Sirens, soot and strikes

This was written for Edge magazine's "Time Extend" slot, which looks at the lasting influence of a classic computer game. It first appeared in Edge 215 (June 2010) and is reproduced here with permission. It expresses some of the thoughts contained in this old blog post in a more cogent and convincing way.


Eagles soar in smokeless skies and whales glide through the clean oceans. Herds of horses (or perhaps giraffes) are the only inhabitants of the lush plains and old-growth forests. The simulated world of SimCity 4 is a peaceful place before you set about building your city. Boring, though. What it needs is urban sprawl, ribbon development along blacktop highways, strip malls and Dopplering sirens, chimneys belching soot, budget crises and strikes. What it needs, really, is problems – problems that you, the mayor, can solve.

That’s the paradox at the heart of the appeal of SimCity 4. Much of the fun that comes from playing the 2003 apogee of the SimCity series of city design and management games is solving problems: relieving traffic on this avenue, removing the polluting industries from that business centre, restoring a depressed neighbourhood to prosperity. But these problems have to come from somewhere. Next to the game’s peaceful, constructive, problem-solving side, it also nurtures the darker, more complex pleasure that comes from problem-creation. The tension between these two sides of its personality is written deep into SimCity 4; as we’ll see, it’s a reflection of the real-life systems and people that led to the creation of the game in the first place.

Key to SimCity 4’s enduring popularity is the fact that it can be enjoyed on a number of levels. Effective management can be satisfying in itself, given the game’s devilish complexity compared to previous versions and its dozens of competing variables. When things are going well it can be pleasant enough to simply sit back and watch the contented populace streaming along your ample boulevards while skyscrapers sprout around them – again, something that reached its peak with the gorgeous, hugely detailed, entirely 3D-modelled graphics of SC4. But those are passive pleasures, to be enjoyed once a city has been built. First you must play the game – and its split personality means two different styles of play. You can plan ahead and build with care, tending to your city like a bonsai tree, guiding every stage of growth and clipping and tweaking until it looks just right. This approach is deeply absorbing and can eat up tens of hours of dedicated play; the quality of the graphics has always made a beautiful city a highly desirable end. But that can be a bit boring. Often, a player will just want their city to get big quickly. So indulge in SimCity 4’s kinky secret: the joy of unplanned sprawl. The city is developed hurriedly, with only the loosest plan in mind. Vast zones are laid out without much thought, in artless but easy-to-build grids, and with services added (maybe) as an afterthought. Obviously, this manner of play creates problems – but in SC4, that’s a good thing. Pretty soon, your city is a snarling deathmaze of smog, crime, poverty, dereliction and gridlock. Bliss. These problems must be fixed to keep Gotham growing, but they can be ‘fixed’ in the same haphazard way that the city was thrown up in the first place: quickly, cheaply and dirtily. Roads and train tracks can be punched through run-down inner cities without protest; new business districts can be founded on the outskirts without caring too much about the chaos this will ultimately cause on the roads. Each solution brings a batch of fresh problems.

This approach, with its swift returns and constant challenges, can be the most rewarding and most addictive way to play. Imagine that you lay out a residential district and it immediately develops into Snooty Corners, a rich neighbourhood full of attractive high-wealth houses and well-kept lawns. That part of the game map is pretty much done with – barring vandalism, there’s nothing more you need do to it, so it’s finished, dead, game over. But if it develops into Crystal-Methington, a crime-ridden hellhole full of empty lots and burned-out cars, well, game on, you’ll be revisiting there pretty soon. The appeal of creating a ‘perfect’ city may be what draws players to the game in the first place, but actually perfecting a city is a losing approach. When it’s done – admittedly after what could be tens of hours of play – what else is there to do? You can look at it, but that’s more like owning a fish tank than playing a game. Almost every game is a struggle towards completion and perfection: SimCity gives you the opportunity to reject that goal, and to revel indefinitely in play. Its creator, Will Wright, called it more toy than game. It’s a rare game that can be at its most fun when it’s played ‘badly’.

The reckless style of play can also, oddly, lead to the best results. Cities built as sprawls, full of improvised solutions and gimcrack workarounds, can be very attractive – certainly Maxis put as much aesthetic effort into the low-wealth commercial units and tenement blocks as it did into the pretty-pretty mansions and sparkling skyscrapers. But they’re also appealing, and fun to play, because they most closely resemble real cities. And it’s worth remembering that this high-speed slapdash improvisation is how most real cities grew, and are still growing.

