Wake Up The City

Lego Chicago City View 2001, Otto Normalverbraucher, 2005

Like the photograph to the left, I had a large Lego city that eventually had to be packed away. Next week is thirteen years since it was boxed up when I moved out of my old house, and to date it's still in the basement buried under even more boxes of unpacked stuff. The thing about Lego is it takes up space. In my old room at the end of the 90s it was all set up on two spare paint tables - there isn't even room for half a table now. In a way Lego followed Scalectrix and Subbuteo in being replaced by digital products that could better emulate reality and required nothing more than a computer and a compact disc. In all the years I've missed building with Lego, SimCity has provided a constructive outlet.

Last month I dug into the new SimCity (SimCity 5 for ease of reference) despite not having played it. I have, however, seen the game in action by watching Quill18's lengthy Let's Play. By the way, EA; that isn't a lost sale as I never intended to buy SC5 - SimCity 3000 continues to serve me quite well. There was a major criticism of the new game that I neglected to include in my pseudo-review.

Although SC5 is labelled a reboot of the series, the core gameplay is virtually identical to preceding titles. The player's role is mostly restricted to zoning areas for residential, commercial, or industrial development, and directly placing buildings is primarily limited to public services. SC5 now adds a new category of building the player can 'plop' (in Maxis' terminology) which ties into the new mineral resource feature of the maps. A city can utilise these resources to develop - for example, power plants were always ploppable but now they can run off the oil or coal extracted from the ground. They can also be directly utilised for industry which is the new mining sector, which in turn spurs development of a processing sector. Yet rather than mines, wells, refineries, and foundries appearing through zoning industry, passing ordinances, and sufficient demand existing to instigate their appearance; their existence in a city is directly controlled by the player. Thus, the game starts to become a command economy simulator as the player decides to add another shaft to the ore mine in the same way he or she can expand public resources - welcome, finally, as there was nothing more out of place in 3000 than a tiny two-floor fire or police station downtown surrounded by 4x4 and 5x5 tile skyscrapers and having to build another losing valuable space.

I like the introduction of resources (which feed into a global market with fluctuating commodity prices) as an economic basis for a city which in previous instalments would be locked to taxable population, I just believe its implementation is out of place with the character of the series. The participation of the player (ie, the mayor) should be limited to permitting the extraction of resources in zoned areas (say, a subset of the industrial zoning tool). If the player wishes for oil to be processed into plastics and ore into alloys for the creation of electronics to be exported, then it should be done as in reality - pass ordinances as in previous games for high-tech industry and offer tax breaks to attract business to your city in the same way the tax rate can alter the population. Whether the resultant products are consumed locally or sent to export should again be handled by the game's simulation of market forces and at most indirectly influenced by the players decisions as mayor. It becomes micromanagement when a player is not only juggling the demands of maintaining a budget and providing adequate services, but also tinkering with the local economy.

Despite the flawed mechanism for creating specialised cities built on fossil fuels or tourism (as with the theme park downloadable content), it at least approximates the way a settlement can come into being. Towns in the North of England and Wales come to mind when I think of coal, and I'm sure there are plenty of places in Texas founded on oil. When I started Orpstal in SC3K it didn't have an impetus. There was no reason for it to appear other than the fourth-wall breaking reason that I ran the game with the intention. I zoned some residential, a little commercial, and further along industrial. I placed a water tower, a coal-fired power plant, and some emergency services. I unlocked and placed the Mayor's house, the City Hall, and the Court House by 1911. From there it accelerated until the first high-rise buildings appeared in date unknown. A subway was built by 2039, and a ring-road highway system in place by 2064. Come 2081 the city completely spanned both banks of the river. From 2092 the city started to undergo extensive redevelopment - the massive seaport was converted to high-value residential, the river narrowed as skyrocketing commercial land value drove land reclamation, and the right bank de-industrialised. Two hundred and seven years after founding the population broke one million and continued up to one and a quarter million over the next fifty years, slightly set back by the construction of the cross-town highway tunnels in 2133 and the connection spur to the airport island in 2156.

So here we are five years after it eventually occurred to me to 'save-as' in order to document the developmental history of Orpstal. I thought coming up with names for custom tracks in Gran Turismo 5 was hard enough (at least SC3K lets you rename cities on the fly), but I eventually found a solution - I took the names of former mansions on deliveries I've done over the years and applied them roughly chronologically. I also looked over the old saves and noted how the city changed over the years, the decades, and indeed the centuries; but beyond the above listed dates it's a little insubstantial for constructing a narrative. Perhaps SC5 can parallel real life and you can recall the story of economic devastation when the mines were shut down and how a generation later a call centre was built on top of a shipyard. See below the map of Orpstal as she stands under the two and a half century long rule of Mayor DeFacto...

Orpstal on the river Dravia, 2160 [Picture link 5.7MB!]

In the twenty years since the last screenshot little has changed inside the city save for a section of Orbine being levelled and redesigned and the impact of the aforementioned airport connection. Most development is occurring on the outskirts. The areas Linnary and Greenbank are no longer industrial and the Central Business District has moved Westward with the shift of land value. The main industrial mega-estate has been rebuilt to look a bit more realistic, though SimCity can only create traffic circles rather than roundabouts hence basic four-way junctions to minimise traffic chaos. I'm aware of the problem of placing virtually all the industry off on the edge of the map, however, seeding it throughout would entail higher land values which, unlike for residential and commercial, is bad for industry. Further along in the top corner there's been an increase in farms simply because I like the variation they bring. The concentration of public services has continued. Aside from police and fire stations which have to be spread across the map in order to provide coverage; schools, colleges, and hospitals can be built away from the centre. It may not look realistic to have a farm-sized elementary school ten miles out of town, but nor does it look realistic to have these two-level buildings every other bloc.

SimCity is a game that never really ends, and even though Orpstal is essentially done - there's nothing much else that could be done besides completely urbanising the entire map - I've no doubt some time in the future I'll decide to jump back in and try out a new trick to solve a traffic problem or find a better layout for the industrial zone for the fifth time. You'll surely grant me the indulgence after two heavy political essays.

Written 6th July
¶[1351;1.5]