of Sim City was released: Sim City Societies. This time it’s a different Sim City. The rules of the game have changed. Where the object of desire in the game used to be the ‘the city’, now it’s the ‘society’ it houses. What are the tools and rules of Sim City in its new guise, where the Godlike mayor has turned social master-planer? The game revolves around six societal energies: productivity, prosperity, creativity, spirituality, authority and knowledge. These energies manifest themselves in the kinds of buildings you put in your city. A certain building embodies a certain program with regard to certain societal energies. The clown school is a happy fairground looking building, which will stimulate creativity around it. The cryogenic prison is where you can effectively exercise your authority and freeze unproductive members of society.

In contrast to the old Sim City where a city grows from a sketchy composition of interlaced with infrastructure and tweaked by tax policies, now you must choose a combination of buildings which radiate a cocktail of social energies to effect the city and its citizens. Instead of architecture following society, now society follows architecture. The script of the city is no longer just the interrelation of the functionalities of zones, electricity, laws and taxes, but an organism with citizens as its blood cells. Citizens are pumped through society’s multiple hearts: its working places, its housing and its venues. These multiple hearts irradiate citizens with the six social energies because in the end your citizens are society. In the real world one could say that most of these social energies are more or less balanced, but in the game you can really force your society in certain directions, from Orwellian dystopia to artist colonies and suburban utopia to dictatorial hyper-capitalism. It’s all possible, but the operating system under which the six social energies function is still the market economy, and in this game even God needs money. In this case it’s up to God how many hours he wants his citizens to work per day, how many days a week, and how he will keep his citizens at it. If citizens are unhappy and go on strike, God’s tools for countering this are ‘venues‘: theaters, malls, theme-parks, but also gulags. These are basically different ways to condition your society, some more benevolent, others more authoritarian. So what kind of God are you?

Although the game won’t say if you’re evil or good, there are enough clues in the esthetics your city develops. Generic music will change, all of a sudden CCTV cameras spring up on the facades of your buildings and the ambient color of the city changes from bright blue skies to a murky brown haze. So while you’re exercising your social engineering skills, the game designers have built in some mood engineering of their own. In addition to the esthetic hints, your conscience is played upon by your citizens. Each one indicates their mood on an individual happiness scale. So how would you feel if your society consisted of a happy few successful industrialists exploiting the city’s workers who are on the verge of depression in the factories and sweatshops of the elite?

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The next generation of architects, urbanists and planners got their first lessons in their trade before they entered the university or the schools of their respective disciplines. They didn’t learn their first lessons from a book, from their parents or a teacher.

They learned it from a computer game, a computer game in which you couldn’t win, a game without a plot, a game without game over. Revolutionary at the time, nobody could conceive that a game in which winning was not the objective would sufficiently engage players, let alone become one of the biggest hits in the gaming industry. The game is Sim City.

I remember sitting in a small attic room fixated on the monitor (black and white) of my XT computer (imagine a hard drive of ten megabytes and a working memory (RAM) of a fraction of a megabyte!). I sat there for hours on end, making a city, watching it grow, making the right configuration of residential, commercial and industrial zones, sprinkling in a good distribution of fire and police stations across the city and keeping my citizens, or Sims as they are called, from rioting out of discontent with their mayor’s policies. That’s what you were, the mayor, but also master planner, urbanist and politician. In short, you were God. Sim City in this sense was the birth of a new genre in gaming: the God Game, because you could not only create everything, you could also destroy it. There was this dangerous array of buttons with which you could unleash tornados, earthquakes, floods and even Godzilla like monsters upon your city.

Yet even God has to play by rules. Although they can be bent, they can’t be broken.

