I wrote the very long expository comment in that article (when it came out). I really think that many industrial processes would make surprisingly good (or bad) video games – it's a novel training method at the very least, and I think Sim Refinery was way ahead of its time. There's a fine line between "fun" and "simulation" for many of these things.

You're quite right that Ars Technica appears to just package articles from HN and Reddit at times though...

I love looking back at Sim City and thinking, "damn - no 'pandemic' catastrophe!" and feeling that this is one reason why my generation is so ill-equipped to deal with present day.

But if there was a Godzilla monster, we'd be fine.

As a kid I always struggled with Sim City because I couldn't make sense of the zoning. Only as an adult I eventually learned that the problem was that Germany (where I'm from) approaches zoning very differently from the US.

Ha! Too true.

It is very flawed. In the US mindset, so long as there was a freeway between commercial and residential, you are good.

I would enjoy, "Sim livable Small City"

There's a lot of truth to this.

This is how machine learning works.