I love big cities; hope I can live in one someday. Those great mountains of brick and steel churn through my heart in the same way I suppose regular mountains do for the more sane. Since I was a kid, I've dreamed of living in NYC; I think kid-me saw it as a sort of platonic form of cities, not a city but The City (a naive but understandable thought for a child). Alas, my dream has been spoiled by New York's decision, over the past couple decades, of repositioning itself as the Anor Londo of the US. My dreams have instead looked towards the more financially modest city of Chicago, a place my partner and I plan on relocating to in the next few years. Now Chicago's a mighty town, filled with a certain brawn and brilliance that's all too rare in cities these days, and a respectable choice of big city living for the non-ludicrously rich. I've often seen it being called 80% of the NYC experience at half of the cost. (But what I'd do for that extra 20%...!)
As you've probably intuited by my unbridled optimism, I've never actually lived in a city, being stuck in numerous Midwestern suburbs throughout my life. (I've no qualms against people who prefer to live in suburbs, but I myself am firmly against them. I get the same feeling being in an American suburb as people with seasonal affective disorder do on a dark January night, or a marine biologist in Kansas.) My love of cities as a child was always lived vicariously through the media I consumed, and the occasional visit to St. Louis for a Cardinals game. I remember coming home from a Cards game, six or seven years old, and being more in awe at the great big buildings I saw than I was at Pujols' batting. I'd get out my Megabloks in the living room and try creating the skyscrapers that I saw; I'd build em as big as I was! My love for the city was founded on an aesthetic fascination for a world that looked so different from the big-box retailers and single family houses I was used to. It was bigger and denser and more fun.
But SimCity was different. I'm not sure how I got ahold of it, if my mother bought me it or if it was a hand-me-down (we had a bunch of old 90s Maxis games lying around). SimCity challenged child-me's purely aesthetic infatuation of cities, instilled it with a new dimension of thought. Cities, according to SimCity, were not just colorful playgrounds but living beings with needs and problems; not paintings but symphonies. They were something that could be systematized with a pattern logic, their structures not mere whims and fancies but the scientific parceling of space and resources based on the needs of rational agents. This is all pretty commonplace to anyone reading this, but to child-me, it blew my mind. In a way, it disenchanted my childlike view of the world, but re-enchanted it by making it something I could understand and thoughtfully interact with. That re-enchantment of the world through rational inquiry came to be something of a precursor to my now-adult self's fascination with reading theory and philosophy.
Anyway, child-me was hooked. I began an almost Quixotic quest to retrofit my life through the eyes of urban planning. Christ, if undiagnosed autism couldn't do child-me's social life in, then blabbering about zoning density and city ordinances surely did! I remember drawing air pollution maps of my school playground in my notebook (the dust kicked up by the school bus was the chief source of pollution). I'd use to bike around town and try to guess a neighborhood's zoning density by how many houses were on each block. When my mother complained about traffic in town, I recreated my hometown in the game and tried to see if I could fix it with public transportation. I think I even considered emailing my town's mayor with my solution at one point!
Playing SimCity (4 in this case, since it's the one I played most as a kid) as an adult is interesting, because even now I think the game's systems hold up strongly. They have such a rigor to them that adeptly simulates the creative challenge of real-life city planning. To give an example: say you have a crime problem in a part of your city. You can help resolve this issue by putting a police station in that part. But police stations within the game do not have an all-nullifying effect on crime: they reduce any crime within their area of effect but don't completely remove it (the police can't be omnipresent after all!). Instead, you have to use other strategies in tandem with this, such as enacting city ordinances that encourage would-be criminals to go to libraries or museums, or upzoning existing development. I think the most profound part of this approach, of balancing the game such that the player is forced to think of alternative avenues to resolve city problems, is its impetus towards promoting a more vigorous political imagination in its players. It's a little surface-level, sure - I'm certain any Europeans reading this are chuckling - but in the US, problems such as crime in the popular sphere are often seen very unidimensionally, as something that The Cops need to resolve, rather than approaching it from a broader socioeconomic perspective. SimCity's approach is imperfect but it had a strong effect on me as a child and it still manages to inspire.
Many of the caveats I have with SimCity 4 (and the series as a whole) as an adult stem from the gaps left between this approach, the sort of exclusions that’d leave the eyebrow of a real-life city planner firmly hoisted at full-mast. The lack of a weightedness towards the effect of automobile-dominated transit is a big one, classically exemplified through an interview with Stone Librande, the creative director of the 2013 SimCity reboot. In the interview, Librande expresses the shock he felt when measuring the size of parking lots in real-life for the game's preproduction, saying that he "quickly realized there were way too many parking lots in the real world" and felt the need to reduce them ingame to better fit the game's simulation.
