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.