Plus there’s a sheer atavistic thrill that comes from playing the game fast and loose, with all sorts of destruction and little thought of consequences. Your urgently needed relief road happens to pass straight through a small, comfortable middleclass neighbourhood? Pah, build it anyway. Sure, you could spend the money on a neat little bus system, but isn’t a glistening motorway just a bit more swanky? Similarly, a vast stadium complex is always going to be more appealing to the ambitious mayor in a hurry, even though a well-funded local library network could yield better results for a fraction of the cost. Huge engineering projects will always be more fun to put together, and more impressive onscreen, than microscopic local initiatives. A mayor should be building suspension bridges and airports – leave the rest to Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.

There are plenty of real-world examples of civic leaders’ weakness for expensive, grandiose white elephants. But one particular figure stands out: Robert Moses. Moses, an American planner and administrator, came closer to playing SimCity with a real city than anyone else in the free world. Never once holding elected office, he wielded unsurpassed power over the city of New York through mastery of its bureaucratic machinery, diabolical legal chicanery and an eerie knack for raising vast sums of money. Mayors, governors and even presidents were forced to let him have his way. He first used this power to build colossal parks and recreation beaches, making himself wildly popular, but his attention soon turned to highways. When Moses started his career in the 1920s, New York was just beginning to come to terms with automobile traffic. He shaped the way it responded, girdling the city in an elaborate web of freeways and neglecting public transport. These new superhighways often created as many problems as they solved, rapidly choking with cars. They drove suburban sprawl and were built with little regard for the residents who happened to be in the way. More than once, Moses demolished a thriving community to make way for a road, even though a perfectly good alternative route existed. When Moses was finally ousted in the 1960s, the city had an expensive freeway network, but was more jammed with traffic than ever. It was also teetering towards bankruptcy.

Moses did a lot, but he didn’t do his worst. He wanted to slice freeways right across Manhattan itself, through some of the most expensive and crowded urban land in the world. One of these plans, the Lower Manhattan Expressway, was only defeated after a desperate struggle by a small community group led by a writer called Jane Jacobs. In the course of the campaign Jacobs wrote a book, the Death And Life Of American Cities, which defended the dense, mixed neighbourhoods that Moses dismissed as slums and encouraged a view of the city as a complex organism which needed nurturing, not drastic surgery.

Death And Life became a classic, and is still widely read. Among those who were influenced by it was Wright. He built his city sim to resemble a living thing, with scores of interlinked processes and cycles interacting over time in a complex system that the player can adjust and mould – a vision palpably drawn from Jacobs’ work, and cultivated over time into the superbly complex and organic fourth game. Ultimately, then, Robert Moses could be seen as the wicked uncle of SimCity 4, indirectly inspiring it by causing Jacobs to mount her defence of city life. To enshrine Jacobs in a game, Moses had to go in there too – we can share his satisfaction in grand projects and wanton destruction. He’s the dark side of the Force, one half of the duality that makes SimCity 4 so seductive. Planning versus sprawl; micromanagement versus megaprojects; neighbourhoods and localism versus traffic, money and power. Those opposite poles keep the dynamo of SimCity spinning even after seven years; it is still rich and rewarding because it springs from the vital conflicts in our own world.

Mo' Moses Mo' Problems

Confirmed sighting: I'm in issue #215 of Edge, which has just come out, taking about SimCity 4, urbanism, Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses. It's a long piece that takes some of the ideas expressed in this rambling blog post from a while back and expresses them rather more cogently. I express some of the pleasure that comes from playing a game badly, deliberately creating problems for oneself, so there's something to fix down the line.

An alternative approach is something like this: Magnasanti, a dystopian megalopolis created by exploiting the game mechanics of the earlier SC3000 to their maximum. (I'm grateful to Jim Rossignol, who first showed me the video.) There's an interesting interview with Magnasanti's creator here.

The Joy of Sprawl

When I started this blog, I knew that there were a few pet subjects that I would have to cover quickly, and get them out of my system. This was chief among them: my love affair with the computer game SimCity. I might even have to return to this subject - after all, I've now written about it twice for Icon (once, twice), and still don't feel I've done it justice. I once pitched an extremely lengthy piece about SimCity to an extremely highbrow magazine, suggesting giving it the same sort of multi-thousand-word analysis they would a book or film, but they turned me down. Maybe there's a book in the subject; I know that the aggregated hours I've spent playing it have cost me at least one book. Maybe more. Easily the same amount of time, effort and concentration has been expended, and for what? For nothing.


