The SimCity franchise has been credited with inspiring an entire generation of urban theorists – The New Yorker has called it ‘arguably the single most influential work of urban design theory ever created’ – and MIT planning professor Brent Ryan attests to that claim, on a personal basis at least, asserting that fooling around with earlier versions of SimCity played a significant role in getting him interested in the profession.Īs director of SA+P’s Scheller Teacher Education Program and The Education Arcade, both seated in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, Eric Klopfer conducts ongoing research into the development and use of such games and simulations for understanding complex systems. But if people get so unhappy they start abandoning their houses and whole neighborhoods start to slide, players retain the right to destroy their entire empire, in a fit of omnipotence, with an asteroid. To keep players from getting too discouraged by such citizen complaints, the designers included positive citizen feedback as well as complaints. To keep the enterprise going, players can adjust tax rates, pick up bonds, make deals with neighboring cities to share or trade resources and so on, but if the city’s residents get unhappy with the way things are going, For Sale signs will pop up on their lawns, wafting in the breeze. The new version of the game, released in March, introduces a whole new level of complexity – including, importantly, the option for several players to play at once, allowing their cities to specialize in a particular area such as education, gambling or big business while their neighboring cities cover other bases, creating opportunities for intercity cooperation.Įach player begins the game with 50,000 Simoleons – a deliberately artificial currency without any real exchange rate, to preclude the confusing variable of what things cost in the real world – then proceeds to lay down roads create industrial, business and residential zones build power plants, schools, police and fire stations – (they can actually hear the trucks at work) – and manage the flow of power, water, traffic and sewage through their city. The game was updated in 1994, 19, growing ever more complex, and even though the more recent version is a decade old it still attracts an actively involved community of players. Below, a brief look at that visit.įirst released in 1989, SimCity is an award-winning simulation that invites players to create their own cities, introducing them to the trade-offs among a seemingly endless array of variables in the design and management of an urban environment. On Valentine’s Day, Librande came to MIT to give our students a sneak preview of the new game and to talk with them about the process of game design in general.
And finally – a source of much pride to us – the lead designer of the new game is SA+P alum Stone Librande (SM’92, Architecture SM’92 Media Arts & Science), Creative Director at EA/Maxis, a division of Electronic Arts that publishes many blockbuster digital game franchises. It is also a hugely successful example of digital game design, the focus of an important research program in the school. For starters, of course, SimCity is a simulation of urban design and management processes, a core concern of almost everything we do here. In March of this year a new version of the enormously popular city-building simulation, SimCity, was introduced with a considerable amount of fanfare in the digital gaming world – an event of particular interest to SA+P for a number of reasons. A Visit from the Lead Designer of the Revised Urban Planning Game