> The game making it impossible to have a stable large city with low crime without dystopian modes of control absolutely communicates the ideology of the creators of the game, conscious or not.

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.

You're missing the point of the author.

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.

I'm still not buying it. The levels of care sims give to each attribute of the simulation could be the result of non-exhaustive game balance testing. They wanted to add crime. They wanted to make crime matter. They wanted something to combat crime, they added police. They tweaked values until it "felt good to play" and then shipped it - a commercial product on a budget and schedule. Zero people were likely employed to analyze how the game's systems might be perceived 30 years later.

That's the entire thing about ideology - you don't do it consciously, for most people the dominant ideology is the unknown knowns.

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.

It does, but so do you somehow assuming that 'stable large city' is something to be aimed for. There's ideology behind what it takes to achieve such goal, just like there's ideology in assuming that is a goal to achieve.

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.

Yes, certainly stable large cities with low crime and happy people being something to aim for has ideology behind it. But so does the game, and the ideology in the game is way more pervasive and interesting.

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.

> the ideology in the game is way more pervasive and interesting.

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.

Perfectly fair within comment, nonetheless my point holds thread-wise.

When you try to "define" a black box, to find its edges, what you're aiming for is irrelevant. You'll give it input and analyze the output to find out what states it can be in and what are the "rules", and use that to characterize the black box.

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.

> By testing to find the win conditions

you realize, that there are none in SimCity.

Of course there are, just not imposed by the game. You set them up for every scenario you decide to play. A win can be to get to any state of the game. For example the win conditions in the scenario proposed by the article seem to be "large crime free city". The rules of the game are hard coded in the "black box" engine and they represent the ideology and mental assumptions of whoever wrote them.

Sure, though this is trivial. Every artifact crated by people shows ideology. Chairs show the ideology of conforming space to human physiology.

As much as I disagree with buran77's use of 'win condition', that is very much not the same.

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.

I was reflecting not so long ago that the biggest unexamined ideology of these city builders exists in to the bulldozer brush. No ecosystem externalities included in this simulation, apart from the occasional newspaper headline about unhappy citizens.

The sleight-of-hand trick in this comment is describing Magnasanti, an exercise in building a city with the literal highest population density possible, as "a stable large city".

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 a fairly high but reasonable population city - SimCity limits population artifically through zoning restrictions - must be a dystopian nightmare is... ideological. In SimCity, citizens are free to leave, and they do if, for example, crime is too high. Why is it then that the best way not to have them leave is to reduce crime and not improve health or reduce pollution? This is a choice the designers made that was probably unwittingly informed by ideology.

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.

> The idea that a fairly high but reasonable population city - SimCity limits population artifically through zoning restrictions

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".

That's really not the point. The idea that what sims care about more is small increases in crime and not health, pollution, work, income inequality, and that's the best way not to get them to leave is absolutely 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.

Imbaba in Cairo sounds pretty dystopian from all the coverage I can find, and the government seems to rely heavily on totalitarian policing to suppress mass uprisings there. And we're talking about an area with, apparently, something like a quarter of the population of Magnasanti.

It's not necessarily the best way, it's just the way that consumes the lowest amount of space in the city. If there's an ideological point to be made here, it's that hospitals are larger than police stations.

...which means that sims care more about crime than they do about pollution, health, etc...

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.

> 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

If everyone is in good health and making decent money, what is the motive for the kind of crime people move away from? The choice to model "crime" as some kind of naturally-occuring resource is already telling.

I'm not talking about motives, I don't know what they are, but I suspect that when crime happens, people prefer to move away if they can.

Also, do you claim to know exactly how and why crime happens?

> do you claim to know exactly how and why crime happens?

Yes, but since you've been snarky now I won't tell you.

Is there any way to describe how a city works and relates to its citizens that isn't political?

I think Simcity makes a political comment, and there was literally no way for the game to avoid that.

Indeed : code is law, or in this case, ideology.