Not really for nothing, of course - for pleasure. But to no productive end. Of course, it's hard to determine the productive purpose served by reading poetry, something else I enjoy, but computer games have a serious credibility problem attached, eve computer games as open-ended, as fascinating, as absorbing and creative as Simcity. Pleasure is the result, escapist delight, and I think the most effective way of describing the value of the game, of exploring what it means to me, would be to explore that pleasure.


For the uninitiated, SimCity is a game in which you build and manage a city. You start with an empty landscape, and grow a metropolis. You lay the infrastructure, build civic buildings and landmarks and designate the zones, but the computer (in the role of Adam Smith's invisible hand) builds most of the prosaic residential, commercial and industrial buildings in the zones you provide. One of the Icon articles linked above gives a detailed enough impression.


Now, I called SimCity a game - that's not strictly true. Will Wright, its creator, calls it a toy. It's entirely open-ended: there are no win conditions, and only one way you can lose - bankruptcy, which is incredibly easy to avoid. There are no time limits. There is no fixed path for play. The playing area used to be a limiting factor, but now it's large enough to be effectively unlimited.

Why play then? For the satisfaction of efficient management, for the engineer's delight of building a mechanism and watching it run on its own, for the pleasure of creation, and for an exotic extra factor, something I can't properly name: let's call it the joy of sprawl.

Simple pleasures

The satisfaction of efficient management is easy to explain. It's obviously satisfactory when the city one has built is running effieciently, with happy inhabitants, world-class health and education, low taxes, a prospering economy, little crime, pollution and traffic, and so forth. A job well done.


The engineer's delight is also easy to explain and understand - it covers much the same territory as the manager's satisfaction. Your city is a machine or organism, and it's lovely to sit back and watch the traffic stream down its streets, to see building sites appear and skyscrapers rise, to watch ferries using the ports, to watch the trees in the parks mature. SimCity 4, the game's most recent and probably final canonical edition, is an incedibly detailed and beautiful game, as I hope the screenshots here convey.

Those pleasures are both lovely. But they're limited - they get boring. We'll get back to that.

Complex pleasures

The pleasure of creation is, again, easy to explain. Playing SimCity is a creative act, and once a player has grasped the basic principles of the game, generally their next step is to try to build their ideal city. (When I speak about players in general, rather than me in particular, I am drawing from compulsive reading of SimCity forums such as Simtropolis, not guessing.) Of course, the ideal city varies from person to person - generally, people either strive for beauty, realism, grandeur or super-size.


What's interesting about those qualities is the way that they overlap, and sometimes don't overlap. Cities that strive towards grandeur, order and beauty can stray into overly sterile Grand Manner quite easily, a dull spectacle of beautifully symmetrical Haussman rond-points, Cerdà diagonales and L'Enfant malls, with the same tedious gigantism as Speer's Berlin or the prissy lifelessness of the worst excesses of the City Beautiful movement. Realism and terrain constraints help ameliorate this problem, but generally the most beautiful cities are the ones that develop organically, at least in part, with some lack of planning thrown in.

Strangely, the cities that strive for realism often tend to be very beautiful, simply because of the amount of care that goes into making sure that this motorway embankment looks just right, or that row of houses accurately reflects the higgledy-piggledy look of a London street.


Ultimately, however, the pleasure of creation is obvious - it's like painting an attractive city, tinkering to get an attractive corniche with palm-shaded pavement cafes, and tending to one's downtown skyscrapers as one would a topiary, snipping here and nurturing there to get an attractive stadtkrone culmination of spires. Or growing a city with care, updating its transport networks as demand grows, expanding services, luring employers, so you end up with a vast, teeming megacity. Or laying out a grand imperial capital, or something that looks just like a real-life small town.

All these goals are complicated and absorbing. One can sink days of happy building into them, filled with the pleasure of creation. But ultimately the pleasure of creation is still limited - it can get boring.

