Why, as a responsible adult, SimCity 2000 hits differently

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2025/09/thirty-years-later-simcity-2000-hasnt-changed-but-i-have/

by doppp • 10 months ago

249 321 10 months ago

bell-cot• 10 months ago

"When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things."

But, being humans, the "I put away" is always a bit aspirational. And part of being older and wiser (or at least aspiring to the latter) is more maturely reflecting upon your own younger years.

casenmgreen• 10 months ago

Unfortunately, the transport model in SC2K is broken, and by that, you have to design your transport network to work for the game, rather than design it as you would wish to do so.

Each tile emits "journeys", which travel down transport routes connected to the tile, with a view to finding other types of tile (residential needs to find industrial and commercial, for example, but commercial IIRC needs to find only industrial). When a journey meets a junction, it randomly chooses one of the exits. The choice is not directed toward a suitable tile.

So if you make say a block of road tiles, in the shape of a square, say 4x4, any journey entering that tile usually times out (travels too far) before by chance managing to emerge from all the junctions.

As such, for example, hub-and-spoke subway systems basically do not work.

You basically need to design the transport network to specifically, and without junctions, go from a set of source tiles of a given type, to the necessary destination tiles, and that's not how real cities look, nor what you would naturally do.

I liked SC2K a lot, but in the end I had to give up on it, because of the transport system; the game couldn't be played realistically. I've not yet tried SC3K, and I don't know how transport is modeled there - hopefully better.

voidfunc2• 10 months ago

the game couldn't be played realistically.

I think I found your problem..., trying to take a game too seriously.

I've played thousands of hours of SimCity 2000, 3000 and 4 and I treat them as what they are, incredibly fun city building sandboxes with illusory and believable but flawed simulations under the hood.

DonHopkins4• 10 months ago

https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-user-interfaces-to-s...

Everyone notices the obvious built-in political bias, whatever that is. But everyone sees it from a different perspective, so nobody agrees what its real political agenda actually is. I don’t think it’s all that important, since SimCity’s political agenda pales in comparison to the political agenda in the eye of the beholder.
Some muckety-muck architecture magazine was interviewing Will Wright about SimCity, and they asked him a question something like “which ontological urban paradigm most influenced your design of the simulator, the Exo-Hamiltonian Pattern Language Movement, or the Intra-Urban Deconstructionist Sub-Culture Hypothesis?” He replied, “I just kind of optimized for game play.”

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22062590

DonHopkins on Jan 16, 2020 | parent | context | favorite | on: Reverse engineering course

Will Wright defined the "Simulator Effect" as how game players imagine a simulation is vastly more detailed, deep, rich, and complex than it actually is: a magical misunderstanding that you shouldn’t talk them out of. He designs games to run on two computers at once: the electronic one on the player’s desk, running his shallow tame simulation, and the biological one in the player’s head, running their deep wild imagination.

"Reverse Over-Engineering" is a desirable outcome of the Simulator Effect: what game players (and game developers trying to clone the game) do when they use their imagination to extrapolate how a game works, and totally overestimate how much work and modeling the simulator is actually doing, because they filled in the gaps with their imagination and preconceptions and assumptions, instead of realizing how many simplifications and shortcuts and illusions it actually used.

https://www.masterclass.com/classes/will-wright-teaches-game...

There's a name for what Wright calls "the simulator effect" in the video: apophenia. There's a good GDC video on YouTube where Tynan Sylvester (the creator of RimWorld) talks about using this effect in game design.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia

Apophenia (/æpoʊˈfiːniə/) is the tendency to mistakenly perceive connections and meaning between unrelated things. The term (German: Apophänie) was coined by psychiatrist Klaus Conrad in his 1958 publication on the beginning stages of schizophrenia. He defined it as "unmotivated seeing of connections [accompanied by] a specific feeling of abnormal meaningfulness". He described the early stages of delusional thought as self-referential, over-interpretations of actual sensory perceptions, as opposed to hallucinations.

