A comparison of city building games
I became addicted to SimCity 2000 in 1996 when I was in economics grad school. I loved it, but was so frustrated by the neoliberal assumptions built into the game.The game rewarded strategies that were not backed up by empirical study, or even common sense: You could lace a city with rail from residential to industrial and commercial zones, and the people would still clamor for more and wider roads; There were no mixed use zoning (You cannot shop in your neighborhood?); Your people would demand more police and if you didn't give it to them, they'd riot!The game rewarded you if you tried to make a California town. (But not Davis — no bike paths!) The city government could not build public housing … (The majority of housing in Helsinki is publicly owned).I wanted to be able to twiddle the parameters based on the way real people and cities have been observed to behave. New study comes out that says that people seek out 15 minute walkable neighborhood? Go to the settings panel adjust the parameters accordingly … The people should riot if you give them too many cops.When Yannis Varoufakis took a job as house economist at Valve (before he was appointed as Finance Minister of Greece), I thought it might be a good time to pitch the idea to them, but he left soon after.