for me sc2k hits differently after reading the city planning theories it’s based on. they’re just… wrong. and the simcity series have always been aware of this and has had to design around that fact up until sc13, where the statistical model was thrown out in favour of an agent-based model.
the parking thing is the most obvious at first glance, but the striking thing for me has always been the theory of crime, which uses a statistical model that’s way out of wack and causes airports to be hotbeds of crime simply because they lower property values and cover a large area.
…which makes it so scary that there’s been at least one mayoral vote that was swung by a game of sim city.
followups of the genre have not fixed this either; cities: skylines is notorious for every citizen being able to pull a car out of their pocket, which is why the vanilla game’s traffic simulation is so difficult to balance. also, since C:S is a “hybrid” of statistics and agents, the stats lie to you. crime rates, the number, are lowered by proximity to a police station, but criminals, the agents, spawn based on whether a police agent can actually catch them. which means you can have a statistical crime rate of near zero because of your police station coverage and still have massive amounts of crimes happening because the cops are all stuck in traffic.
also yeah, as brought up in the article, the most important thing that’s never modelled in these games is time. the time it takes to build something is massively influential on how future developments take shape.
think about your early-game base in factorio; as you advance along the tech tree it inevitably ends up as a huge random ball of belts, pipes, rail, and weird quirks like inserters pulling from chests around corners to avoid a belt that goes underground right there which comes up there because there used to be an assembler there which fed to another belt which has since been removed but we haven’t moved it and…
real-world cities are full of these old quirks that came about because of the resources available at the time. like how many english towns have huge canal networks because that was the easiest way to move massive amounts of goods, or how many cities have earthen embankments running through the center because of medieval walls or old train lines. yet there is none of that in city builders. i had this discussion with anselm, the citybound guy, back in 2014 too. doesn’t seem like we’ve gotten anywhere since then.
TeamAssimilation@infosec.pub 11 hours ago
TL; DR: Author played chaotic evil as a child, and lawful good as a he matured with adult life.
Saved you a couple of minutes.
AngryishHumanoid@lemmynsfw.com 10 hours ago
The author is an idiot. You build your city, click save, THEN spam the spawn disaster button, watch the carnage, then load your save like nothing happened. That way you can still be a saint and torture your citizens, it’s like Schrödinger’s torture victim, it happened and it didn’t!
kautau@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
If we’re living in a simulation the player hit save in 2000 and is currently spamming the disaster buttons
misk@piefed.social 10 hours ago
For some of us reading for leisure is the whole point of having minutes to spare.
TeamAssimilation@infosec.pub 7 hours ago
I am in that camp, and expected a more profound message. My disappointment encouraged me to write the TL; DR.
Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
Aatube@kbin.melroy.org 7 hours ago
it wasn't chaotic evil, it was chaotic good
tidderuuf@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
Subtly it’s probably just the music that gives them the vibes and they don’t even realize it.
bear@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 hours ago
It is a great soundtrack