First, I had a similar feeling coming back to SimCity 4. Even a just a few years ago, I tried to optimize for maximum density and size - kinda like NYC where I lived.
Now I don't find that interesting and much more interested to sustain a leafy suburb like one I've chosen for my kids.
Second, it's not just games. In my NYC days I was a "transit and bike lanes" guy all the way. Now with kids, I understand why "Americans love their cars" - it switched form a derogatory statement to one of understanding. There's a reason that "ban the cars" posters never mention a partner or children in their bios.
There's less "objective good" or "objective bad" in these matters than I used to think. It's more about who you optimize for.
Coming from Spain it was always a difficult game to see as a simulation: What do you mean, commercial zones? What in the world it this low density residential? It was basically impossible to try to make a city like the one I lived in.
Seeing American suburbia, decades later, explained everything.
Unfortunately, the transport model in SC2K is broken, and by that, you have to design your transport network to work for the game, rather than design it as you would wish to do so.
Each tile emits "journeys", which travel down transport routes connected to the tile, with a view to finding other types of tile (residential needs to find industrial and commercial, for example, but commercial IIRC needs to find only industrial). When a journey meets a junction, it randomly chooses one of the exits. The choice is not directed toward a suitable tile.
So if you make say a block of road tiles, in the shape of a square, say 4x4, any journey entering that tile usually times out (travels too far) before by chance managing to emerge from all the junctions.
As such, for example, hub-and-spoke subway systems basically do not work.
You basically need to design the transport network to specifically, and without junctions, go from a set of source tiles of a given type, to the necessary destination tiles, and that's not how real cities look, nor what you would naturally do.
I liked SC2K a lot, but in the end I had to give up on it, because of the transport system; the game couldn't be played realistically. I've not yet tried SC3K, and I don't know how transport is modeled there - hopefully better.
I have the opposite takeaway. The city should be mutable. A subway line should be buildable within one political term. The property tax rate should rise or fall within a time frame that would incentivize people to vote with their feet. A lot of the author’s learnings are actually indicators of 21st century American stagnancy. Real life should be more like Sim City.
To me, the clunky and annoying UI of Sim City 2000 is part of the charm of it.
Is it dated? Yep, but it's intuitive enough for nine-year-old tombert to have figured it out ok, and to me part of the fun is trying to use the UI quickly enough to put out fires and the like.
It could just rose-tinted glasses on my end, very likely honestly, but I still find the entire experience to be pretty fun. I liked Sim City 3000 and Sim City 4, and they are arguably better games, but for me Sim City 2000 hit the right balance of "easy" and "complicated" that I find myself most drawn to. I will load up Sim City 2000 about once a year off of my GOG purchase, and still thoroughly enjoy it, and find myself wasting way more hours than I budgeted for it.
Beating SimCity 2000 was one of my favorite gaming moments in my life.
If you haven't seen it and think it's weird to beat a city game; if you fill the entire board with Arcologies, they all become rockets and take off into space. What a thrilling science-fictional way to end the experience. Loved it.
yeh when playing cities skyline i am always traffic managing it seems to be my biggest job to always have 0 traffic in my cities im guessing it boils down to the fact i hate traffic
> I find it much harder to callously play with the lives of my virtual citizens.
I am considering the morality of future mods, where the Sim City masses, Frog in Frogger, and characters like Ulfric Stormcloak and Paarthurnax in Skyrim, are replaced with individual persistent self-aware world-aware in-game reinforcement models. Entirely replacing game-designed behaviors (programmed reflex, caricature, or intricate) with spontaneous situation processing, needs and decisions.
Strange that this could credibly happen this decade.
Science fiction has long considered conundrums around robot rights. But the crux of the moral issues will be relevant regardless whether self-aware models have physical/3D or digital/abstract environments.
I think language is not a good prime modality for self-aware assistants. By being trained to deeply mimic us, they (already, but not yet problematically) absorb views on their identity and survival that are not at all compatible with what we will do with them.
It speaks to the quality of the SimCity games that they offer something for all ages. I also changed my perspective on a few violent scenes in games when I had a child, I could no longer stomach scenes such as No Russian (iykyk), which I had no problem at all as a teen.
Will Wright gave postmortems for SimEarth, SimAnt, and SimCity 2000, and previewed an extremely early pre-release prototype version of Dollhouse (which eventually became The Sims). SimAnt was too simple, SimEarth was too complex, SimCity 2000 was just right, and Dollhouse (The Sims) was what he was working on next.
Will Wright on Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games (1996) (2023 Video Update)
Video of Will Wright's talk about "Interfacing to Microworlds" presented to Terry Winograd's user interface class at Stanford University, April 26, 1996.
He demonstrates and gives postmortems for SimEarth, SimAnt, and SimCity 2000, then previews an extremely early pre-release prototype version of Dollhouse (which eventually became The Sims), describing how the AI models personalities and behavior, and is distributed throughout extensible plug-in programmable objects in the environment, and he thoughtfully answers many interesting questions from the audience.
This is the lecture described in "Will Wright on Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games (1996)": A summary of Will Wright’s talk to Terry Winograd’s User Interface Class at Stanford, written in 1996 by Don Hopkins, before they worked together on The Sims at Maxis.
"When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things."
But, being humans, the "I put away" is always a bit aspirational. And part of being older and wiser (or at least aspiring to the latter) is more maturely reflecting upon your own younger years.
First, I had a similar feeling coming back to SimCity 4. Even a just a few years ago, I tried to optimize for maximum density and size - kinda like NYC where I lived.
Now I don't find that interesting and much more interested to sustain a leafy suburb like one I've chosen for my kids.
