![]() Should planners pay any attention to such games, beyond their recreational possibilities? Despite SimCity’s self-professed status as a simulation, and the range of sophisticated data queries that can be run in the most sophisticated of the games, they can never match the complexity of a real city, so their value as a simulation of real cities is limited. What Do City-Builder Games Offer the Planning Profession? Yet despite these attempts to broaden the approach, the classic SimCity model has proven the most enduring, with its ultimate iteration, the venerable SimCity 4, still readily available more than seven years after its initial release – an eternity in the realm of computer games. SimCity Societies (2007), an offshoot of the core SimCity series, had mayors try to balance and choose between various “societal values:” productivity, prosperity, creativity, spirituality, and authority. City Life (2006), for example, tried to take the focus from hard infrastructure and service provision to an ersatz form of social planning, with the player managing the interaction between six social groups: elites, suits, blue collars, have-nots, fringes, and radical chics. Other city-builder games, however, have taken the idea of a virtual planner in different directions. These basic mechanics have become more sophisticated, but nevertheless remained essentially unchanged in the subsequent SimCity games, culminating in SimCity 4 in 2003. Wright’s game-play was based on a high-level view of town planning practice: players outlined zones (residential, commercial, and industrial) and built hard infrastructure such as roads, trains, and power stations as well as services such as schools, hospitals, and police stations. The fundamental inspiration of the game was to make play essentially open-ended: while the game included various indicators as to how things were going (a city budget, approval ratings) there was no way to win, allowing players to tinker with their cities as they saw fit. The original SimCity was invented by game designer Will Wright in 1989, and let players act as “mayor” of a virtual city that they built and governed. But what do SimCity and other city-builder games say – and teach – about our profession? It’s possible that SimCity has done more than any other single source to disseminate information about what urban planners do, especially amongst younger sections of the population. Yet urban planners can claim a disproportionate prominence in the area of computer games: since 1989, one of the most persistent game genres has been city-builder games, most famously epitomised by the SimCity series. When it comes to the pop-culture representation of various professions, doctors, lawyers and the police have traditionally been the most heavily represented on television.
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