RimWorld: Contrarian, Ridiculous, and Impossible Game Design Methods

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdqhHKjepiE

5 game design tips from Sims creator Will Wright

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scS3f_YSYO0

Tip 5: On world building. As you know by now, Will's approach to creating games is all about building a coherent and compelling player experience. His games are comprised of layered systems that engage players creatively, and lead to personalized, some times unexpected outcomes. In these types of games, players will often assume that the underlying system is smarter than it actually is. This happens because there's a strong mental model in place, guiding the game design, and enhancing the player's ability to imagine a coherent context that explains all the myriad details and dynamics happening within that game experience.
Now let's apply this to your project: What mental model are you building, and what story are you causing to unfold between your player's ears? And how does the feature set in your game or product support that story? Once you start approaching your product design that way, you'll be set up to get your customers to buy into the microworld that you're building, and start to imagine that it's richer and more detailed than it actually is.

liveoneggs• 10 months ago

It's wasn't bad for two floppy disks. Transport tycoon obviously gives more of what you're after but might not be at the correct scale.

Modified30192• 10 months ago

I still have my SC2K floppy disks. Probably full of errors now, and no way to read them anyways, but a nice little keepsake from a time we kept physical “save icons”.

card_zero2• 10 months ago

It has another flaw, which is that you don't need to build any pipes. Water supply has no effect other than roleplay.

CursedSilicon• 10 months ago

That was at least added in SimCity 3000

sio8ohPi• 10 months ago

Sixfortyfive on Reddit claims to have done testing of this, and disagrees.

https://www.reddit.com/r/SimCity/comments/1euehye/how_simcit...

The water system has one very significant direct effect: the land value of any given tile drastically increases when it is watered.

throaway5445454• 10 months ago

water supply raises or lowers property values

navane2• 10 months ago

What? I'm pretty sure high density zones need water, or they will stick to low density buildings?

TheCycoONE• 10 months ago

SC4 with the NAM mod sounds more in line with your expectations https://www.sc4nam.com/docs/feature-guides/the-nam-traffic-s...

rifty• 10 months ago

If you want you can even make a completely disconnected city and bypass most traffic issues all together because of how supply and demand is fulfilled across the map.

Industrial development only requires a single road connected residential tile to grow off the full city's industrial demand. The same goes for Commercial. Residential will fully develop with just a single commercial tile on its road network.

It is broken in a realistic sense definitely, but it's also why I'll always play it regardless of which realistic transportation city game i'm also playing. I could never abstractly brush-in a city like I can in SC2k.

rokkamokka• 10 months ago

Funny enough, cities skylines, a much more modern game, had the exact same thing (at least at release). Simply disconnecting the residential areas removed their traffic altogether but left everything else working normally

xyzelement3• 10 months ago

First, I had a similar feeling coming back to SimCity 4. Even a just a few years ago, I tried to optimize for maximum density and size - kinda like NYC where I lived.

Now I don't find that interesting and much more interested to sustain a leafy suburb like one I've chosen for my kids.

Second, it's not just games. In my NYC days I was a "transit and bike lanes" guy all the way. Now with kids, I understand why "Americans love their cars" - it switched form a derogatory statement to one of understanding. There's a reason that "ban the cars" posters never mention a partner or children in their bios.

There's less "objective good" or "objective bad" in these matters than I used to think. It's more about who you optimize for.

bombcar4• 10 months ago

You can get quite a bit of advancements by having “one side” try to optimize for the other - if done honestly, you can get a “best of both worlds” as they learn what the others want (and need).

dataflow2• 10 months ago

"Americans love their cars" isn't so much about the cars as it is about the lack of good alternatives. Other countries have great public transportation and good bike lanes and all that... in addition to car ownership. So people can get the best of both worlds. It's only a zero sum game if you want it to be one.

cyberax7• 10 months ago

Nope. It's universal. The denser the city, the more child-hostile it is.

Just imagine getting into Tokyo subway with a stroller for 2 kids. There's a reason why Tokyo fertility rate is below 1.

p_ing6• 10 months ago

"Americans love their cars" isn't so much about the cars as it is about the lack of good alternatives.

I love to drive therefor I buy a car I love to drive.

America is largely rural. Comparisons to Europe aren't appropriate outside of the proper metros.

crooked-v• 10 months ago

Of course, SimCity as a series leaves out the biggest visual impact of cars - all the parking lots. Even Cities Skylines doesn't try very hard.

p_ing6• 10 months ago

SC2K has Parking Lots.

https://simcity.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_SimCity_2000_buildin...

Obviously that doesn't get to your point, which is accurate.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/05/the-p...

I was blown away by how much more space was parking lot rather than actual store. That was kind of a problem, because we were originally just going to model real cities, but we quickly realized there were way too many parking lots in the real world and that our game was going to be really boring if it was proportional in terms of parking lots.

