In those games, you can indeed “craft” a city as you like it, like Robert Moses on steroids. There are no environmental reviews, no neighborhood groups, no corrupt politicians — none of the things that might hinder such grand visions in the real world.
Want to build a rail line? Just do it. Want to bulldoze something? In the original SimCity that I played in the early 1990s, there was a button that literally had a bulldozer on it.
Your decisions do have consequences for your city, though, and you may have to contend with tradeoffs from development like pollution or traffic.
The benefit of these games is that they inspired a whole generation of players to think systemically about cities, and primed them to look at a map and imagine what combination of steps it would take to make it look different — and better — in the future.
As a Los Angeles Times article about the game’s legacy put it in 2019: “For many urban and transit planners, architects, government officials, and activists, ‘SimCity’ was their first taste of running a city. It was the first time they realized that neighborhoods, towns, and cities were things that were planned, and that it was someone’s job to decide where streets, schools, bus stops, and stores were supposed to go.”
The main downside is that it let players govern their cities “with more power than any mayor in history; not only can they destroy an entire city and start over on a whim, they make their decisions in a virtual political vacuum with no elections, rival political parties, or other democratic processes to contend with,” as a 2015 article in the Journal of Geography described it. That’s not realistic, at least outside China.
I don’t want to ascribe too much influence to computer games. But I’m not sure that it’s a coincidence that it’s the generation that played those games in middle and high school that’s now fueling calls to build more stuff and build it faster, like the abundance and pro-housing YIMBY movements.
Step back a moment and consider that the major focus of YIMBYism is the reform of zoning — a subject that previous generations would have considered unspeakably boring if they had heard of it at all. SimCity was the first place I encountered the concept, and I bet I’m not alone in that.
And while I don’t think supporters of the abundance movement want local officials to have the dictatorial powers of a SimCity players, I suspect many of them built highways and rezoned neighborhoods with the click of a button in SimCity in the 1990s — which only deepened their horror to find the glacial pace at which those things happen in the real world.
Many Americans are frustrated with the sad state of infrastructure in this country, and the political paralysis that often seems gets in the way of fixing it. SimCity and its descendents offer a fantasyland alternative, where you can imagine transformative changes — and then make them happen. It’s revealing that “Subway Builder” markets itself with the phrase “craft the subway system your city deserves.” Intentionally or not, the game’s developers are appealing to that sense of frustration. We all know we won’t get what we “deserve” in the real world — but at least we can build it in a computer game.
This is an excerpt from Are we there yet?, a Globe Opinion newsletter about the future of transportation in the region. Sign up to get it in your inbox early.