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.