Planning Games

With the success of SimCity and the omnipresence of virtual technologies,

it is interesting to showcase the original game cover from 1989.

As we start [IN]City and meet others in the program, one common question that comes up is, "how did you get interested in city planning?" For me, it always comes back to my days sitting on the computer building multitudes of cities on none other than good ole' SimCity. I assume probably most of you have played it a few times.

Because of that game, wherever I traveled I tried to come back and build. It was a game that could last minutes until I crushed a city with aliens or tornadoes, or weeks as I slowly built up its wealth and population on the slowest time setting.

But back then, it was never about city planning. I never really even knew what city planning was until college. But as our world becomes more digital, computer games powerful enough to model traffic flows, wealth shifts, and demographic trends like SimCity (4 I think is the latest one?) become valuable tools to teach and inspire generations of planners to come.

While these types of games are extremely valuable, they could also constrain thinking, which is what I've been thinking about lately too. In SimCity, although you could potentially start by doing anything, the best methods were to begin with plotting gridded zones of residential, commercial, and industrial. Then, you had to make sure they were all connected using roads. Mass transit on the scale of trains and subways really didn't become a factor until later on when it became affordable. The game, as advanced, inspiring, and educational as it was, really forced you to look at developing cities in only a few ways.

So, what could be the role of these games for the future? Will they continue to just be entertainment and only inspirational here and there, or could they become powerful enough to teach a higher level of planning early on? Also, how did the rest of you get interested in city planning?

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