Seeing Like a Simulation

Reviewing Chaim Gingold’s “Building SimCity,” Celine Nguyen finds similarities between tech billionaires’ attempts to build a utopian city in Solano, California, and being a godlike player in “SimCity.”

By Celine NguyenOctober 5, 2024

• Science & Technology

• Art & Architecture

• Cultural Studies

WHEN I WAS 20, I believed dogmatically in mass transit, dense urbanization, and a nine percent tax rate. These were not political beliefs. They were gameplay beliefs that I had picked up—through online strategy guides and in-game experimentation—to build the metropolis of my dreams in SimCity. 

For many years, the popular imagination has equated video games with competition and violence, thanks to game franchises like the first-person shooter Call of Duty series, or the open-world criminal adventures of Grand Theft Auto. But other genres have always existed, including hero’s journeys through the Japanese countryside to collect anthropomorphic flora and fauna (Pokémon), or multiplayer spacefaring games that publish monthly in-game economic reports (EVE Online). For gamers who eschewed direct combat and explicit goals for more self-directed play, though, one genre stood out: simulation games. And one of the oldest and most influential simulation games is Will Wright’s SimCity, where players act as a city’s mayor and make decisions about the city’s infrastructure, zoning, budget, and public services. First released in 1989, the game found unexpected success, showing that there was a market for open-ended games that turned real-life professions into play. 

Chaim Gingold spent several years working as a game designer under Will Wright before he turned his attention from building games to writing about them. In his new book Building SimCity: How to Put the World in a Machine, Gingold meticulously describes the history of the people and ideas that shaped simulation games. Unlike other stories of software development, which rely on “tropes of larger than life personalities and Silicon Valley success porn,” as the digital media scholar Janet H. Murray notes in the foreword, Gingold’s book recognizes that games are rarely the result of a single person’s efforts. Building SimCity includes the collaborators—programmers, artists, interface designers, writers, and business partners—who helped make the game an unlikely commercial success. It also situates SimCity in the wider context of 20th-century computing, design, and education. 

This approach makes Building SimCity a compelling example of “software criticism”: a close interrogation of a single work that attends to its form, function, and sociohistorical context. Art, literary, and architectural criticism are well-established disciplines. Yet in an article for WIRED last year, writer and programmer Sheon Han bemoaned how software, “a defining artifact of our time,” is “under-theorized,” despite its influence on our lives. Software critics, Han proposes, need to marry aesthetic sensitivity with technical literacy—and avoid the perils of both techno-optimism and reflexive Luddism. Gingold skillfully accomplishes this in his book. 

Taking software criticism seriously might also require taking software—including games like SimCity—more seriously as an art form. In Games: Agency as Art (2020), the philosopher C. Thi Nguyen observes that proponents of games-as-art often try to “assimilate games into some other, more respectable category of human practice.” Nguyen argues that comparing games to the more “legitimate” narrative forms of novels and films obscures what is distinctive about gameplay: “Games […] engage with human practicality—with our ability to decide and to do. […] In ordinary life, we have to struggle to deal with whatever the world throws at us […] In games, we can engineer the world of the game, and the agency we will occupy, to fit us and our desires.” 

Enacting one’s agency in a game can produce an aesthetic experience. It can also be a political act. SimCity players must make decisions about key urban political dilemmas: What businesses and residents should the government try to attract? What taxation policy encourages growth? What transit and zoning policies will improve cultural diversity? What defines an ideal city—or a city gone awry? 

During the 1980s, while city-building simulations like SimCity were being developed, a movement called New Urbanism coalesced to address problems of affordability, walkability, and transit access. New Urbanists recognized that inadequate transit networks affected how people commuted and how often they saw loved ones. Historic zoning regulations might, years later, saddle city residents with unaffordable rent and impoverished social lives. Most of SimCity’s players live in a world shaped by other people’s decisions. What happens, then, if an urban planning enthusiast isn’t satisfied with changing the world within a game? What could go right—or wrong—when they try to create their utopia in real life? 

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Narratives of artistic and technological invention often begin their accounts too late, and too narrowly, by focusing on a solitary genius and their masterpiece. Gingold takes a different approach. The first half of Building SimCity illustrates how Wright’s game “synthesized a wide range of influences”: the discipline of systems dynamics, the scientific fervor for simulating cellular activity in code, and theories of children’s education. Systems dynamics, which informed SimCity’s socioeconomic models, was founded by the engineer turned management theorist Jay Wright Forrester. In the early years of the Cold War, Forrester led a project to develop a computing system to track and intercept Soviet aircraft in real time. To do so, the system modeled aircraft behavior using various feedback loops, and accommodated information latency and time delays between when a command was issued and when it was executed.  