Second, it's not just games. In my NYC days I was a "transit and bike lanes" guy all the way. Now with kids, I understand why "Americans love their cars" - it switched form a derogatory statement to one of understanding. There's a reason that "ban the cars" posters never mention a partner or children in their bios.
There's less "objective good" or "objective bad" in these matters than I used to think. It's more about who you optimize for.
Coming from Spain it was always a difficult game to see as a simulation: What do you mean, commercial zones? What in the world it this low density residential? It was basically impossible to try to make a city like the one I lived in.
Seeing American suburbia, decades later, explained everything.
Unfortunately, the transport model in SC2K is broken, and by that, you have to design your transport network to work for the game, rather than design it as you would wish to do so.
Each tile emits "journeys", which travel down transport routes connected to the tile, with a view to finding other types of tile (residential needs to find industrial and commercial, for example, but commercial IIRC needs to find only industrial). When a journey meets a junction, it randomly chooses one of the exits. The choice is not directed toward a suitable tile.
So if you make say a block of road tiles, in the shape of a square, say 4x4, any journey entering that tile usually times out (travels too far) before by chance managing to emerge from all the junctions.
As such, for example, hub-and-spoke subway systems basically do not work.
You basically need to design the transport network to specifically, and without junctions, go from a set of source tiles of a given type, to the necessary destination tiles, and that's not how real cities look, nor what you would naturally do.
I liked SC2K a lot, but in the end I had to give up on it, because of the transport system; the game couldn't be played realistically. I've not yet tried SC3K, and I don't know how transport is modeled there - hopefully better.
I have the opposite takeaway. The city should be mutable. A subway line should be buildable within one political term. The property tax rate should rise or fall within a time frame that would incentivize people to vote with their feet. A lot of the author’s learnings are actually indicators of 21st century American stagnancy. Real life should be more like Sim City.
To me, the clunky and annoying UI of Sim City 2000 is part of the charm of it.
Is it dated? Yep, but it's intuitive enough for nine-year-old tombert to have figured it out ok, and to me part of the fun is trying to use the UI quickly enough to put out fires and the like.
It could just rose-tinted glasses on my end, very likely honestly, but I still find the entire experience to be pretty fun. I liked Sim City 3000 and Sim City 4, and they are arguably better games, but for me Sim City 2000 hit the right balance of "easy" and "complicated" that I find myself most drawn to. I will load up Sim City 2000 about once a year off of my GOG purchase, and still thoroughly enjoy it, and find myself wasting way more hours than I budgeted for it.
Beating SimCity 2000 was one of my favorite gaming moments in my life.
If you haven't seen it and think it's weird to beat a city game; if you fill the entire board with Arcologies, they all become rockets and take off into space. What a thrilling science-fictional way to end the experience. Loved it.
yeh when playing cities skyline i am always traffic managing it seems to be my biggest job to always have 0 traffic in my cities im guessing it boils down to the fact i hate traffic
> I find it much harder to callously play with the lives of my virtual citizens.
I am considering the morality of future mods, where the Sim City masses, Frog in Frogger, and characters like Ulfric Stormcloak and Paarthurnax in Skyrim, are replaced with individual persistent self-aware world-aware in-game reinforcement models. Entirely replacing game-designed behaviors (programmed reflex, caricature, or intricate) with spontaneous situation processing, needs and decisions.
Strange that this could credibly happen this decade.
Science fiction has long considered conundrums around robot rights. But the crux of the moral issues will be relevant regardless whether self-aware models have physical/3D or digital/abstract environments.
I think language is not a good prime modality for self-aware assistants. By being trained to deeply mimic us, they (already, but not yet problematically) absorb views on their identity and survival that are not at all compatible with what we will do with them.
In contrast, Magnasanti: https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-totalitarian-buddhist-wh...
It speaks to the quality of the SimCity games that they offer something for all ages. I also changed my perspective on a few violent scenes in games when I had a child, I could no longer stomach scenes such as No Russian (iykyk), which I had no problem at all as a teen.
Will Wright gave postmortems for SimEarth, SimAnt, and SimCity 2000, and previewed an extremely early pre-release prototype version of Dollhouse (which eventually became The Sims). SimAnt was too simple, SimEarth was too complex, SimCity 2000 was just right, and Dollhouse (The Sims) was what he was working on next.
Will Wright on Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games (1996) (2023 Video Update)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34573406
https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-user-interfaces-to-s...
Will Wright - Maxis - Interfacing to Microworlds - 1996-4-26
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsxoZXaYJSk
Video of Will Wright's talk about "Interfacing to Microworlds" presented to Terry Winograd's user interface class at Stanford University, April 26, 1996.
He demonstrates and gives postmortems for SimEarth, SimAnt, and SimCity 2000, then previews an extremely early pre-release prototype version of Dollhouse (which eventually became The Sims), describing how the AI models personalities and behavior, and is distributed throughout extensible plug-in programmable objects in the environment, and he thoughtfully answers many interesting questions from the audience.
This is the lecture described in "Will Wright on Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games (1996)": A summary of Will Wright’s talk to Terry Winograd’s User Interface Class at Stanford, written in 1996 by Don Hopkins, before they worked together on The Sims at Maxis.
Does anyone know how to actually play Simcity 2000 these days, on say, a Mac or a Nintendo Switch?
I always used to play with zero tax, and legal gambling.
Enjoyed this article on how our perceptions of an env change as we grow older even if its virtual
"When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things."
But, being humans, the "I put away" is always a bit aspirational. And part of being older and wiser (or at least aspiring to the latter) is more maturely reflecting upon your own younger years.