At Spillway, Will Wiles writes about a series of contradictory tensions at the heart of SimCity:

“…there’s a sheer atavistic thrill that comes from playing the game fast and loose, with all sorts of destruction and little thought of consequences. Your urgently needed relief road happens to pass straight through a small, comfortable middleclass neighbourhood? Pah, build it anyway. Sure, you could spend the money on a neat little bus system, but isn’t a glistening motorway just a bit more swanky? Similarly, a vast stadium complex is always going to be more appealing to the ambitious mayor in a hurry, even though a well-funded local library network could yield better results for a fraction of the cost. Huge engineering projects will always be more fun to put together, and more impressive onscreen, than microscopic local initiatives. A mayor should be building suspension bridges and airports – leave the rest to Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.”

[If you are looking for more evidence that SimCity has permanently altered the way we look at cities, then the above view of Shanghai from Chinese search engine Baidu's "dimensional map" is probably a pretty good place to start; seen via @doingitwrong.]

“I wanted to do something about the value of the future, and the value of cities, both of which seem, of late, to have been somewhat reduced in their placement on the stock market of our imagination. Creating a game that was about reclaiming a city came to mind, and this developed into something which will be both an interesting exercise in anti-dystopian playfulness, and an offbeat take on familiar ideas about strategy games. The Walking City is about starting with things in ruins. This is no blank slate, as you might expect with SimCity, but instead a catastrophe of cynicism and neglect. It’s about helping the people that remain in a collapsed civilization to pull themselves out of the hole. It’s also going to be a game about /influencing/ the people in the city, rather than simply telling them what to do, and it’s working on the idea that if you clean up and fix one thing in an environment than that will have a knock on effect for everything and everyone else in its area of effect.”

Obviously, the project is just beginning, but the thing that has me so excited about it is that it seems to me to be a game that is being explicitly produced to do what I have suggested games are capable of doing: producing critiques of cities.  (Or, more accurately, of ideas about cities.)

Vincent Ocasla’s “Magnasanti” is a SimCity with six million inhabitants, which Ocasla argues represents the maximum possible stable population achievable within the game.  A winning solution, he says, to a game without any programmed conditions for winning.  Ocasla, a Filipino architecture student, spent four years constructing the SimCity — building the SimCity itself, but also studying the game systems, wading through equations, and working out optimal spatial solutions on graph paper.  I was reminded of Magnasanti by Super Colossal‘s post on it today, which you should read:

This is the kind of archiporn that I am a sucker for; gamespace urbanism exploited to its extreme condition. Can you ‘win’ urbanism? Is this even urbanism? If not, can we take anything from its construction? The primary move that the city makes is to remove cars altogether and base transport purely on subways. I suspect this is a method to exploit the space otherwise taken up by roads for real estate allowing for an increased population per tile, however, it is a strategy that many cities—Sydney included—are seriously looking into. Remove motor vehicles, increase public transport. Seems like a sound idea. But ultimately, Magnasanti has little to do with urban design and everything to do with gaming systems for maximum reward.

This, of course, is exactly right — the construction strategy for Magnasanti tells us very little about how to construct a city, but a great deal about how to manipulate the internal logic of SimCity (and that is instructive as to the distance between the logic of the city and the logic of SimCity, which results from SimCity being the embodiment of a particular set of assumptions about how cities are planned).  Having been reminded, though, I should also link to this interview with Ocasla at Vice.  Fascinatingly, Ocasla argues that he constructed Magnasanti as a critique of urban conditions, inspired by Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi.  Magnasanti, he says, is not a blueprint for how to build a city.  It’s an intentionally hellish vision which exploits the game’s internal logic as commentary:

There are a lot of other problems in the city hidden under the illusion of order and greatness: Suffocating air pollution, high unemployment, no fire stations, schools, or hospitals, a regimented lifestyle – this is the price that these sims pay for living in the city with the highest population. It’s a sick and twisted goal to strive towards. The ironic thing about it is the sims in Magnasanti tolerate it. They don’t rebel, or cause revolutions and social chaos. No one considers challenging the system by physical means since a hyper-efficient police state keeps them in line. They have all been successfully dumbed down, sickened with poor health, enslaved and mind-controlled just enough to keep this system going for thousands of years. 50,000 years to be exact. They are all imprisoned in space and time.

Given mammoth‘s professed interest in finding overlap between gameworlds and cities, it’s probably not surprising that this leads me to wonder: what other games might be used to produce critiques of cities, or buildings, or landscapes?  I’m particularly interested in this question because of a minor pet theory, which is that one of the most important futures for video games — if they are to become as important a venue for cultural expression as they have the potential to be — is less about the design of spectacularly complex linear (or even branching) narratives for video games, and more about the sharing, re-telling, discussion, and celebration of emergent narratives and objects created by players.  Pro Vericelli or Oil Furnace, in other words, not Mass Effect.

A little while ago I spat out a series of tweets for “#idiosyncraticallyarchitecturalvideogames”, some of which (Love, Detonate, Mirror’s Edge) would seem to be excellent fodder for this sort of thing.  If, for instance, as Geoff Manaugh has argued, “the bank heist and the prison break together might form the architectural scenario par excellance“, then surely a game like Subversion — “a Mission Impossible-style spy thriller” set within an infinite array of procedurally-generated cities, neighborhoods, buildings, and bank vaults — could be played with the intent of exploring such scenarios (and, if the player is particularly clever, played with the intent of expressing a certain set architectural ideas).  What happens, basically, when architects play video games as architects?

