SimCity Review

Electronic Arts' video game SimCity is seen in a handout photo. (March 11, 2013)                                                                                  

"SimCity" has been lying to you. For decades, the legendary city-simulation game has given players the sense that they possessed real power over virtual people. When you played "SimCity" — whether you got hooked by the original game, created by Will Wright and released in 1989, or its many wonderful sequels — you imagined yourself as a city-planning savant who had the power to make life awesome or awful for thousands of hapless simulated citizens.
Sure, they weren't real people, but the genius of "SimCity" was the way it elicited empathy for your digital constituents. When you hiked taxes or shut down a fire station or plopped a coal power plant in a residential neighborhood, you imagined, if only briefly, the tragic consequences of your callous reign. Somewhere deep down in the game engine, a simulated salaryman was losing his job, someone's sim apartment was burning down, and little sim boys and girls were coughing in their sleep. And it was your fault.
But that was all a fiction. In truth, "SimCity's" simulation engine has never had a place for simulated citizens. Instead, under the hood, the game has always modeled the city the same way the Soviets did — from the top down. Indeed, if you looked closely at "SimCity's" screen, you'd often notice cars and people fade in and out of view. "That's because they weren't really there," says Ocean Quigley, a longtime game designer at Maxis, the Electronic Arts-owned studio that makes "SimCity."
"The whole city was just an abstract, top-down, statistical representation of how a city worked," adds Quigley. It was, in other words, a simulated simulation.
Well, until now. Last week, Maxis launched the sixth major version of "SimCity." (For now it's for Windows PCs only; Maxis says it will put out a Mac version this spring.) For the first time, the game does something it has long pretended to do: "SimCity" simulates discrete urban behavior, tracking how each person and object interact. "We now have every car and every person and every garbage truck and every criminal represented by an autonomous agent in the environment," says Quigley, who served as the creative and art director on the new game. "Then we give each of them simple rules about how they should behave — so a criminal goes around looking for a place to commit crime, and a policeman goes about looking for places where crimes are being committed."
The result is incredible. I've been playing "SimCity" and have found it, like every previous version, to be unyieldingly addictive. But "SimCity" isn't just habit-forming. It's also deeper and more realistic than any other sim game I've played. Because previous versions weren't really tracking citizens' activities, the game could only give you limited information about what was going on in your city. In fact, a lot of what happened was just luck, the work of a random-number generator. The new game, by contrast, floods you with real-time data about what's happening in your city.
(Not so incredible: online connection failures that severely hampered "SimCity's" launch. The game requires players to be online at all times, even in single-player mode, and servers were predictably dragged down by a rush of new players. So extensive were the problems that Electronic Arts promised a free separate EA game to those who bought "SimCity.")
In some ways, all the data make the game easier to play. In other ways, though, greater authenticity makes "SimCity" more difficult.
For one thing, as in real life, your city's resources are now finite. When you set up your city, you're shown how much water, oil, coal, wind and other natural resources are available. You'd be wise to pay attention; if you create a sprawling metropolis based on coal but then find you can't buy any once your mine runs out, you'll be in trouble.
There's also now a fuzzier definition of what it means to "win" the game. "In previous "SimCitys" there was one implicit win condition: Manhattan," says Quigley. "Even though it wasn't stated as a goal, that was the goal most people assigned themselves — to get the biggest buildings and the maximum population." In the new game, there are a number of ways to "specialize" your city in a way that might not require huge population density. You can create a place like Saudi Arabia — mining all of its resources and selling them on the global market — or one like Monaco, where the economy runs on tourism and gambling, or Silicon Valley, pumping out electronics all day long.
But the most fascinating thing about the new "SimCity" is the way it sometimes startles you with unexpected events. "In the old model, the simulation would never do something you wouldn't expect," says Quigley. Now, you get what Quigley calls "cascades" between different systems: "So say, for example, a person in a house gets sick. And then they carry that sickness to a factory. And then the people in the factory get sick. Then the factory goes out of business because it's no longer got any workers. And once that factory goes out of business, then the store that it's supplying also goes out of business — and so on and so forth. You wind up with these organic cause-and-effect relationships."
Even though "SimCity's" overall tone remains comic and cartoony, in its exquisite detail, the new game can sometimes evoke much more serious portrayals of urban life. As I was playing, I couldn't help thinking of "The Wire" — "SimCity" mimics that show's God's-eye view of urban disrepair, and in some moments even its crushing bureaucratic lethargy.