It's really not a sleight of hand. The idea that it's natural for it being impossible to have a city with low crime and a high population without making everyone miserable is absolutely ideology, and it's just your own ideology that perceives this as somehow a neutral fact.
Its not progressive to say that without over-policing high crime is inevitable, or that industrialization means we have no choice but to be miserable either. Those are solidly reactionary beliefs.
No, it "absolutely" does not. It could simply be a shortcoming of the developer's reach. You try to simulate a large city and get it a stable utopia! Do I have to remind you that this is something we've yet to accomplish in the real world, either. You expect a single game developer to do it successfully? Will Wright is (presumably) not a mayor, city planner, nor politician; he's a gamedev. Talented and famous, I'll grant you, but not infallible. And we're talking about a game he made 28 years ago from today, at the age of 33.
SimCity 2000 isn't your typical illusion as many games are, either. It's trying to be a fairly accurate simulation of its time. Of course it embeds its creators biases, but it's not really trying to "convey a deep message" using an elaborate facade, like some games are, or theatre, for example. It's a sandbox.
In that game, people care more about still pretty low levels of crime than they care about their health, having a nice income, and so on.
And in addition, that game has crime as something that's simply immutable and that you remove by totalitarian policing.
I never said the game conveyed a deep message. I said that it conveyed the ideology of the creator. Those are very different things - often the second is accidental.
Video games are art. Adding crime in the way it was implemented is an artistic decision. Making crime dependent on policing instead of other, more realistic factors is also an artistic decision (and it's not true that police is the only way to handle crime from a gameplay perspective either). Balancing what exactly the sims are concerned about is also an artistic decisions.
Artistic decisions, especially when they seem obvious, are often ideologically motivated without someone even realising it, and this is both what the writer of Polygon was touching on as well as explicitly on of the things the author of Magnasantis was targetting.
There is a lot of intentional and unintentional emergent states in games, but trying to push narration of something being a win state as if that was a minor jump is not doing that critical reading any favours.
As far as myself, I did take care not to assume that large stable crime free happy cities are inherently desirable in my above comment. Simply the fact that they are impossible still communicates ideology, whether you think they are desirable or not.
I think you have this backwards. The ideology in SimCity is only a tiny reflection of broader ideologies that pervade almost every aspect of modern/urban life and ought to be much more interesting due to their much larger impact. If anything is interesting in SimCity's ideology, it is only what it says about ideology outside of SimCity, as the game itself is trival.
In this case whether a stable large city is to aim for or not in real life or in the game is a bit irrelevant, what's important is that the game's black box allows large, crime free cities if and only if they are a dystopian nightmare. This is how the state was defined and it's backed into the game by design. It's worth noting that someone made it like this and behind that ideology there's a message being passed on through the game.
By testing to find the win conditions in a certain scenario you basically discover what the designer of the system considered to be necessary to win. The coder who wrote the code responsible for this (or their manager) either put their own ideology in code, or put what they believed to be the most accepted by the target audience.
Almost any such creation embodies either the ideology of the creator, or that of the consumer. Sometimes it's boring and sometimes it's interesting to let the genie out of the black box.
you realize, that there are none in SimCity.
You can't make (usable) chairs without conforming space to human physiology. The ideology is in making a chair, not in what chair one makes.
You can however put different ideologies into city builder and get different, perfectly fine city builders.
You could probably create a nice big city that had low crime without dystopian policing, but you might need to build a public park in space that could otherwise be used to pack in a few more apartments.
The idea that what people are willing to suffer and keep the city in a state of self-sufficiency has nothing to do with health, income equality, and so on, but only about crime and the amount of commerces and parks, is also ideological.
The assumption that the highest density city that people are willing to live in means that reducing crime is more important than having healthy and happy people is ideological.
The idea that this is an expected result is also ideological.
I'd say the population limit stems from the game's map size limit. The largest SimCity 3000 map is 32 square kilometers, and Magnasanti packs 6 million residents in there. That's 187,000 people per square kilometer.
For comparison, Manhattan is one of the densest areas in the US, and it has 28,000 residents per square kilometer. Manila, the densest city in the world, has 41,000 per square km.
I am unsure I would describe a city seven times denser than Manhattan as "reasonable", at least in a game designed to replicate cities as they currently exist in the real world, and I am also unsure I would describe the decision to limit the map size in a video game as "ideological".
To note, 187k people per sq. km is not actually unrealistic - there are neighborhoods in the world with this level of density such as Ayal Nasir in Dubai, and even some with this level of density and the same order of magnitude in population such as the Imbaba neighborhood of Cairo in Egypt. But this is a detail and mostly besides the point.