JambalayaJimbo• 10 months ago

Your kid will hate your car constrained area, because they will be unable to get around themselves until they’re old enough / rich enough to drive one

FredPret3• 10 months ago

Then the kid moves to NYC, loves it, meets someone, has a kid, and realizes they need two SUV’s and a heated garage near good schools.

busterarm2• 10 months ago

I grew up in NYC and maybe having my movement restricted might have been a good thing.

I was deep into NY's drug and party scene from about the time I turned 12. Pedos used to follow me walking home from the public library.

Lotta my friends growing up did not make it and I no longer live in NYC.

superfrank• 10 months ago

Suburb doesn't mean car constrained. I grew up in the suburbs and rode my bike and skateboard just about everywhere from the time I was 13 to the time I could drive.

seb1204• 10 months ago

Dirodi or other ebikes make kids very mobile nowadays

positron262• 10 months ago

There's another phase we forget about. If I could choose, I'd like to grow up in a giant forest arcology and go hang out with my friends like it's a giant vertical mall with lots of places to go get lost.

When I finally got access to grocery delivery to my door, I could see how it all will work. Carrying things for one person is fine. It's carrying groceries for a household for a week where things break down. Even putting all that on an elevator would be really unwieldy compared to unloading from the garage.

Self-driving and the evolution of early-life education will play a big role in simplifying life without the parents needing to ferry the kids around five days a week.

JoshTriplett• 10 months ago

Delivery makes sense for another reason: delivery services could have mechanisms that don't make sense for individual people to own, such as dollies or carts to get things from a vehicle to your door. (Due to the current over-reliance on gig-style delivery people using their own vehicles, rather than dedicated employees with specialized tools, this often doesn't happen today, but it should.)

In general, it makes a huge amount of sense for a specialized employee with specialized tooling to pick up groceries for many people and deliver them; the net result is less total person-hours spent shopping, less vehicle miles driven, and less overall labor.

joules77• 10 months ago

Go deeper. Why does society needs parents at the current rate of change?

The ants discovered hundreds of millions of years before even the chimps got social, that parents are not required for functioning society.

We will get there soon with artificial wombs on the near horizon.

cblum• 10 months ago

FWIW, I’m not in NYC, but I’m in general a “ban the cars” type and have a wife and kid. We’re intentionally raising the kid in the city because we believe it’s a richer cultural environment than suburbs, and also because we both grew up in cities in our respective countries.

cyberax7• 10 months ago

Now try getting 2 more kids.

Large cities are OK if you have one kid. They completely break down once you have 2-3 kids.

sien• 10 months ago

The economic aspect is also worth considering.

The subsidy per passenger mile in the US is :

0.019 for road transport, 0.021 for air transport, 0.710 for Amtrak and 2.300 for transit.

From : https://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=22592

Just also as a note, you can create suburbs pretty easily where bikes use paths or whatever. I live in a suburb where I can ride 15 kms to work without riding on roads. The subsidy for bikes would actually be really low.

pastage2• 10 months ago

You should look at Cost benefit analysis, there was one made on Copenhagen. [1] Bicycle infrastructure usually gets you 6x-12x on the invested amount, getting a 1.2 CBA is ok, 2 is amazing.

Bicycle infrastructure is often destroyed by those other investments and that is usually not counted as a con. But it is just too cheap to build bicycle infrastructure to be interesting.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09218...

chimeracoder4• 10 months ago

There's a reason that "ban the cars" posters never mention a partner or children in their bios.

To the extent that "ban cars" even exists as a real political archetype rather than a meme, this is just patently not true. At least one of the two co-hosts of The War on Cars (again, a title which is intentionally tongue-in-cheek) has a preteen son.

But more importantly: car-dependent suburbs are an absolutely miserable place to grow up as a child if you're not wealthy enough to have one non-working parent and/or a nanny (or both). Being dependent on someone else to enable your entire social life until you turn 16 is a torturous enough experience that I'm not surprised that the first generation to have universal access to social media as teenagers has become the first generation to use social media to organize a teenage-driven movement for public transit.

cyberax7• 10 months ago

Find me anti-car advocates with 3 or more children. With both working parents.

lkois• 10 months ago

To the extent that "ban cars" even exists as a real political archetype rather than a meme, this is just patently not true. At least one of the two co-hosts of The War on Cars (again, a title which is intentionally tongue-in-cheek) has a preteen son.

