But unlike when I was ten, I can also appreciate that CS, like SimCity, has a whole host of assumptions about how cities work, and how urban governance works, built into the gameplay-assumptions that are both frustrating as a player and fascinating as someone who spends a lot of time thinking about real urban planning and governance. CS is very much like SimCity, with some added details (at least compared to the last version I played) and much better graphics. Recently, I started playing a successor to SimCity, Cities: Skylines (or CS, as I’ll call it).
By making thousands and thousands of people plan commercial, industrial, and residential districts for their virtual towns, the creators of SimCity have probably done more than anyone in the history of the world to introduce basic principles of zoning to the public. Playing as mayor (or, really, dictator, but more on that later), you shepherded the growth of a city from its very first streets to towering skyscrapers-assuming you weren’t wiped out by tornados, fires, or aliens. For readers who are tragically uninitiated, SimCity is one of the iconic computer games of the 1990s, though new versions have been released as recently as 2013. Like most city lovers of a certain age, I spent many hours as a kid playing SimCity.
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