"Screenshots suggest cities more complex than suburban plots are possible in Metropolis 1998."
Which sounds good, but naturally, all such simulators bake in assumptions about what good urban planning is. These are the kinds that get rewarded by the simulator. SimCity bakes in the awful postwar fetish for suburban sprawl and rigid zoning, for example. Perhaps it isn't always done explicitly - game developers could very well be absorbing prevailing sensibilities and expectations about urban planning unwittingly, for example. Most people today think suburban sprawl is just a fact. They even find it desirable, as that is what they are expected to want or what they grew up with themselves.
What I would like to see is a simulator based on traditional principles of urban planning or the 15 minute neighborhood or whatever. This could have the benefit of stirring the imagination of future urban planners to look beyond broken postwar patterns.
(Side note: the Venice Biennale this year features more examples of sustainable architecture and green adaptations of existing buildings, which is a welcome change compared to the usual practice of the weird architecture Olympics where vain architects compete to maximize how bizarre they can make a building, which is not to say beautiful or useful.)
Sure, but I think doing this would actually make it fun. The weird, inhuman assumptions SimCity and other simulators make, I argue, make those games less fun, because they leave you with a city that looks offensive. You're no longer managing or building a city with good vision in mind. You're just some boring manager operating within boring rules.
"Screenshots suggest cities more complex than suburban plots are possible in Metropolis 1998."
Which sounds good, but naturally, all such simulators bake in assumptions about what good urban planning is. These are the kinds that get rewarded by the simulator. SimCity bakes in the awful postwar fetish for suburban sprawl and rigid zoning, for example. Perhaps it isn't always done explicitly - game developers could very well be absorbing prevailing sensibilities and expectations about urban planning unwittingly, for example. Most people today think suburban sprawl is just a fact. They even find it desirable, as that is what they are expected to want or what they grew up with themselves.
What I would like to see is a simulator based on traditional principles of urban planning or the 15 minute neighborhood or whatever. This could have the benefit of stirring the imagination of future urban planners to look beyond broken postwar patterns.
(Side note: the Venice Biennale this year features more examples of sustainable architecture and green adaptations of existing buildings, which is a welcome change compared to the usual practice of the weird architecture Olympics where vain architects compete to maximize how bizarre they can make a building, which is not to say beautiful or useful.)