game cities
The Secret to a Believable Game City Isn't What You Think
I sat down with a SimCity historian and a real urban planner to ask: what makes a game city feel alive—and what happens when designers get it wrong?
simcity
News
The original SimCity guide was basically a textbook on urban development
Back when the first SimCity was released in 1989, the editor of Computer Gaming World magazine, Johnny L. Wilson, was commissioned to write a guide for the city management sim called The SimCity Planning Commission Handbook. In a manner befitting the complexity of the original SimCity, Wilson didn’t
Review
MultipliCITY makes a strong case that SimCity is capitalist hogwash
Turns out, there are problems with playing God.
News
Factorio gives the middle finger to SimCity’s vision of industrial utopia
SimCity is about building a flourishing biome where citizens can live without dying of smog. Factorio, contrarily, says screw that. It is a game about wrecking the environment by building sprawling, Rube-Goldbergian, obscene, waste-shitting factories out of conveyer belts and tens of thousands of cl
News
SimCity goes offline, world breathes huge sigh of relief
The news that SimCity is receiving an update, so that you can play it offline, has been seen as a victory for the Internet. But is it really? When the game launched last year, always being connected was required. Opponents of digital-rights management cried foul. There was pretty much a circus. Many
Article
Save me, SimCity!
Wrestling with all the changes in the new SimCity, we worry that our mistakes will never disappear.
News
How SimCity’s Will Wright wants to use your memories in the cloud to talk to aliens
Collect all of your memories and send them to space and back!
Article
SimCity is a textbook in modernist architecture and playpen for future builders
The beleaguered SimCity has suffered a dent in its reputation after a shaky launch. But beyond the server woes and consumer complaints, a jewel of digital urban planning arises.
News
How one British library is using the game tools to craft awe-inspiring virtual environments
When I think of the future of maps, I think about my old road atlas, the large, accordion-folded sheet of paper of the Great State of Alabama, covered with county roads and highways and twisty rivulets and interstates like arteries, and how it has long been replaced by my G.P.S. But when Tom Harper,