Sim City was the brainchild of game designer Will Wright. He designed the algorithms that guide the choices in the game. There were many factors to calculate: optimum ratios and the proximitys of the three zone types, commercial, residential and industrial, to each other. So Sims like to live close to commerce and away from industry. Commerce wants good infrastructure; industry needs a huge power supply and flourishes best if you tweak the tax and pollution laws in their favor. The kind of problems you’d solve as mayor included traffic congestion, budget worries (somehow there was never enough cash), power-grid failures and crime. But the rules upon which the game was built weren’t purely Wright’s invention, he had ‘coauthors’ who are probably more familiar in the architecture and planning circles. For Wright the inspiration mainly came from Jay Forrester’s Urban Dynamics1 and Christopher Alexander’s essay ‘A City is Not a Tree’.2 Since its initial release in 1989, Sim City has been continually developed. Sim City 2000 (1993), Sim City 3000 (1999) and Sim City 4 (2003) evolved and expanded over the years parallel to the explosion of the computer into our everyday lives. Sim City added more and more planning parameters, sustainable energy options and added in addition to a flat topdown God view, birds eye views and eventually street view and more God like tools such as terraforming.

Yet the game’s basic premise remained the same. In the education of student planners and decision makers a Sim City analysis exercise has been used to help students understand the dynamics of planning and governance. For example, David Lublin, Professor in the Department of Governance at American University, explains how his students wrote papers analyzing the

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Sim City lets you learn about certain dynamics which are also active in the real world. In this case it lets you learn about the dynamics of a society, but of course this simulation also has a source code which limits the kind of things we can learn from it. The market economy is a given for instance, but what is perhaps more noteworthy is that the esthetics of the game give an implicit judgment. This isn’t a problem really.

The Orwellian perspective is communicated as something bad, although few will have a problem with this.

More problematic is that the transparent facades or sunny skies may not necessarily cover an open and balanced society. Singapore is nice on the surface, but the regime that hides behind that surface is less benevolent than its façade. Although the game allows social conflict, you, the player, remain instrumental in bringing this about through building specific venues in a context that conflicts with it.

Therefore I propose an update for Sim City Societies: a feature called neighbors. Nearby cities, outside of your view in the game and built by other gamers who upload and share their cities and connect them to each other influence your game play. In this update players would be confronted with refugees (economic as well as political) leaving or coming to your city, what kind of immigration policy will you put in place? Perhaps your citizens have reached perfect happiness, but somehow they are missing something, what will they do, where will they go? Will your openminded city fall victim to populism, or will you be the first to successfully establish a genuine utopia?

These considerations once again raise critical questions for the game designers as well as its players.

The designers will have to write rules that govern the game, and in this case not buildings radiating social energies and contaminating the blood vessels of a societal organism also known as your city. In this case they have to write the script of human behavior itself and calculate the basis upon which individuals make decisions. Would Maslow’s pyramid suffice? Should emotions, intelligence and memory play a part? What would happen if your citizens were actually able to learn?

And what would a gamer take from playing this game, especially those who may one day become planners and architects? What if their citizens fled to a neighboring city and learned about communism came back and spread the word? What if communism seemed a very tempting alternative in contrast to the regime you’ve been exercising over them? What if your people declared you, the gamer, the God of the game, dead? What if they supported regime change and installed a new government? Perhaps societies do have a moment of game over. What would you, future architect, learn from that? Would you learn that you can lose, but can’t win? Or that no matter the result your computer always anew: ‘New Game?’

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Jay W. Forrester, Urban Dynamics, Cambridge, MA (MIT Press) 1969.

Christopher Alexander, ‘A City is Not a Tree’, Architectural Forum, no. 1 and 2, 1965.

Daniel G. Lobo, ‘Playing with Urban Life’, in: Borries, Walz and Böttger (Eds.) Space Time Play. Basel/Boston (Birkhäuser) 2007.

The top- down city view in the city editor, Sim City on the Macintosh (1989)

Citizens request lobby for money to build a stadium, Sim City on the PC (1989)

An overview of info-graphic maps and timeline displaying: population density, growth rate, crime rate, traffic density, power grid and land value, Sim City on the PC (1989)