Similar for the YouTube channel NotJustBikes, who has gone into great detail about the advantages of raising kids in a city planned around pedestrian and cyclist usage, and not in a suburban sprawl.

noosphr• 10 months ago

Second, it's not just games. In my NYC days I was a "transit and bike lanes" guy all the way. Now with kids, I understand why "Americans love their cars" - it switched form a derogatory statement to one of understanding. There's a reason that "ban the cars" posters never mention a partner or children in their bios.

Buy a bakfiet cargo bike, there's models that can fit five kids under 7. Mine fits three.

Kids like them better and you get exercise. For the first time in my life I have a BMI of around 20 without having to waste time at the gym, the drop off, pick up, shopping, and work commute add up to an hour and a half of medium intensity cardio.

Every other parent my age in the neighborhood looks five years away from a heart attack. I'm fitter than I was in my 20s.

There's less "objective good" or "objective bad" in these matters than I used to think. It's more about who you optimize for.

There are over 1,000 children killed in the US annually by cars. This is after we restrain them like Hannibal Lecter while in cars and don't let them out of our houses so they don't get run over.

That's before we talk about the child obesity epidemic, social media abuse, and on and on.

If given the choice between keeping cars or letting polio loose on the land you'd be hard pressed to figure out which will kill and disable more kids.

theturtlemoves• 10 months ago

Buy a bakfiet cargo bik

Off topic, but my brain did a double take there. Didn't know that the Dutch word "bakfiets" (bike with a box) was anglicized to "bakfiet". Cool. Usually it's us who borrow foreign words from all over

sleepychu2• 10 months ago

I'd love to get a cargo bike and use it for kid transport.

I would be worried about collision safety though, I am not going to persuade everyone in my neighborhood to stop using cars in a hurry and there are not bike routes between me and school, library, shops, ...

glimshe3• 10 months ago

I'd love if more people on HN could read your post. As someone who's spent more than half of his life overseas in an ultra high density city, I wouldn't trade my quiet American suburb by a glamorous city with perfect public transportation anywhere in the world. It was great when I was single and cared about meeting girls and partying, but no more.

To each their own, right?

mft_2• 10 months ago

With respect, despite writing “anywhere in the world”, I doubt you have experienced the places in the world that might change your opinion.

I can think of multiple European towns which offer a great quality of life together with (thanks to safe cycling and great public transport) the ability to live largely or entirely car-free, if that’s your choice.

yard2010• 10 months ago

In my experience a big city in the US is always noisy and filled with aholes/miserable people. In Europe that's not always the case

morsch• 10 months ago

Sure, just as long as all the externalities are prized in.

criddell2• 10 months ago

When I was 20 I couldn’t imagine living anywhere other than in the heart of a city. I loved the energy and all the things to do.

When I had kids, the suburbs suddenly made a lot of sense. Better schools, tons of neighborhood sports, lots of kids around, very dog friendly, etc…

Now that I’m an empty nester, I’d love to move further out of the city. Get more space around me, have a smaller home but a bigger workshop, sauna, and garden.

I can imagine that when I hit my 70’s or 80’s, I might want to be back in the city again closer to other people, healthcare, and other services that will be a bigger part of my life.

There really isn’t one ideal setup for me in all parts of my life.

em5003• 10 months ago

Now with kids, I understand why "Americans love their cars" - it switched form a derogatory statement to one of understanding. There's a reason that "ban the cars" posters never mention a partner or children in their bios.

This seems very different from the large anti-car movement in the Netherlands in the 1970s (which eventually led to massive investments in bike infrastructure and car restrictions in the cities).

There was significant parent involvement, touting the memorable slogan "Stop de Kindermoord" ("Stop the Child Murder").

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_transport_in_the_Netherla...

qwertox2• 10 months ago

There's a youtube channel named @NotJustBikes which mostly talks about how bike-friendly the Netherlands are and compares it to the USA. It's worth watching a couple of those videos.

lr4444lr• 10 months ago

I have no knowledge of what this Dutch effort was beyond the info in your link, but nothing suggests that the public outcry was go actually ban vehicles or disincentivize ownership and use with tactics such as with higher fees, reduced parking availability, which is what U.S. urban road safety advocates I see pushing for.

xnx• 10 months ago

The US doesn't even try to restrict machine gun ownership by civilians even after mass murder of six year olds so I'm doubtful a campaign about child safety will motivate them.

throw0101a3• 10 months ago

Now with kids, I understand why "Americans love their cars" - it switched form a derogatory statement to one of understanding. There's a reason that "ban the cars" posters never mention a partner or children in their bios.

