City building games have been around for a long time, starting with SimCity
Classic back in 1989, through SimCity 4 in 2003. The mantle city building games
has been picked up by Cities: Skylines released in 2014 by the studio Colossal
Order. There is no doubt that this game is more realistic than SimCity Classic.
In SimCity, the zones had to be square and the most realistic part of the game—
and the most fun—was destroying your city. Fast forward to today where every
citizen in your Cities: Skylines city has a name, they get an education, they get a
job, they grow old (if your health care system is good) and die. Clearly the
simulation in Cities: Skylines is getting closer to approximating real life, but
how close is it and how does it compare to the tools planners use to simulate
real cities? Let's go find out! The obvious way to do this video is to play
through the game and point out every little place where the game doesn't
quite match reality. *cough* mixed-use zones *cough* but I think that's kind of a negative way to
go about this topic. I mean no simulation is gonna match reality 100% of the time,
unless real life is the simulation... But it's pretty obvious to anybody who's
played this game on anything other than a top-of-the-line machine, this game is
doing some serious processing to simulate all the systems in a city, from
traffic to land-use, hydrology, weather, trash collection, even dead body
collection. But are they based in reality? Instead of making some educated guesses
I thought I'd asked the folks at Colossal Order if I could talk to a game
designer and get the information straight from the source. And
surprisingly they said yes! Miska: Yeah, I'm Miska Fredman. I'm a game
designer working for Colossal Order and, yeah, we be doing Cities: Skylines for a
while already. Dave: How much effort goes into looking at what actual cities
are like when you're starting to plan out the game or plan out a DLC? How
much does is inspiration from real life and how much of it is more the
technical aspects of what can be done?
Miska: The main pillars of the design is that it's grounded in reality, so we try
to look things from like the realistic perspective so we are not doing anything
totally fantastic or like futuristic. So we try to think how things are
really done in real life and then it's implemented into game play. Of course
we need to think about the gameplay and how it feels, what kind of experience it
produces for the player. That's an important thing and we sometimes
have to make some kind of compromises in how we actually implement
certain features in the game, right? Dave: Are you talking about
looking at real life? Is it based on your experience? I mean of
course you probably inhabit a city or you looking at outside sources
like books or other sort of simulations. How how do you draw upon the
the real world when you start informing the game? Miska: Well a bit of both and
and something else, also. One thing is like a drawing inspiration from
your own experiences in real life, and another thing is [finding]
different kind of like a articles and whatever you can you can get your hands
on. I must admit that like we could have like a more academic approach
to things but it's just a matter of fact that there isn't always
enough time to like like a get familiar as possible with
everything. Dave: No, that's okay! I am an academic so it hurts me a little bit
for me to hear you say that, but that's okay. I also understand that it's really tedious
to read articles. Miska: Yeah yeah yeah yeah. That takes time and and of course
we try to—let's say like economics and different sort of stuff like what we
did in in a recent DLC where there's a lot more industry. We tried to
do like different kind of production change there that's based on how
production chains actually work industry but we have
to have to simplify things and make it like playable, in a sense. How
we approach the whole traffic simulation and and everything involved
with that was—one of the goals was to have like a city that can support
1 million citizens and we wanted to have that there there is like a real
life busy-ness in the city. Like if there's a company and
people working for it they actually go to work or and the company like gets
products elsewhere and then whatever they produce the goods
they then transport it elsewhere, to something like a commercial zones and so
on. So there are like a different agents
working in the game. For example, all of the vehicles they they have a
starting point and they have a home where they start from. And then they
plan the path where like how they are gonna get to their destination and that's
calculated early on and that that kind of affects how they proceed.
In general, we wanted to have that so
that it feels life-like, like there's actually like vehicles going
from places. They are not just like going around the city to create traffic.
Dave: At this point I asked the long-winded question about fun versus complexity.
Like is it too complex to add considerations of topography and gravity
to the water system. Miska: You you can add quite a lot of complexity into game
and it it's not necessary. Even with technical restrictions, but then you [think]:
how much you want complexity? Do you add it into the game and then you
need to think about it. Okay, I know the gravitation thing with with water
systems that that's like a very very nice idea, but it it might complicate it
so that like some players might feel it's too complex.