[Thanks to Tim Maly for the tip on Subversion.]

Through Brian Finoki, I ran into the game-world “photography” of Robert Overweg (“Facade 2″ pictured above), who hunts the worlds of video games not to run up a body count, but for architectural fragments and broken landscapes, moments where the rough edges of programmed rules find visual expression.  I recommend “Glitches” and “The end of the virtual world”, in particular.

Exactly what common ground do the modular megastructure of Plug-In City and the instrumentalized cityscapes of Civilization share? Both of these frameworks propose that urban growth is an algorithmic or procedural operation whereby “the city” (rather than a singular edifice) embodies the essence of Le Corbusier’s technophilic proclamations that architecture should function as a “machine for living”. These examples encapsulate systemic thinking in paper architecture and game design by suggesting the possibility of an instrumentalized, “plug and play” urbanism founded on the notion of homogeneous citizenry and the possibility of infinite expansion. These reductionist approaches to reading the city are equal parts utopian and monomaniacal – one need only look as far as McKenzie Wark for some sage advice regarding such totalizing thought: “The delusion of God games is that the gamer is in control when at the controller … But it is the game that plays the gamer … the gamer who is an avatar, in the sense of being the incarnation of an abstract principle.” While Wark is levying this warning at the players of strategy games it could well be heeded by urban planning firms who find themselves enmeshed in the market forces and legalities that dictate the scope of most city-scale projects.

If you enjoy the essay, note that Greg has posted a handful of additional thoughts here.

[Readers of mammoth will recall that this -- particularly the parallel between the god-like control assumed by the gamer and the fetishization of control in modernist urbanism --  is a topic which we have occasionally discussed.]

An unfortunately brief article in the latest Atlantic Monthly describes “SimCity Baghdad”, a video game developed for the US Army in order to train officers to navigate the intersections of local politics, Iraqi culture, infrastructure, urban social systems, and insurgent violence.  It’s not exactly what I was thinking of when I described a hypothetical Infrastructure XL, but UrbanSim (that’s the actual title of the game) nonetheless represents a fascinating evolution of the traditional and staid genre of city-building video games, though it is obviously an evolution with sinister overtones.

[Your authoritative source for understanding military urbanism is of course Subtopia, but this recent BLDGBLOG post on Die Hard, the Israeli military, and the violent navigation of architectural space also springs to mind for its explication of the links between military practices and architectural practices.  And I'd be negligent if I failed to mention the Archinect school blog of Nick Sowers (@soundscrapers), which is conveniently capped just today with a look back at his grand tour of military installations (and American bases in particular) around the world.]

[screenshot from Utopia, a rather unique game that blended SimCity-esque urban development with a proto-Starcraft model of realtime combat management in a science fiction setting]

Getting quite close to the (October 9th) release date for Cities XL, which is at least moderately interesting to those of us (I’d imagine a fair percentage of designers in their twenties and thirties) who developed and/or nurtured childhood fascinations with urban planning through SimCity and the like. What should be the final trailer can be found here. It seems there’s a bit of controversy because the basic release’s transportation options will be limited to roads and freeways, which I suppose I would find disappointing (if I planned on playing the game, which I don’t think I do) as, even though there’s nothing wrong with the vicarious thrill of watching citizens stuck in hellish traffic in the pollution-choked metropolis you’ve built, we play these sorts of games to experiment, and so having to pay extra for the buses and trains is a bit like having to rent the shovel for the sandbox.

The real disappointment, though, is how strictly limiting these games can be — in SimCity, for instance, the entire game engine was built around modeling cause and effect in the urban system as understood by the late 20th century modernist planning orthodoxy, in which the ultimate planner is a near-deity, laying out strictly-defined, single use zones within his city, with the primary feedback loop being the construction, abandonment, and demolition of buildings based upon increasing or decreasing real estate values. It’d be much more thrilling to enter into (and, I admit, much more difficult to build) a gameworld where the player encounters more basic conditions (populations, ecologies, resources, terrain) and, in the process of responding to those conditions, constructs the urban ruleset as a by-product of interaction with the gameworld. So one player might be drawn to orderly boulevards organized around pedestrian transportation and discover himself a virtual Baron Haussman, or another organizes his city around vast parks, over and underpasses, and sky-lit skyscrapers, unwittingly resurrecting Le Corbusian planning, only to find his city devolving into a Blade Runner-esque dystopia¹.

Or, even better, instead of Cities XL, its Infrastructure XL, and rather than semi-omnipotent mayor, you’re the superintendent of public works: you build tangled on-ramps, dig vast subterranean networks for trains, massive piers for transoceanic commerce to dock at, dams, powerlines, sewers, solar farms, canals, parking garages, airports, public parks, playgrounds, landfills, cemeteries, wastewater treatment plants, reservoirs, nuclear power plants, stormwater detention ponds, and so on — all for the pleasure of watching the city shift, grow, and evolve in response to them. Who’s to say that a more limited and focused decision set wouldn’t present more interesting choices? Build the egg digesters and they will come. Now that’s a game I’d play.