Maddy Novich, https://www.instagram.com/cargobikemomma/, for one, may disagree with you. Interviews:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PoKcQRlDGs

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDhJt26dQTs

And I'm not sure how many folks are about banning cars (completely), as opposed to designing things so that (two) cars go from being mandatory to optional.

stouset2• 10 months ago

Yeah, it’s crazy the number of people who scream about taking their cars from their cold, dead hands when people talk about adding some bike lanes, rolling out more public transit, or removing small amounts of parking for more human-centered uses.

People somehow perceive all of these things as trying to ban cars instead of promoting other forms of transportation.

loglog2• 10 months ago

You don't recognize the objective bad because you've never lived in a place that does it better (NL, DK).

agentcoops• 10 months ago

I just had a kid and moved to DK from the US. I was so skeptical of the infant (and often mother!) in cart on front of bike that you see everywhere, but it's such a life-changer versus the ordeal of carseats etc. TLDR totally agreed.

xandrius2• 10 months ago

Spend 1 month with your kids in a place where cars are actually not needed, only then you can actually understand what you are denying your kids.

And if you want to know right away, think about who can drive your car, as supposed being able to walk or ride somewhere. You're limiting their own personal freedom by forcing them to have you always needed to go somewhere.

tombert4• 10 months ago

Cars really aren't needed in NYC, where the poster said they lived. Many, many people here do not have cars, and haven't for years.

It's still annoying to not have a car. I don't have kids but f I did then the first thing I would do would almost certainly be to buy a vehicle.

lotsoweiners2• 10 months ago

I don’t really want my kids have that much personal freedom because they’re kids. I live very suburban and my kids could walk to one of the neighborhood parks (2-3 minutes) or to a friends house but I don’t see them needing more than that.

darkamaul• 10 months ago

Actually, even for families with kids, the safer option is still bikes and low-car environments. Fewer cars means less air pollution, less noise, and less sedentary behavior for both kids and adults.

The data we have shows that the presence of cars is the main source of risk on the street, not the act of biking itself. Neighborhoods that design around walking and biking tend to have fewer serious accidents, not more.

If we're talking about optimizing for kids, then banning individual car use in residential neighborhoods would be the ideal. I know it’s not politically feasible in most of the US right now, but it’s worth keeping in mind that cars are the danger.

rglullis25• 10 months ago

No city simulation game properly models the real cost of parking and car-centric infrastructure: https://humantransit.org/2013/05/how-sim-city-greenwashes-pa...

Now with kids, I understand why "Americans love their cars"

In other words: I was okay with demanding change when it didn't inconvenience me, but now that I get to benefit from economic policy that heavily subsidize my lifestyle I rather keep the status quo.

tengbretson• 10 months ago

There's a reason that "ban the cars" posters never mention a partner or children in their bios.

Here comes the flood of "but not meee" comments

CalRobert9• 10 months ago

This is condescending and wildly inaccurate. My children are exactly the reason we live car-free and chose a town where you can bike safely - anything less is effectively condemning them to live in an outdoor prison until you can drive.

But, this is why we live in the Netherlands. If all you've seen is the US I can see how you might not understand that not being car-dependent is actually better for kids.

jjmarr2• 10 months ago

I rode transit everywhere as a kid living in the city. Got to explore a ton of cool stuff.

Meanwhile my friends in the suburbs had to walk 30 minutes to get Starbucks. And it was a gruelling march without sidewalks or tree cover.

CalRobert9• 10 months ago

The sad thing is that you _CAN_ have a leafy suburb without the roar of internal combustion and 8 lane stroads everywhere. Planners in the US just refuse to build them.

We live in a lovely leafy suburb completely car free. But it's this one - https://youtu.be/r-TuGAHR78w

This morning the four of us biked to the grocery store (we loaded the groceries in the bakfiets). The kids bike to their daycare. We bike to the train when we feel like a day out.

I can't fathom trying to raise kids somewhere we need to use a car to do anything.

thfuran• 10 months ago

But kids can use bikes and public transport well before they can drive. How are cars so especially helpful for children?

criddell2• 10 months ago

Robo taxis might change lots of things. I think I would be a lot more comfortable letting my ten year old use a Waymo to get to grandma’s house than a city bus. It’s door-to-door and you don’t have to worry about some weirdo across the aisle being inappropriate.

tombert4• 10 months ago

I've lived in NYC without a car for the last decade, and I don't have kids, and even granting that, I still have grown to understand why Americans love cars.