When Forrester left defense for an academic appointment at MIT’s business school, he applied these techniques to modeling economic and civic life. His economic models proved controversial: the economist Paul Krugman criticized Forrester’s work as a classic case of “hard-science arrogance.” Despite Forrester’s engineering expertise, Krugman complained, he “didn’t know anything about the empirical evidence on economic growth…and it showed.” Forrester’s approach to modeling cities suffered from the same flaw, according to Gingold: He “aggressively abstract[ed] a phenomenon into a system of feedback loops and variables that could stand for everything,” and privileged expert interviews and “intuition over hard data.” Nonetheless, when Forrester’s Urban Dynamics—which describes a computer model for how cities grow, change, and decay—was published in 1969, it received a warm reception, especially in Nixon’s administration.  

Forrester’s career reflects a broader move “from warfare to welfare,” in the historian Jennifer S. Light’s words, that occurred in the second half of the 20th century. Technologies like cybernetics and computer simulations, first developed for military purposes, were repurposed to “better plan and manage U.S. cities in the 1960s and 1970s.” While the solutions from Forrester and other “defense intellectuals” never quite worked out as planned, we’re left with the legacy of their interventions. Forrester’s Urban Dynamics, the historian Kevin T. Baker argues, is far from neutral, and incorporates many of Forrester’s right-wing political beliefs: welfare programs are counterproductive and reduce upwards mobility; lower tax rates lead to higher growth. Crucially, Forrester’s book is a theory of the world. It reads, however, as if Forrester is describing how actual cities work, not just his model of cities.

But as the aphorism goes: “All models are wrong, but some are useful.” The lack of empirical validation made Forrester’s book a problematic basis for policy decisions, but the “computational make-believe” of Urban Dynamics was perfect for creating an entertaining game.  

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In 1984, the year the first Apple Macintosh was released, an autodidactic college dropout named Will Wright was fresh off the success of his first video game: a 2D shoot-’em-up where players had to bomb a series of small islands while avoiding enemy missiles. For his next game, however, Wright was drawn to something different. Just as Forrester and other computing pioneers turned from defense projects to peacetime pursuits, Wright turned from devising war games to creating a city builder. He drew inspiration from Forrester’s Urban Dynamics, as well as a sci-fi short story by the Polish writer Stanisław Lem. In “The Seventh Sally or How Trurl’s Own Perfection Led to No Good,” from Lem’s The Cyberiad (1965), a tyrannical king is deposed from power and is given a consolation prize: a miniature toy kingdom to rule over. The inventor of the toy “showed [the king] where the input and output of his brand-new kingdom were, and how to program wars, quell rebellions, exact tribute, collect taxes.” 

These sources shaped Wright’s decision to give players total control over their cities. (This god complex was heightened by a whimsical in-game disaster menu, which let players inflict earthquakes, fires, floods, and monsters on their city.) This, along with the assumptions incorporated into Forrester’s model, meant that “SimCity reproduced authoritarian notions of governance and city planning, simpleminded ideas about crime, policing, and taxation, and a downright colonial and extractive outlook”—but these are, Gingold suggests, “unexceptional shortcomings for a computer game.” If we believe, as Nguyen writes in Games: Agency as Art, that “the purpose of games was simply to model or represent parts of life,” then their simplicity “would be something of a lie.” But games are meant, first and foremost, to be fun. “One of the greatest pleasures games offer,” Nguyen argues, is “a momentary shelter from the existential complexities of ordinary life.” SimCity allowed people to play out their god fantasies without guilt. 

Although the game incorporated some political convictions (including Wright’s own pro–mass transit, anti–nuclear energy beliefs), a key design principle for SimCity—and one that defined simulation games as a genre—was to let the player realize their own idiosyncratic vision. “We left it up to the player,” Wright wrote, “to decide what the desirable outcome was. A city reflects the values of its designers.” As Gingold points out, this deference toward the player’s values is also on display in Wright’s subsequent game, The Sims (2000), where players were given remarkable flexibility in simulating different sexual orientations and family structures—not just a heteronormative nuclear family.  

Some players used this freedom to create elaborately engineered dystopias. A Filipino architecture student named Vincent Ocasla used one of SimCity’s sequels to create a dystopian city named Magnasanti with a record-breaking population of six million Sims. The city’s problems, Ocasla said in an interview with Vice, are “hidden under the illusion of order and greatness—suffocating air pollution, high unemployment, no fire stations, schools, or hospitals, a regimented lifestyle.” Such intolerable conditions, Ocasla suggests, are inevitable in a society that optimizes for one quantitative goal, like profits or population size, at the expense of social and environmental well-being. For Ocasla, SimCity was “more than just a game. It has evolved to become a tool or medium for artistic self-expression,” which he used to illustrate the destructive power that “egotistical political dictators, ruling elites and […] architects, urban planners, and social engineers” could wield. But other players chose to create utopian cities that provided stable employment for residents, high-quality housing, accessible public transit and parks, and well-funded schools. “Paradoxically,” Gingold writes, 

it was the unreality of the simulated denizens that underwrote both the violence and the emotional connection. […] City […] inhabitants were mere data points—unimportant subjects to torture and trifle with, but their powerlessness and (imagined?) suffering also provoked empathy and care. 