Put it that way - in SimCity as long as crime is down and some other factors are adequate, they won't leave even if they are miserable. But if crime increases, then they leave, even if they are in good health and make a nice income nonetheless.
Doesn't seem that unreasonable, actually. High-income people leave crime-ridden areas, happens approximately everywhere
Also, do you claim to know exactly how and why crime happens?
Yes, but since you've been snarky now I won't tell you.
I think Simcity makes a political comment, and there was literally no way for the game to avoid that.
SimCity does have an ideology, and it does have something to say with how it has weighed it's measurements of citizen satisfaction, but the author seems to fail at capturing that ideology and instead just talks about how minmaxing is bad.
The rest of the article is interesting. There's plenty of people out there that don't even think about how the rules of the game frames the discussions you can have about it. It's just kind of a bad example.
Ho hum. Who lacks ideology? Well, the dead, for starters.
My observation is of the "who smelt it, dealt it" variety: those offering the heaviest charges of bias and ideology are communicating the depth of their own.
But try to zone something for mixed use.
SimCity itself tells you that certain things will happen under certain conditions, and it is generally wrong about those predictions. It's not intended to be an accurate simulation; it's intended to be amusing and to conform to people's intuitions about what they want to happen when they plan their city in a certain way. But people play it and feel they're learning something about how cities actually work.
It absolutely is trying to be an accurate simulation, for its time. That was 28 years ago. Do you remember how slow computers used to be? You can't zone for mixed use because of technical limitations. The simulation takes place on a grid; each grid cell is limited in memory by computer technology; therefore the performance requirements of the simulation dictate that only one thing can exist in one place.
I love that you called it a sleight of hand because that's exactly what it is; just by assuming someone could beat the game, the authors have misunderstood Sim City.
One example: "Scientific simulations, like those used to model climate change, don’t keep their formulas hidden in a black box because replicability is a big part of the scientific method."
But the black box nature of climate models was the core issue in one of the biggest disputes between sceptics and researchers of all time. It went to court and the researcher preferred to lose the suit than reveal his model (Michael Mann). The COVID model from Imperial College that justified lockdowns had to be extracted from the university via FOIA requests which were stonewalled for months. The scientist who wrote it openly claimed in interviews nobody except him understood the model equations, which were all entirely undocumented. Probably the author doesn't know these things, but it shows a rather naive misunderstanding of the true nature of science. Black box models that encode ideological beliefs are common throughout serious research.
The comment about how SimCity doesn't simulate race or gender is also rather ideological. The belief that race and gender are central to everything is both quite new, very much a view of the left and totally USA centric, but SimCity was designed to sell to international markets too. "Cities are built on history, politics, and racial bias" is the sort of comment that gives away the article for what it is: a complaint that a a popular video game wasn't woke. We learn more about Polygon's ideology than that of Will Wright.
Which court case was that?
Sure, not all the design assumptions align quite so neatly with American and right wing sterotypes: suburbs are really inefficient to provide services for and Sims aren't at all bothered about religion in many versions. But they are designed limitations rather than the product of players' imagination.
Because it's a 28-year-old game with the computational limitations of the time. It does not simulate people walking. It does not simulate multiple types of buildings existing in the same plot. It does not simulate building styles (I think?). And it has nothing to do with ideology. No-one could make such a simulation in 1993.
> The art project Magnasanti revealed the contours of the black box when it attempted to “beat” the game that famously doesn’t have a win state [...] Artist Vincent Ocasla accomplished this feat through rigorous trial and error, eventually creating a crime-free city that maintained a stable population of 6 million sims, but only by creating a dystopian nightmare. [...]
> Magnasanti reveals the contours of the black box, showing how citizen health and happiness were ultimately unimportant. What the game considers a successful city doesn’t look at all like one we would actually want to live in.
SimCity presents an open-ended simulation with a wide range of things players can decide to optimize for. An artist once built a city optimizing for population density and low crime to the exclusion of all other factors, and this resulted in a dystopian nightmare where all the simulated citizens were unhealthy and miserable.
But by describing what the artist did as "trying to 'beat' the game", the article pins the blame for the artist's choices on the game itself. Even though SimCity clearly does not think Magnasanti is a good city -- it's constantly flashing up warning messages and graphs showing that all the citizens are miserable and unhealthy! One could just as easily have argued that SimCity's black box is hiding a progressive ideology, one that warns us of the dangers of industrialization and over-policing! (Much like how the board game Monopoly is about the dangers of capitalism.)
In essence, an artist set out to 'beat' SimCity, the artist decided what 'beating' SimCity meant, and the article tricked us into thinking that said something about SimCity.