It's easier to have like a bit simpler system. Dave: I know you can't break any news
here, but are there sort of features that are either upcoming or you would
like to see added that add an additional dose of realism or
come closer to approximating what a real city is like? Miska: I don't really have like it...
What could I say... Yeah, well, yeah... We're still working on Cities: Skylines, but
I gotta say... How much I can say... more about that we are working
on... very interesting stuff and making new interesting things for you people. Narrator: It's
clear from what Miska said that the point of the game isn't to be a 100%
exact copy of a city, but for it to resemble a city in a way that makes it
fun. It is a game after all! But the game designers did make one key
decision to make it feel more real. They made it an agent-based mode.l What
is that exactly? Colossal Order filled the game with
agents. What are agents? They are individuals essentially running their
own autonomous models and are empowered to make decisions based on their
interactions with other agents in the environment. Agents take multiple forms,
including land parcels, vehicles, trees, and people. Cims, as they are called in the
game, have a home, a workplace, an age, education, health, and they commute. They
are empowered to do things like move out of the city if things get too bad for
them for any of the characteristics I just mentioned. Agents are one way to
simulate a city, but what's the alternative? Game designers use
statistical models that aren't made of distinct agents imagine pedestrians and
city skylines for a second in an agent-based model all the people are
agents moving from an origin to a destination you can click on them and
see their names and attributes in a statistical pedestrian system the game
would determine the correct number of pedestrians that should appear on this
block based on attributes like land use density and the relative importance of
that sidewalk segment in the larger transportation system in both cases you
would probably see a similar number of people walking on the street but they'll
be generated in a very different way if the end result looks similar then why
used an agent-based approach I mean it uses a lot of computational resources to
generate all those agents in fact there's a limit to the number of agents
that game could simulate at any one time the trade-off for all those
computational resources is realness players aren't simply manipulating a
statistical model but shaping a city for real ish Sims when you delete a road
you're forcing autonomous agents to rethink how they get somewhere you can
see it happening in real time to those vehicles if anything I hope to see
future city building games give more agency to the citizens of the city they
should have opinions about how the mayor is doing it be able to resist certain
actions a player wants to take let's start stimulating local politics that's
adding realism to city games because of the realism agent based models bring
their used in software used by real city planners and researchers one industry
leading software package is called urban sim it doesn't model individuals in the
same way as cities skylines but it does model parcels of land households and
jobs to use urban sim you feed it data about the city things like parcel
boundaries streets current population and employment statistics urban sim them
projects things in the future like population and employment growth and
decline as well as new building construction it uses several separate
models that feed into each other first it simulates households and businesses
moving and making choices about where to locate as the city or regional economy
grows this change in demand triggers the real estate models to simulate the
construction of new housing and non-residential buildings to match the
demand keeping in mind development constraints
real estate prices are simulated to and factored into the artificial real estate
market cities and regions use this tool to develop and test growth scenarios the
result of an urban sim model run gives you year by year projections of
population and jobs that can help planners and policy makers understand
the impact of proposed policies that affect housing markets or labor markets
unlike city skylines where you want to be able to see the simulation running in
real time urban sim processes that data through
their models and spits out the results after it's done it's sort of like if you
plan new zones transit lines and districts and cities skylines and then
turned off your monitor you could turn your monitor on once per game year to
grab a screenshot record some key data points like population and income and
then you to shut the monitor off again and did that process 30 or 40 more times
so the purpose of city scallions is different than that of urban sim but in
some ways they're very similar pieces of software they both are trying to
simulate agents in a virtual city and they're trying to make their simulations
as realistic as possible city skylines what's more of an emphasis on fun but
it's still an impressive feat of software so like I said we can quibble
about all the ways city skylines is unrealistic but I rather focus on the
ways that it is realistic it can do some things that industry-leading software
can't do and it does it all in beautiful 3d and in real time there's definitely
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