![]() I would do bold things, like taking out a huge bond issue to fund several new schools, and then see my efforts wither. ![]() I had many moments of frustration in the game-times when I rushed into action to fix something terrible in ManjooVille only to be stymied by the inherent inertia of civic life. After all, part of the fun of previous versions was that you could exercise complete control over a city if fire raged across your land, you didn’t need to wait to hire firefighters to put it out.īut I never felt SimCity stray from its supreme goal: keeping it fun. You might wonder whether this is all too realistic-whether, in trying to replicate the more numbing aspects of urban reform, SimCity risks losing what has made it so addictive. You’re just waiting for these people to get from their houses to the police station to be police officers so they can get into their police cars so they can race across town and stop this robbery.” So you put down your police department, and now it sends out a call to say, Who wants to be a police officer? So you’re watching this robbery unfold and meanwhile you’re saying to yourself, Come on guys, sign up as police officers! You’re watching people amble over to be police officers, and you really feel anxious about it. “But in the new SimCity, now you actually need to hire police officers, and they need to go out and stop crime. You frantically put down police departments while that’s going on to stop him.” In the old SimCity, that was all you had to do-as soon as you put down your police station, nearby crime would magically abate. “Say you have a criminal who goes into a building to rob someone. “The most interesting stuff that stands out to me is around the drama of criminality,” Quigley says. As I was playing, I couldn’t help thinking of The Wire- SimCity mimics that show’s God’s-eye view of urban disrepair, and in some moments even its crushing bureaucratic lethargy. “The whole city was just an abstract, top-down, statistical representation of how a city worked.” It was, in other words, a simulated simulation.Įven though SimCity’s overall tone remains comic and cartoony-your people speak in an indecipherable chatter, and many buildings have self-deprecating names (Roach Studio Apartments, The Flea Pit hotel)-in its exquisite detail, the new game can sometimes evoke much more serious portrayals of urban life. “That’s because they weren’t really there,” says Ocean Quigley, a longtime game designer at Maxis, the studio that makes SimCity. Indeed, if you looked closely at SimCity’s screen, you’d often notice cars and people fade in and out of view. Early computers didn’t have the horsepower to keep track of how every individual’s deteriorating health might change how he behaved, and how those behaviors might ricochet across the city. ![]() The game’s designers knew this was something of a hack, but they had no choice. For instance, if you decreased funding for your city’s hospitals, SimCity would simply apply a macroeconomic function to approximate how increased levels of sickness would affect the overall economy. Instead, under the hood, the game has always modeled the city the same way the Soviets did-from the top down. In truth, SimCity’s simulation engine has never had a place for simulated citizens.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |