Simulating means there is granularity about how each element can be seen and touched by the player.

In sim city there are a lot of shortcuts and simplifications. It looks like you have a city, but the more you play, the more it's just a decor, because the game shows a representation, but doesn't let you see the details.

So you see a car, a house, money, a school, but there is no day planning for citizens, they don't have a lifespan, citizen A or B doesn't have a commute with job C or D, they don't have children that you see grow up, you don't see those citizen bring back groceries or corn going out of the farm.

The problem is simulating granular elements of a city or even a village would require a lot of memory and computing power, even today, so back in 1990 or 2000 it was just not possible to have a granular village or city.

I want to see a mixture of The Sims and Sim City, but you can imagine how difficult it is to design such a game.

But in terms of "how directly transferable are lessons learned directly from the model" is always going to depend on the model's assumptions.

Fun fact -- have you ever heard of the "Monocentric city model?" It comes up in a lot of econ papers, and a lot of urban economics, and therefore a lot of real world policy is based on it.

The "Monocentric city model" is about as simplistic as it gets -- it models the city as a LINE. IE, you have a bunch of agents, and they live some distance from the city, and they have different travel/commuting costs proportional to their distance from the city center; let's run that and see what kinds of consequences fall out of it.

Turns out it's actually a pretty good model and generates outcomes that are pretty analogous to what we see in the real world! Is it perfectly representative of the real world? Of course, not, it models the city as a friggin line. But if we're talking about sheer complexity alone, SimCity is already orders of magnitude more complex than this famous economic model. But that in and of itself doesn't mean that a successful SimCity city would make for a successful real world city, because it's not just about sheer complexity, it's about the appropriateness of the assumptions.

The various control planes and randomness of the simulation can be tuned, sure, but if you were to capture all those control inputs you can reconstruct the world event timeline in a determistic timeline.

Starcraft 2 Is a simulation. Replays are just games with all commands timestamped and the simulated world throttling forward and backward through time.

Science

It’s a toy model.

There’s always simplifications made in any model — SimCity’s happened to be made with “fun” in mind.

The rules of both are explicitly set up to be fun not a simplification of some model.

If you don't add all the house rules all kids use to prolong the game, it is quite playable.

For some reason alot of kids love it. I think handling money is the main lure.

And yeah, getting money and property is fun! But the game is supposed to be a 30-45 minute experience.

The solution is for families other games which are better suited especially for younger kids. But Monopoly has established itself as universal family board game.

Simulation or Game is a false dichotomy, there's plenty of opportunity for overlap.

Consider the original X-COM: obviously a game, yet also a simulation, not withstanding that the situation it was trying to simulate was not real. Units with individual statistics, status effects, individual gear with weights and placements that affected movement and actions, etc.

Another example to consider might be the Napoleonic warfare origins of Dungeons & Dragons.

The other kind of simulation where people are trying to understand how systems interact is even further removed in how they are used. Running the exact same hour plus simulation repeatedly while only changing initial conditions isn’t fun, but it can be informative.

So people can argue around MSFS’s trim modeling, ground modeling etc, but the issue isn’t with the physics engine’s specific compromises it’s a more fundamental problem.

To put the dissonance in clearer terms, imagine a book described as "Analyzing interpersonal relationships through the lens of The Sims". Would you take it seriously?

It doesn’t seem like a pedantic distinction to say that the goals of SimCity are different from the goals of simulating reality.

At least in the hardware world, there are simulators (which are faux short cut versions that work reasonably like the real thing) and emulators (which are software versions that act exactly like the real thing, but usually are very slow)

Idea being if you make a Sim City type game but worse, because you are IBM, and then market it to bureaucrats around the world, because you are IBM, they will happily pay you a lot of money, because you are IBM, so that they can point to your simulation as justification for their in/actions. The ass covering is magnificent you just have to feed it a little bit of real data (traffic, power consumption, weather).

Of curse part of what you are simulating is your own understanding and aspirational ideals about how society should function. If you write an essay or a speech people will argue but if you embed values into a game... well, they will still argue but they have to notice it first.

Some will ascribe magical powers of clairvoyance and correctness unto the simulation for reasons that nobody quite understands.

I'm not sure what my point is exactly other than this is potentially a very interesting fulcrum point. Like who is playing whom really in this situation?

[0] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1992-10-02-vw-391-st...

Cities Skylines eventually filled in that gap and if you look at the dedicated community around those games you'll see a heavy emphasis on simulation and very little focus on making it a more fun game. Interest is somewhat split between modeling aesthetics and modeling transit. I think the greatest interest is in modeling societies and economies, but few games seem to make that work except on small scales. There's an old game called City Life that did an commendable job modelling social classes. The early Tropico games had a very engaging economic system. I can't think of any modern games that have impressed me like those, but I would love suggestions.

Nowhere near. If Cities Skylines was a truly accurate simulation:

1. It would be nigh-impossible to bulldoze private property. Every road, once built, would become essentially permanent.

2. Every city would be perpetually cash-strapped, with tax income insufficient to cover the maintenance costs on the infrastructure.

3. If you either raise taxes or reduce spending you would get thrown out of office at the next election.

Thankfully, the creators realised that making it fun was more important than making it accurate.

China builds cities without regard for 1 and 3, and partially 2.

Also, you don't have to consider changing the city part of the simulation. It may just be switching from one test model to another.

My list would probably include: Capitalism and Capitalism 2. I also put a lot of time into Civ1, the original X-Com and Theme Hospital. Not really simulators, but they all had interesting economic models.

It is a simulation, just a simulation game as opposed to simulation software.

You may have a reasonable point, but that doesn't mean that SimCity cannot feature in a book about computer simulation history.

https://rikroots.substack.com/p/why-rik-left-the-neighbourho...