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chiaki747
@chiaki747

We're thinking back to the concept of gentrification and the ultimate limitation of many city building simulators as we really look into the San Francisco Housing Element. It's brought back my latent criticism for many of these games in how they fail to understand the humanity of the people who live and work in a city.

As Douglas wrote in the piece linked above, and later echoed by Kunzelman in Vice, as the concept of a city is reduced to a system, the ultimate goal becomes an exercise in making number go up. You want more people. You want more agents. You want more money. You want to push the simulation to become more complex within a finite box, which ultimately means you build upwards—and if you're building upwards, such projects assume that these complexes are better in some way than a base-level dwelling, and the ultimate goal is to build beyond basic developments because they enable you to collect the one definitive metric to the success of your mayoral mettle: more tax dollars.

So, of course you want neighborhoods to have schools, and of course you want neighborhoods to have public safety institutions such as police and health care. These are needs that any neighborhood should have, but they become a gateway to success for the video game denizens. High wealth residents pay more tax dollars and that money becomes the metric for judging how successful your city is run. Thus, in games such as Cities Skylines, the highest echelon of development presumes high wealth citizens.


A series of tall tenement blocks in a Sim City 4 city

Sim City 4 managed to strike a semblance of balance in this scenario instead by having low-medium-high tier developments in addition to wealth, so you could have large-developments for low-income residents, but these developments would automatically be subverted to higher-wealth developments the moment city services offered any modicum of quality of life improvements.

Sim City 4 further complicated this by simulating urban blight by downgrading high-wealth buildings to middle and low-income if environmental factors failed to keep them "desirable" enough for its intended tiers, however, ultimately, developing a city meant playing a balancing act for you, the god-given rule of this plot of land to dictate a caste system where the poor will remain poor with lack of access to various services. And if you are a benevolent ruler who believes in things such as "health care for all" or "everyone should have the opportunity to succeed in school," your cities become gleaming utopias with no space for the poors.

A gentrified nice looking city

As an aside, perhaps the game that best managed to balance this was Focus Interactive's Cities XL series, which all things otherwise, was not a good game. XL, at the least, gave you control of what tier of wealth and what level of development you wanted to zone for each plot. Shoddy coding and game-breaking bad mechanics aside, this enabled cities to be equitably developed (should you choose to do so), though players could seldom be bothered to focus on such matters given most of your playtime was spent agonizing over resource management.

Thus, the utopic endgame of city building simulators is to have a highly educated high wealth citizenry who predominantly work in white-collar jobs, and often times that is only achievable by sweeping away any vestige of the "global south." When everyone in your city is too well educated and too rich, they refuse to take jobs at manufacturing industries in town. So the more your city loses its industrial base, the more it assumes that its goods are being furnished by an invisible generator of materials no longer of concern for your city. And this is true in modern American society, as much of its consumer goods, food and luxury items are produced totally outside the context of its consumers' lives.

A slew of level 5 houses in a suburb in Cities: Skylines 1.0

Moreover, opportunity equates to wealth and by the mere ability of residents being able to attend college, it assumes every residential agent in your city wishes to work in a high-wealth or high-education requisite job.

Chilean developer's Urbek City Builder, by contrast, heads off some of these limitations and develops cities based on the nature of each block. Higher-tier housing assumes the presence of schools, but the city develops tenements or condos depending on other extant factors such as proximity to industry and pollution, parks or other impacting factors like churches or commercial facilities. And Urbek also requires balanced growth by removing cash as the growth metric and instead focusing on conceptual resources of "unskilled labor" or "science."

New buildings require investment of labor and some developments (such as factories) regularly consume labor. So high-tier developments like a nuclear power plant might, in theory, not require any low-income labor save for its initial construction, but its requirement for science points would necessitate a university, and that university needs a large base of a highly-skilled educated workforce, and they can only be supported with more middle-income suburbs, who in-turn consume food, necessitating a larger manual labor workforce to support that development, and so on.

Still, even Urbek fails to perfect this balance. In want of "labor", your development of the city makes you choose how a block develops. The late game crunch starts as high-tier developments are limited by a lack of lower-middle-class residents. Cities naturally start to lack basic-skilled laborers as it's increasingly easy to push suburbs into developing into solidly middle to upper-middle income blocks. To aid in this, the game's developer intended strategy is to build housing next factories, where the pollution will automatically relegate any housing development in these areas to shacks and tenements, which can be better developed with the addition of police stations. Another method of development includes the purposeful creation of "poor suburbs" which generate lower-tier labor (Perhaps tongue-in-cheek, these poor suburbs become far more happier with the addition of churches, which transform them into "religious neighborhoods" which produce lower-tier labor while keeping the citizenry content).