Getting groceries is a particular pain in the ass; I either need to go to the (very limited) grocery selections in my neighborhood with a cart, or lug the cart up and down the stairs of the subway, or be ok with only taking as much as I'm able carry with my hands in a few bags. I could get delivery, and I do that fairly often, but there are things that I prefer to get in person, like fruits or vegetables.

There's also just large things you cannot realistically take on a train, like large sheets of plywood at Home Depot. Again, you can of course get this stuff delivered, but then you run the risk of them sending you the worst, most warped piece of wood available, which has happened to me multiple times.

I've grown to sympathize with most Americans as a result.

AfterHIA• 10 months ago

This isn't an attack pal but I love that we have a generation of young men that are willing to sell all of their principles and buy into the suburbanite cult just right after, "getting it" after starting a family. I can appreciate that this is, "how it goes" but it creates a political class of people that are more concerned about their family's well-being than the well-being of society as a whole. Rinse and repeat over a few generations and this is a big part of why the United States has stagnated culturally.

Stated with love out of concern for our, "whole societal family" which includes you and yours.

Relevant: https://sites.pitt.edu/~syd/ASIND.html

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-adam/works/...

mitthrowaway24• 10 months ago

My biggest fear about cars is that one might kill my kid. This leads to impossing all sorts of play and travel restrictions on her that I wouldn't have to if there were fewer cars and more bikes. (Bikes which kids can ride independently to their friends' houses from a single-digit age, by the way, which I would allow her to do if she weren't sharing the streets with cars.)

Maybe the problem is that the leafy suburb you moved to is car-dependent? It doesn't have to be built that way, that's a design choice. It's possible to build a low density suburb that kids can bike through safely, for example: https://youtu.be/r-TuGAHR78w

barbazoo• 10 months ago

There's a reason that "ban the cars" posters never mention a partner or children in their bios.

Seems very rare that people describe their families in here so I wouldn’t go to that conclusion. I didn’t even know this page had a “bio” section. Anyway, seems like a strawman to me.

mrgoldenbrown2• 10 months ago

Kids and marriage are not unique to America. There are millions of Dutch kids happy to ride a bike or ride the bus along with their married parents.

crikeykangaroo• 10 months ago

Sure, but The Netherlands is also quite a lot smaller than the US.

goosedragons• 10 months ago

Nope. Just more selfish choices. Resources are finite. The further we can move away from cars, THE better for kids. Less risk of them being run over by a 7 foot tall Dodge Ram, more chances for independence because actually going places doesn't require a car.

mapotofu• 10 months ago

I live in a very walkable small town with lots of young families also biking and walking with their young children, as I am, and couldn’t disagree with you more about cars. It’s so nice to walk to the market instead of loading and unloading a car seat, to have the option of walking or taking a short bus ride to school, to walk to parks and playgrounds. I had the opposite reaction you did when I actually lived in a place that was kinda similar to what Europeans describe.

aucisson_masque• 10 months ago

Netherlands

mschuster912• 10 months ago

Now with kids, I understand why "Americans love their cars" - it switched form a derogatory statement to one of understanding. There's a reason that "ban the cars" posters never mention a partner or children in their bios.

That's because the infrastructure doesn't exist in lots of the US, either it never existed or it got ripped out during the car boom phase.

Here in a suburb of Munich (Germany), almost everything one needs in life - all four large supermarket chains, a veterinarian, a hardware store, daycare and school for children - is walkable in less than half an hour, or 5-10 minutes with a bike.

casta3• 10 months ago

Interesting. To provide a different experience, I live in NYC with kids and I find it great here. Daycare/Kindergarten is at most 4 blocks away, grocery stores are less than a block away, it takes me 10 minutes to get to the office on the train (1/2/3). I still bike to the office often. If we need a car there is a rental less than a block away, but in practice we rent maybe once a year. Today there was an open street on Columbus Ave and it was lovely to meet co-workers with their kids and let them play there. To be fair, I wasn't born here even if I'm a citizen, so I guess I wouldn't be considered "American".

xyzelement3• 10 months ago

I wasn't born here either (but I am the person you are replying to)

I'll give you some examples of the kinds of things I easily did with my two bigger kids (5 and 3 years old)

- woke up on a nice Sunday morning and decided to go for a woodsy hike 20 min drive away. - threw our kayak on the roof and drove out to paddle it on the south shore, on a whim. - threw bikes into the bike rack for a long ride along a Greenway. - dropped by Grandma's house easily. - went to the Adirondacks for a week and brought our bikes and paddle board along with a bunch of other stuff.

