Unboxing the hidden politics of SimCity - YouTube

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.