I think a bigger issue, however, comes from the game's philosophy towards city design as a whole. I read a quote earlier from art critic Robert Hughes lamenting the planned city Brasília, calling it the result of "perfectly decent, intelligent, and talented men [...] thinking in terms of space rather than place". Brasília's development is a rabbit hole I've yet to go down, but from what little I've gathered, it's a prime example of early modernist urban design alongside such movements as City Beautiful, a desire to plan the city from a top-down rationalist perspective. Its chief failure comes from an inability to recognize the organic development inherent in communities and a desire to wrestle away their inhabitants' control in favor of a lofty systematization: an aim to see the city not as a community but as a machine devoid of historicity and placehood. SimCity, I think, perfectly imbibes this mentality: a vision of the city as an individual godking creation that seems to exclude the agency of the very people who live in it. There's this feeling one gets while playing SimCity that the city they're building is empty of real people. Cities in the game are not defined by the needs of residents, but by the needs of the city itself as an abstract entity: things such as crime or health are never investigated holistically from the lives of people but are instead treated as these abstract little Sims needsbars that need to be filled. Crime, for instance, isn’t simulated as an occurrence naturally resulting from residents’ immediate needs and desires, it’s just a thing that randomly crops up as your city gets bigger. You'll never see anything like homeless people or political interests manifest within SimCity because these are but mere glitches in its well-oiled city-machine. Destroying a row of houses to make way for an interstate in the game does not incur any human cost because the human factor is not present, is not even really simulated to begin with.
In a similar vein, there's another issue that poked around in the back of my head that might be the most troublesome exclusion in SimCity playing it today: that of race. To study the development and history of Western urban communities in any manner resembling intellectual coherence is a fruitless effort without understanding racial prejudice. No amount of neutral SimCity-esque rationalism can bring one closer to understanding why the northern half of St. Louis looks like it's been shelled by bombs, or why cities like NYC have been carved up with interstates to the suburbs. I don't bring this up as a way to wag a finger at SimCity: I don't think every simulation game of this sort necessarily needs to come armed with something important to say about topics like these, and I'm not even sure including something like race as a game mechanic would be possible without coming across as deeply insensitive. I think any computer game that lies adjacent to real-world subjects is bound to be wrapped up in real-life controversy, that’s just to be expected. That being said, SimCity's blindness towards race (or really any modicum of socioeconomic rank), in tandem with the faults I mentioned in previous paragraphs, lend it a feeling that comes across as increasingly naive at the very least. History has taught us that the spatial dynamics of urban planning have as much opportunity to oppress as they do to help.
Again, my approach with these criticisms aren't to chastise SimCity; they're exploratory avenues of thought, possibilities for a greater and more involving city simulator. In truth, the most disappointing thing about SimCity is that its legacy has never been properly fulfilled. I've been biting my tongue about this but I'll just say it: Cities Skylines, the oft-considered successor to SimCity, is an abject failure in this regard. Cities Skylines not only fails to expand upon SimCity's systems but actually regresses upon them in the decade-plus since its release. Gone is the mechanical rigor and challenge of SimCity's mechanics. Rarely is there ever a need to approach a problem in Cities Skylines from multiple angles like there is in SimCity; crime is as easy as stamping an omnipresent police station, health is as easy as stamping an omnipotent hospital. Cities Skylines symbolizes a trend I've noticed in simulation-adjacent video games where the player has been ascended to a primacy beyond even the game's mechanics, manifesting itself in a constant desire to prostrate itself to them with dazzling visual customization. For once I'd like to see a city simulator whose claims to improvement are not how good the Steam Workshop train stations look or how curved you can make the roads, but genuinely new multidimensional mechanics that the player has to keep track of, ones that loop into each other and push the player: a city sim with a life and bite of its own. These sorts of mechanics exist in grand strategy games like Victoria II (ironically published by the same company as Cities Skylines!), why can’t we have that in a city sim?
The great thing is, I think there's never been a better time for such a city simulator. Not just due to the advancement of technology since SimCity 4, but I think even the demand for such a game has grown to new heights. There's this mindshift I've sensed among my age group, the older Gen Z to younger Millennial range, of a newfound desire for urbanism in their lives. I don't know if it's just a chimera of social media feedback loops, but more and more twenty-somethings I've come across have gotten tired of living in decaying car-dominated suburbs and have expressed a desire to live in vibrant urban environments with walkability and mixed-use zoning. The environmental and health benefits of such spaces have been increasingly proven and stressed in popular political conversation. I bring up the possibilities in the paragraphs above not as a way to one-up SimCity, but instead to keep the torch lit for this new generation. The ethos of Maxis in the 90s has always rooted itself in my heart ever since I played their games as a kid; I think they were one of the few developers of the time to recognize the transformative educational possibility of computer games, a medium capable of simulating and expressing the real-life world and generating reflective thought on them. People like to joke about such DOS oddities like SimEarth and SimAnt, but those titles to me represent an early, humble attempt at using games to generate a scientific fascination of the world around us, a fascination that took hold of me as a wide-eyed child. One of these days I’d love to see a city sim that takes Maxis’s fascination of the real world to the next level, complete with a mechanical rigor capable of keeping the player on their toes. Imagine a city sim where each resident has their own finances simulated, where the careless demolishing of a local commercial tract causes them to lose their jobs and resort to a life of crime from their own simulated physical needs. Or imagine a city sim where residential political interests like HOAs are simulated, and the player has to constantly keep under their whims lest they take their tax revenue to the local suburbs. To many it may seem mundane, but to me I’d love such a game; hope I can play it someday.