The delights of Gotham

And so we come to that final, elusive source of pleasure - the secret ingredient that keeps the game pleasurable. The joy of sprawl. The incredible thing about SimCity is that it's fun to play the game badly. It is fun - endless fun - to build a mess of a city, a hellhole, to expand a city in all directions at great speed without a thought for planning or consequences. The population explodes, pollution and crime soar, the streets jam up with traffic, and you keep building. The central business district is overloaded? Build a new commercial district on the periphery, let employers migrate there. Too much traffic? Smash an el-train line through for the time being, don't worry too much about the route. Poor residential district being abandoned because of polluiton, crime, collapsing services and traffic? Build new districts, quick, on the outskirts, and build more industry, create more employment to ensure housing isn't too plentiful, the poor have to live somwhere, they'll stay in the slum. The answer to all problems is build, build, build, and grow, grow, grow, not stop and fix. Don't plan - you'll only slow things down.


This is, of course, how many cities really did develop for at least part of their life. Many British cities did this in the 19th century, and many American cities did it in the 20th century. Many Chinese cities are doing it now.


Eventually, you end up with something like Gotham city, a nightmarish, crumbling megacity that barely works. Poor tax base and inefficient services will tend to keep the city budget in permanent crisis, endlessly dropping into the red.


It's a mess. And as a player, I couldn't be happier - because now there are problems to solve. Building a city from scratch is a fascinating task, but nothing is as fascinating as managing, and slowly fixing, and decrepit, decaying monster. (You might be interested to hear that simply slashing taxes and rolling back business regulation rarely works.)

The delights of Robert Moses

But we're not done. It's a pleasure to build a good city. It's a pleasure to build a bad city. It's a pleasure to build a bad city and turn it into a good city. It's even a pleasure to build a good city and let it degenerate into a bad city. But there's something else that's fun: building a "bad", sprawling, Gotham-esque city wracked with problems and fixing it ... badly.


We can think of this as the pleasure of being Robert Moses. Go about solving your sprawling city's traffic problems with a network of superhighways. "Fix" slum districts by driving elevated freeways straight through them, and decant the displaced residents into new high-density projects elsewhere. Everything can be improved by a grandiose and destructive bit of heavy road infrastructure - neglect services, let public transport run down, sweep away the varied and interesting to make way for sterile office districts, bare-bones housing projects and egomaniacal stadia and convention centres adrift on an ocean of parking spaces.

Part of the appeal of a bit of Moses-style play is the thrill of wanton destruction - presumably the same impulse which leads some players to build a city and then entertain themselves slamming meteorites into them. (I've never enjoyed volcano-slinging.) But there's also the pleasure in knowing that the fix won't work, or that its effects will be temporary at best, or that it merely displaces or defers problems. The key is that it leads, ultimately, to new problems, which require planning around, ameliorating, and fixing. There'll be more game to play, as you remove the expressway you smashed through downtown only a few decades earlier.

What it comes down to - the formula for sustained SimCity pleasure - is staving off stasis. Once part of the city is "finished" - for instance, a historic core that looks perfect, or a fully skyscraper core - it really is finished. Finished as in game over. You can look at it and derive satisfaction for a while, but there's no more building to be done. The pleasure of SimCity is in flux, development, problems, difficulty. Getting big quickly through sprawl is exhilirating and stores up the pleasure of solving the resulting clusterfuck. Fixing things Moses style gives the cathartic pleasure of fixing (and the unalloyed joy of large-scale planning and building) without actually changing anything for the better.

Can anything be learned about real urbanism from all this? Well, I'd be wary of that, because this is just the starting point of what I hope will be a periodic exploration of SimCity, ultimately perhaps resulting in a longer piece of writing. But I will say this. I grew up in Oxford, parts of which are famously, spectacularly beautiful. I used to cycle through Radcliffe Square every morning on my way to school - it is simply exquisite. But - barring a major disaster - Radcliffe Square will almost certainly never change. It's finished. Game over. I've been thinking about this recently, in connection with my attack on the turn-back-the-clockers in the Statesman, and the recent argie-bargies involving Prince Charles. It's a dangerous idea, that something is finished. There's a "Conversation" in the next Icon that includes David Adjaye, and he says that a common misconception about London is that it's "finished", that vast areas of it don't need anything to be done to them. And that's a crazy idea - on any reasonable measure, huge areas of London, of most cities, need quite radical rethinks. But this pernicious idea is put about, that things are basically OK, that our first duty is to conserve and be sensitive, that the furniture is just fine where granny left it. Game over.