SimCity was the kind of “serious” game you
could convince your parents was totally educational. Totally.
But what your parents didn’t know was that the game
had a secret.
(scary music) A pernicious ideology hiding in a black box.
But to know what’s inside the black box, first you’ve gotta know how it got there.
(Finger snap that makes everything look and sound like the 1980s)
It’s the 1980s! Will Wright is hot off the heels of his first video game,
and toying with the idea of something completely fresh:
a game about building cities, with the working title
“Micropolis”. It wasn’t a “sim” just yet.
but that would change once Wright got a hold of the book Urban Dynamics,
written by a guy named Jay Wright Forrester.
These two not-Wright brothers actually had a lot in common;
they were both huge nerds.
Jay Wright Forrester actually invented the precursor to computer RAM!
So you know he woulda had a sick gaming rig.
But Urban Dynamics was actually Forrester’s follow up to his most notable invention.
That famous methodology for understanding industrial scale logistics that we ALL know and love!
That’s right: System Dynamics.
It's got stocks! It’s got flows!
It helps corporate managers understand complex business cycles!
In fact it was so successful at modeling corporate supply chains,
that Forrester decided to apply it to a system he knew absolutely nothing about:
cities.
In Urban Dynamics, he created a computer model meant to describe
the major internal forces controlling the balance of population,
housing, and industry within an urban area.
The book claimed this could “simulate the life cycle of
a city and predict the impact of proposed remedies on the system.
(80s music ends suddenly) Almost like… a video game.
With just 150 equations and 200 parameters, Forrester had turned the idea of a city into
a formula — one that could be used to test social policies.
Urban Dynamics was controversial because it concluded that a lot of the social programs
meant to improve a city were actually harmful to its long term prospects.
You know, horrible things like financial aid, low cost housing, and job training.
It was classic anti-welfare politics dressed up for the computer age.
It also helped convince Will Wright that he could turn his rough
“city building game” idea into a city simulator.
What's called System dynamics... everything is either a stock or a flow.
And so a stock might be like “population". A flow might be “death rate” or “birth rate”,
and you basically can model almost anything using those two little devices.
Will Wright used the stocks and flows modeling from Urban Dynamics
to create the formulas for SimCity’s… simulation.
And that's how the black box came into being.
In both the book and the video game, the city starts as a blank slate.
The land has no value, until it’s populated with structures and people.
The city’s “success” lies solely in maximizing its land value.
Without perpetual growth, it will stagnate and die.
Now to be clear, I don’t think the way SimCity models cities
necessarily reflect Will Wright’s politics.
He has always maintained that the series was a
caricature of the way a city works, not a realistic model.
But it still does echo the book’s political assumptions, whether intentional or not.
When we first did SimCity 2000… over time people started saying,
“oh wow, that’s really cool the way you programmed in
inner city decay and I went back and looked at it and in fact,
yeah, really big cities, eventually the land value would collapse, people would start moving out,
and it would really look like inner decay, but we never programmed that into the system.
This quote really stood out to me because Urban Dynamics was written in the 1960s as a
response to the growing national concerns about “inner city decay”.
The book (and seemingly SimCity 2000), turned this concept into a formula,
but in doing so, created some major blindspots.
For example, neither of these simulations can really grapple with the
“white flight” that so often occurred as neighborhoods became more diverse…
because neither of them model race.
And yet, the series is called SimCity SimCity and not Micropolis
because it turned out the realism aspect was super marketable.
But a simulation is only as “real” as the model it’s built on.
Flight simulators are real enough to train pilots
because the model of flight is very well established.
The formulas we use to build an airplane are the same ones at work in a simulator.
But there’s no base scientific model for cities. So... what kind of simulation is SimCity?
Simulations we do are generally social simulations.
Social simulations really are a lot more difficult to build than something like a flight simulator
which is much more straightforward.
So we start with the core behaviors, we get those
tuned, and then we start layering on more and more subtle behaviors.
Perhaps it’s more comparable to the climate
simulations that scientists use to model and predict global warming.
But even those formulas aren’t hidden in a black box.
Each new SimCity game adds more features,
but deep down they’re still based on Urban Dynamics’ core model of stocks and flows.
And that model is what made the series not just famous, but a massive financial success.
So what if the game reinforces a particular political perspective on urban planning.
It’s not like mayors are being tested on the thing before they run a real city!
(music cuts out) Well, except for that one time in Rhode Island.
(upbeat music) A newspaper tested a bunch of mayoral candidates in SimCity;
one candidate accidentally demolished a digital church and it might have cost her the election.
Oh oh oh! And then there was the 2002 race for the mayor of Warsaw, which
may have indirectly affected the outcome of Poland’s presidential elections.
An audience of 3000 citizens watched as the candidates
enacted their campaign promises in SimCity 3000;
building police stations, hospitals, zoos, and navigating civic challenges including riots,
tornados, and even a UFO attack.
Lech Kaczynski was the clear winner of the contest,
and would go on to win the mayoral election and eventually, the presidency.
There is actually another mayor with an intriguing connection to SimCity,
but it means I have to talk about (existential shudder) Rudy Giuliani.
(Apocalyptic gothic choir)
Back before he was supporting coups and giving speeches at Four Seasons Total Landscaping,
he was mayor of a little town called New York City.
As the 1999 Time Magazine article goes,
a first-term Giuliani found his son playing SimCity one day.