And not directly care related but car enabled - I just opened the backyard door and they were playing there by themselves while I kept an eye from the kitchen.

thatfrenchguy• 10 months ago

It’s funny because as a parent there’s nothing I want less than living somewhere I have to drive everywhere. I can walk 5 minutes to the nearest park, take a bus or a tram to be in a different one in 10 minutes, and I can’t fathom having to take our car for that kind of daily activity.

libraryatnight• 10 months ago

what a selfish and narrow way to process the world.

monkeyelite• 10 months ago

You’ve awakened the horde by suggesting the anti-car project is not an absolute good.

tstenner• 10 months ago

Our city replaced some train tracks with high quality separated bike streets (no cars allowed, obviously). Biking five kilometers each way with only three street crossings is perfectly doable, even with small children on their own bikes.

presentation3• 10 months ago

I live in Tokyo and have kids. Both cycling and transit are essential to most parents lives here. It is not that these are incompatible with family life, it’s that as it is implemented and maintained in the USA (read: badly), it is incompatible.

An example that’s minor for young singles but major for parents: train stations here pretty much all have elevators and they almost always are working. This alone changes the game.

RodgerTheGreat• 10 months ago

In contrast, Magnasanti: https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-totalitarian-buddhist-wh...

card_zero2• 10 months ago

I always used to play with zero tax, and legal gambling.

NortySpock• 10 months ago

... How well does that work? Asking because my SC3K runs always ended up being boring cases of "yes, we sell landfill space to the surrounding 4 cities, and if people want education they're going to have to go to a library and learn to read themselves, and we're obviously too broke to improve things."

hibikir• 10 months ago

Coming from Spain it was always a difficult game to see as a simulation: What do you mean, commercial zones? What in the world it this low density residential? It was basically impossible to try to make a city like the one I lived in.

Seeing American suburbia, decades later, explained everything.

fluoridation6• 10 months ago

It was so weird to me too. The idea of laying down zones for purposes was completely different from the way I imagined my city was built, considering businesses and residences coexist not merely next to each other, but often one on top of the other, even in relatively low density areas. I would have imagined that you'd start from some basic service to attract settlers and then add infrastructure as the population grows, while the inhabitants figure out the land use on their own, with uses changing over time with the ebb and flow of the economy.

roxil• 10 months ago

It's a different historical setting, but the Anno games work kind of like that. The resulting towns look more like something you'd expect as a European with markets, churches, taverns, theaters and things like this in the town's center and agriculture + industry on the outskirts.

navane2• 10 months ago

I thought they made cities like that in SimCity out of technological limitations of the software. When I saw US cities for the first time, decades later, it clicked.

Nevermark• 10 months ago

I find it much harder to callously play with the lives of my virtual citizens.

I am considering the morality of future mods, where the Sim City masses, Frog in Frogger, and characters like Ulfric Stormcloak and Paarthurnax in Skyrim, are replaced with individual persistent self-aware world-aware in-game reinforcement models. Entirely replacing game-designed behaviors (programmed reflex, caricature, or intricate) with spontaneous situation processing, needs and decisions.

Strange that this could credibly happen this decade.

Science fiction has long considered conundrums around robot rights. But the crux of the moral issues will be relevant regardless whether self-aware models have physical/3D or digital/abstract environments.

I think language is not a good prime modality for self-aware assistants. By being trained to deeply mimic us, they (already, but not yet problematically) absorb views on their identity and survival that are not at all compatible with what we will do with them.

DonHopkins4• 10 months ago

Will Wright gave postmortems for SimEarth, SimAnt, and SimCity 2000, and previewed an extremely early pre-release prototype version of Dollhouse (which eventually became The Sims). SimAnt was too simple, SimEarth was too complex, SimCity 2000 was just right, and Dollhouse (The Sims) was what he was working on next.

Will Wright on Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games (1996) (2023 Video Update)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34573406

https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-user-interfaces-to-s...

Will Wright - Maxis - Interfacing to Microworlds - 1996-4-26

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsxoZXaYJSk

Video of Will Wright's talk about "Interfacing to Microworlds" presented to Terry Winograd's user interface class at Stanford University, April 26, 1996.

He demonstrates and gives postmortems for SimEarth, SimAnt, and SimCity 2000, then previews an extremely early pre-release prototype version of Dollhouse (which eventually became The Sims), describing how the AI models personalities and behavior, and is distributed throughout extensible plug-in programmable objects in the environment, and he thoughtfully answers many interesting questions from the audience.