"Poor suburbs" in Urbek

Cities Skylines has also had time to grow since its initial release 7 years ago, and perhaps Douglas and Kunzelman had some effect, as the city has introduced new policies to help cities grow more equitably. You can set certain parts of the city to emphasize trade schools and encourage residents to enter the workforce earlier rather than sticking around for a college degree. These conscious policy decisions help simulate a more equitable city where, regardless of city services provided, the city welcomes a more diverse workforce and that lower-income households also deserve services too.

And to bring this back to my initial reference of the San Francisco Housing Element, I think about equity in development through that planning document because the Housing Element focuses on acknowledging the systemic racism the city enacted to shape it into what it is today. Much of the city's "well-resourced" neighborhoods developed with help from redlining and kept historically disenfranchised groups, namely BIPOC people, from moving in. And not only that, but those communities where BIPOC people could live were deemed "blighted" and redeveloped in the previous century.

The Housing Element offers historically disadvantaged neighborhoods relief, focusing new housing stock to be built in formerly inaccessible neighborhoods and, most importantly, handing previously ravaged communities a sense of self-determination by making development goals a community-driven process rather than a city-prescribed process. The community focused approach makes me realize that zoning strategies and city development isn't meant to be a god-mode game. It is perhaps the worst way to learn about cities, because letting one person decide how streets are laid out and where the garbage dump is situated ignores the most complex factor in the equation to building a city: what the people who have to live with your decisions think about it.

Rioters protesting below as mansions sit on top of the hill, inaccessible

It's nonsensical in Cities Skylines for me to sit there and build a neighborhood to roleplay "and this was a middle-income suburb built in the 1960s getting encroached by a growing downtown centre" when I am in full control of figuring out how these neighborhoods can organically grow. And even in Urbek, who am I to judge that a city should become a nightlife district or not based on whether I prescribe a neighborhood bar to be built or not. A truly engaging city simulator would be one that has to play as mediator and take part in the political process. It would be a game such as.... a game such as.... oh no.

The title card for Urban Empire, a terrible 2017 city ruler game.


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in reply to @chiaki747's post:

I just appreciate the somewhat hilarious take that you don't unlock police stations until you've built churches in your city. Though, equally good, the game simply does not require you to technically ever build police stations if you're okay nurturing an anarchist movement within your shantytowns (which is what I do)

this was a great post! I enjoy sims generally in session binges with long gaps between them, and taking a moment to suddenly go 'ah, my optimisation is,, on the ground,, something to question', is so valuable

This was a great read, thank you. One of the things that always annoyed me about city builders is specifically the way zoning works which has always been hierarchical. A block is either a suburban place to live, an urban place to live, an urban place to work or industry. Which always resulted in these sterile and artificial designed cities. What you wrote here explained a lot why this seemed so artificial.

Anyway, on your last paragraphs your proposal for a simulation of people: Have you played Victoria 3? I know it's only tangentially related and still a ways of being great but I think their base systems model nicely what you outline here. A city builder building on such a foundation, where you only control public infrastructure, where buildings, streets and businesses appear organically which you can only control through in- and divestment, where you can only redesign streets that have appeared outside of your control.... Now that sounds interesting.

Victoria not so much, since I get enough of my time sucked up by other empire sims, but I feel there's a bit more organic growth in this fashion through Railroad Tycoon and A-Train games, where investment and divestment is based on your hand as a rail company rather than as an omnipotent god. I personally do like thinking about the way cities grow organically in games like Transport Tycoon where goods and services create impetus for an economy to grow.

It's actually a concept I've also thought about by starting cities in Sim City 4 and some modded cities in Cities Skylines, a concept of asking "why does a city first start growing?" Whether it's a rural agricultural hub that gradually develops or a highway pit-stop on a two-lane country road, I like to see it modeled out organically, even if I'm the one controlling most of the variables.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts, I enjoyed reading this!

An interesting game in this space that I played some of last year is Foundation. It's more of a town-builder than a city-builder, and it doesn't have a contemporary setting, but it does two things I have not seen in any other game in the genre: it does not allow you to build roads OR residential buildings. It's in a protracted and awkward early access phase, and I'm not sure it is going to turn out all that good, but it makes me really happy to see devs trying to shake up the formula (I enjoyed Urbek for this reason too)

https://www.polymorph.games/en/