He watched enthusiastically as lil Andrew added police stations to every block
and brought the city’s crime rate down to zero.
Awwww (growing sound of harsh audio feedback and disgust)
I’m not saying that Rudy “broken windows” Giuliani derived his infamously
aggressive policing policy from SimCity.
He was quite clearly horny for cops long before that.
What’s really striking is this quote, from Hayes Lord — one of Giulani’s city planners.
Lord got his wish, because city simulators have been used as a
learning device in thousands of classrooms.
You can find tons of academic papers on the use of city simulators in education
going back to the early 90s.
What influence this had on the politics of its users
is difficult to untangle, but we do know it had at least one other positive effect.
I think it probably inspired generations of planners. I mean,
I knew it was my favorite game growing up!
I am someone who believes that we, as human beings,
need to learn more about how cities are designed and built.
And even though these city games get things wrong, they get enough right.
and they inspire enough people that I think that they're valuable tools to have.
This is Dave Amos, who runs the YouTube channel City Beautiful.
By day, he’s a professor and Urban planner, so he understands better than anyone what
the advantages—and limitations—of these city building simulations are.
For instance, I'm at Cal Poly. I know
that a colleague of mine has people download city skylines.
And he uses it to introduce some basic concepts.
The games get the basics, right, I mean, like, there are some basic ideas that can be, that students can learn from.
and it's actually pretty useful then to start doing comparisons, right?
What do they get wrong? And it can be a useful jumping off point as well.
Dave has seen how the city sausage actually gets made.
But for those of us without an urban planning degree, there’s another way to comprehend
what’s inside that mysteriously meaty black box:
by pushing the simulation to the limit.
This is Magnasanti. It was built in SimCity 3000
with the specific goal of maximizing population in order to “beat” the game.
Created as an art project by Vincent Ocasla, Magnasanti overcomes SimCity’s need
for perpetual growth by maintaining a stable population of six million citizens.
There is no crime, abandoned buildings, or congestion.
(Eerie music)
It is also a dystopian nightmare.
Citizens spend their entire life in Magnasanti: no one moves in or out.
Not that it’s a very long life; thanks to the lack of hospitals and high pollution,
its citizens rarely live past the age of 50.
There’s no traffic because there are no roads.
A subway connects every part of Magnasanti, but there's no real
reason to leave your neighborhood because every neighborhood looks exactly the same.
There are no fire stations or schools: just a robust police state to keep everyone in check.
Magnasanti was a multi-year project for Ocasla,
designed to expose the inhumane assumptions and calculations going on inside SimCity.
By “beating” the game, Ocasla actually revealed the shape of the black box.
Citizen health and happiness were ultimately unimportant.
What the game considers a successful city doesn’t look at all like one we’d actually want to live in.
It’s also a great example of how complex social simulations can sometimes spit out
these really perverse results. Like when SimCity (2013) tried to model homelessness.
There are tons of threads on forums and message boards where players
tried to figure out how to get rid of homelessness in their SimCities..
Without realizing it, these players were probing the black box,
trying to figure out what input would make the homelessness variable go down.
They tried getting rid of garbage because it might be a potential food source (yikes),
and they demolished public parks where people
experiencing homelessness congregated (yikes yikes).
A confounding issue was that SimCity 2013 was, to put it lightly,
buggy as hell at launch,
so players were unsure if the intractability of homelessness was a feature or a glitch.
The whole game had become a black box. Which strangely, made it feel more real.
That’s why artist Matteo Bittanti catalogued people’s discussions about this online,
and compiled them into a two volume book.
His intention was to highlight how the conversation about homelessness in the game
mirrored discussions of homelessness in the real world,
from solutions like giving houses to people in need
to “solutions” like giving people a 1-way bus ticket
which, fun fact, SimCity actually let you do (yikes yikes yikes).
Even if our attempts to understand exactly what’s in the black box fall short,
we can still learn something simply from being aware that it exists.
Real cities are also guided by formulas hidden in black boxes.
Algorithms are used to assess child welfare, evaluate teachers,
and even “predict” where crime is likely to occur.
When researchers at Yale asked a bunch of cities to see their algorithms, most of them either
denied the request, gave them everything but the actual formulas, or just didn’t respond at all.
It actually reminds me of another source of inspiration for SimCity.
At the same time he was wrapping his head around Urban Dynamics,
Will Wright was reading something else: a sci-fi story called “The Seventh Sally”,
in which an alien king gets banished from his kingdom for becoming a tyrant.
Upon seeing this, a god takes pity on the king, and gifts him a glass box containing within it
a tiny civilization.
At first, the king is insulted by this fisher price kingdom.
But he eventually accepts it. And with time, he returns to his old ways.
But the god had made the model too perfect — and, history was doomed to repeat itself.
The tiny kingdom’s people eventually break free of the box and overthrow their tyrannical ruler.
After discovering his mistake, the god says,
I don't understand. It was only a model after all.
A process with a large number of parameters,
a simulation, a mock-up for a monarch to practice on…
Will Wright read that parable and thought
“the people in the glass box are the issue” so he turned them into algorithms.
And today, real mayors are looking at those algorithms and thinking they can apply them to real people.
SimCity’s black box is just a game, but we still need to be aware of its impact.
Because if you don’t know what's inside the box,
then you don’t really know what it can do to you.