This is the lecture described in "Will Wright on Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games (1996)": A summary of Will Wright’s talk to Terry Winograd’s User Interface Class at Stanford, written in 1996 by Don Hopkins, before they worked together on The Sims at Maxis.

yonran• 10 months ago

I have the opposite takeaway. The city should be mutable. A subway line should be buildable within one political term. The property tax rate should rise or fall within a time frame that would incentivize people to vote with their feet. A lot of the author’s learnings are actually indicators of 21st century American stagnancy. Real life should be more like Sim City.

mschuster912• 10 months ago

A subway line should be buildable within one political term.

That used to be the case maybe 50 years ago, when we had the first network built in Munich.

The problem is, since then a loooooot of stuff was built underground. Not just more and more tunnels, but also so many subterranean lines for power, POTS, internet... and a lot of what was built 50 years ago was built by literally ripping open a street, excavating tunnel space, building a roof of concrete and backfilling everything with soil. You simply can do this exactly once and you need a wide enough street to do this. Once all these "cheap and easy" routes are built over, it becomes a multi-billion-dollar project as you have to make sure you don't endanger the buildings on top - in Cologne, that cost the lives of two people and destroyed a good portion of the City Archives [1].

The property tax rate should rise or fall within a time frame that would incentivize people to vote with their feet.

People should not be forced to move, at all. Incentivizing movement, okay, but forcing people around like we do now (mostly, by not having any kind of modern jobs in rural areas) has a lot of nasty side effects - not everyone can move, so you get resentment building up against those that did move (eventually culminating in the "these librul cities turn our kids gay!!!" bullshit and, subsequently, the massive urban-rural political disconnect), and a lot of old people in rural areas end up having no one to take care of them in old(er) age, and young people in urban areas don't have kids because they don't have family to support them in raising said children.

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historisches_Archiv_der_Stadt_...

tombert4• 10 months ago

To me, the clunky and annoying UI of Sim City 2000 is part of the charm of it.

Is it dated? Yep, but it's intuitive enough for nine-year-old tombert to have figured it out ok, and to me part of the fun is trying to use the UI quickly enough to put out fires and the like.

It could just rose-tinted glasses on my end, very likely honestly, but I still find the entire experience to be pretty fun. I liked Sim City 3000 and Sim City 4, and they are arguably better games, but for me Sim City 2000 hit the right balance of "easy" and "complicated" that I find myself most drawn to. I will load up Sim City 2000 about once a year off of my GOG purchase, and still thoroughly enjoy it, and find myself wasting way more hours than I budgeted for it.

Modified30192• 10 months ago

I remember being terribly confused by the lack of options for a good while, before somehow finally discovering that some buttons you had to hold for more options.

Discoverability aside, it made the UI nicely compact while being easy enough to access, so the city could fill most of the screen instead.

tombert4• 10 months ago

Yeah, honestly I have no idea how I figured out the "click and hold" thing. I don't think I read it in a manual, I might have just been messing around and finding it by accident.

ionwake• 10 months ago

Enjoyed this article on how our perceptions of an env change as we grow older even if its virtual

Ozzie_osman• 10 months ago

Does anyone know how to actually play Simcity 2000 these days, on say, a Mac or a Nintendo Switch?

superjared• 10 months ago

https://www.gog.com/en/game/simcity_2000_special_edition

xyzzy_plugh• 10 months ago

Sadly this is the DOS version which is inferior.

DengistKhan• 10 months ago

An alternative game, Theotown, which may or may not be better, is available on steam and android/iOS.

ermir• 10 months ago

It speaks to the quality of the SimCity games that they offer something for all ages. I also changed my perspective on a few violent scenes in games when I had a child, I could no longer stomach scenes such as No Russian (iykyk), which I had no problem at all as a teen.

MattGrommes• 10 months ago

Beating SimCity 2000 was one of my favorite gaming moments in my life.

If you haven't seen it and think it's weird to beat a city game; if you fill the entire board with Arcologies, they all become rockets and take off into space. What a thrilling science-fictional way to end the experience. Loved it.

FugeDaws• 10 months ago

yeh when playing cities skyline i am always traffic managing it seems to be my biggest job to always have 0 traffic in my cities im guessing it boils down to the fact i hate traffic

Why, as a responsible adult, SimCity 2000 hits differently

Related Stories