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"GREAT
CITIES are not like towns, only larger." So wrote Jane Jacobs, in her
seminal study of modern urban development, The Death and Life of Great
American Cities. She might have added a corollary: "Sim cities are not
like real-world cities, only digital." From its initial release back in
1990 to its latest Y3K incarnation, the SimCity franchise has attracted
millions of armchair mayors not so much by mimicking the landscape of the
modern city -- those original 4-bit Macintosh graphics weren't exactly Berenice-Abbott-quality,
after all -- but by recreating the distributed, slightly out-of-control
process by which cities shape themselves. "These collectivist machines run
on myriad tiny agents interacting in ways we can't fathom, generating results
we can only indirectly control," Kevin Kelly wrote of SimCity in his 1994
book Out of Control. "Getting a favorable end result is a challenge
in coordination. It feels like herding sheep [or] managing an orchard."
The trouble is, there are imperfections in these mirror worlds, and as more and more of our everyday reality is channeled through these simulations, the more important it becomes to recognize the ways in which the mirrors distort our view. For nearly a decade now, gaming enthusiasts have prattled on about how SimCity is more than just a game, and to a certain extent, they're right: SimCity implies a specific way of thinking about how a city works. While the game's devotees often champion the game's open-endedness, there's a value-system lurking behind each title, a vision of urban dynamics encoded into the underlying algorithms and their onscreen avatars. "In essence," Kelly writes, "SimCity is an urban theory provided with a user interface." The question is: which theory is it? TO FIND OUT, I asked three leading urbanists and city activists to spend some time with the game's latest incarnation, SimCity 3000, released earlier this year to mixed reviews. For the most part, my "expert panel" found the game intoxicating to play: "brilliantly designed" and "totally addictive." But each critic also detected a number of biases and limitations in the game's underlying vision of urban life. Some of these criticisms are cases where a more convincing simulation would have made for less compelling gameplay. But others are more provocative, and may tell us something about the usefulness of mirror worlds in general. And here we are very much in Jane Jacobs territory. If there is an underlying lesson of Death and Life, it's that the master planner "view from above" -- the Robert Moses perspective, in other words -- is by definition blind to the real beauty and power of great cities, which is to be found on street-level. As Moss puts it, "SimCity 3000 ignores the role of the sidewalk and the sensory life of the street in urban development." Great neighborhoods emerge not just because they've been zoned properly, or because they're endowed with a police station; they also grow out of the "collectivist machine" of vibrant, unpredictable street life, of public sidewalks that are engaging and delightful to explore. In fact, one of Jacob's most enduring observations is that urban safety is as much a product of populated sidewalks as it is the proximity of armed police -- a phenomenon most readily seen in the housing projects from Jacob's day, which eliminated public sidewalks altogether and quickly became war zones. The police commissioners and the news choppers and the "urban elites" may like to think that cities police themselves from the air, but in real cities, the order comes from below. "There is nothing simple about that order itself," Jacobs writes, "or the bewildering number of components that go into it. Most of those components are specialized in one way or another. They unite in their joint effect upon the sidewalk, which is not specialized in the least. That is its strength." READ ON for Part Two: Transcending the Rules of SimCity We've created a single Loop discussion about this game issue -- click here to join the conversation. Available in multiplayer only.
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SimCity
appears to obey the "physical laws" of real-world cities, because interacting
with it feels like interacting with a city, or at least interacting
with the umbrella species that cities belong to: "collectivist machines,"
in one of Kelly's phrases, and "vivisystems" in another. These are systems
where unpredictable, but meaningful, behavior emerges out of countless
low-level actions, like ant colonies, or neural networks, or the Latin
Quarter. The SimCity franchise also looks like an early draft of David
Gelertner's "mirror worlds" -- outlined in his 1992 book of the same title
-- an elaborate, massively-parallel computer simulation of the external
world that grants us new understanding of that world, by compressing and
filtering and shaping the endless flow of data it generates. If only our
SimCities were somehow plugged into downtown Manhattan or Tokyo, if only
they could somehow serve as a window on those urban environments, a way
of seeing what's happening now, from a new angle -- then we'd be
a long way towards realizing Gelertner's vision. Perhaps then our virtual
cities would be like real cities, only digital.
Perhaps
the most telling imperfection in SimCity's mirror world is one that occurs
to urban scholars and screenagers alike: the game's point of view. "Despite
wonderful graphics," Mitchell Moss, Director of the Taub Urban Research
Center at New York University, remarked to me in an e-mail correspondence,
"SimCity 3000 only allows you to look at the city from an aerial perspective.
Everything is planned and every decision is made from a bird's eye view.
Most planners do not make decisions based on helicopter photographs or
images." Leading urban ecologist William Burch goes one step further and
calls that aerial perspective the POV of the "urban elites." Anyone who
has spent some time playing SimCity knows that the birds-eye-view can
grow frustrating; you've built this incredible little world, but you're
never allowed to experience it the way you would experience an actual
city. That's a flaw in the gameplay, of course, but it also implies a
very specific theory of how cities work.