To help players realize their ambitions, SimCity provided multiple layered maps. Crime, pollution, traffic, population density, land value, and more were clearly visualized—and often quantified—to help players understand the impact of their interventions. Players could add a power plant and consult the power map to see what residences and businesses it was now serving; meanwhile, the pollution map showed the impact on the city’s air quality. All of this made the simulation richly detailed and inviting to interact with. And it made players more powerful. “Legibility,” the political scientist and anthropologist James C. Scott proposed, “is a condition of manipulation.” In Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (1994), Scott describes how real-life bureaucrats trying to change the world first needed its elements to be “observed, recorded, counted, aggregated, and monitored. […] [T]he greater the manipulation envisaged, the greater the legibility required to effect it.” In the real world, perfect information, and therefore perfect control, is impossible. States that constructed simplified representations of the world inevitably tried to coerce real life to fit those simplifications—with occasionally disastrous results. But in SimCity, the simplified map is reality. The game realizes the unattainable dream of Scott’s high modernist city planners. The game makes it easy to view cities from a synoptic bird’s-eye view and flick through the layered maps, which helped players understand the “carefully scored choreography,” as Gingold writes, that made SimCity feel so dynamic. And interventions—building new roads, or demolishing neighborhoods—could be precisely implemented and assessed. 

But SimCity’s high modernist, authoritarian approach is just one way to simulate a city. One of the most valuable insights in Gingold’s book is that different simulations, which “embody certain beliefs about the world,” also offer “particular models of agency and subjectivity” through their design decisions. He contrasts Wright’s game with the simulations created by Doreen Gehry Nelson. Decades before SimCity was released, Nelson (the younger sister of renowned architect Frank Gehry) was simulating cities with her elementary school students in Los Angeles. Students could elect peers to be city council representatives or the mayor, and they modeled city planning projects over time—with the teacher acting as facilitator and gamemaster. Nelson’s work was popular with kids, and admired by many designers, scientists, and technologists: Charles and Ray Eames, Buckminster Fuller, Richard Saul Wurman (who coined the term “information architecture”), and Alan Kay. 

Nelson’s game was designed to cultivate agency and civic imagination in her students—and provide a space where even children could try to shape their built environment. As Nguyen notes, game designers can choose what actions are available to players and thus “collaborate in the project of developing our agency and autonomy” in the real world. Nelson’s and Wright’s games, then, offered very different lessons for interacting with cities: 

Nelson’s cities realize a democratic vision of subjectivity and community. Students role-play the social processes of citizenship and governance and must reconcile the desires, plans, power, and perspectives of others. SimCity players, in contrast, are situated like Robert Moses, the infamously powerful and often tyrannical architect of twentieth-century New York: they reshape the urban landscape according to individual whims. […] [SimCity] construct[s] citizens as passive mechanisms—living beings stripped of agency. Citizens of Nelson’s world, by contrast, are played by real people. It is a world in which a group of concerned citizens can reimagine and reshape their world. 

When it comes to political simulation, SimCity—for all its technical innovation and interactive fluidity—might be less sophisticated than Nelson’s game, which was run with simple physical props: cardboard, construction paper, and egg cartons. Despite SimCity’s rich simulations of infrastructure and traffic, the decision to have a solo, godlike player erases the complex negotiations of democratic politics. 

What Nelson’s and Wright’s games have in common, though, is that both offer players the opportunity to build a city from the ground up. Real-world city planners must contend with existing roads and zoning decisions, and ambitious redesigns must be scrapped in favor of small, incremental changes. While SimCity has several premade cities, including San Francisco and Tokyo, the most fun—and flexible—way to play is to start from scratch. In the game, as in Forrester’s model, cities are stand-alone economic entities, with the broader region abstracted away. In the real world, however, building a brand new city isn’t so simple—and nearby residents can make or break a utopia. 

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In 2018, a mysterious company began buying land in Solano County, California, located an hour’s drive from San Francisco. Five years later, the company had spent over $800 million to buy 52,000 acres (in some cases paying five times the market rate), making it the largest landowner in Solano. No one, including county officials, knew who was behind the company, until an August 2023 article in The New York Times revealed the “Silicon Valley elites” that were funding the purchases. The company’s CEO, Jan Sramek, is a former Goldman Sachs trader who acquired funding from venture capitalists like Michael Moritz and Marc Andreessen; the founders of LinkedIn and Stripe; and Laurene Powell Jobs, Steve Jobs’s widow. Sramek’s plan, named California Forever, was to build a brand new city in Solano with 400,000 eventual residents. It seemed, as one Redditor remarked, like an attempt to “play IRL Sim City.”  

Because of these tech affiliations, the “billionaire-backed city” (as many journalists began to call it) invited suspicious comparisons to projects like the Peter Thiel–funded Seasteading Institute (an attempt to create floating city-states free of existing government regulations) or Telosa, a project funded by billionaire Marc Lore to create a tax-free city. But Sramek’s stated ambitions are different. He wants to create a dense, walkable, affordable, and culturally rich city—in short, a New Urbanist utopia—and he hired an urban policy expert named Gabriel Metcalf to be head of planning. Metcalf previously led urban policy think tanks in Sydney and San Francisco, co-founded a car-sharing nonprofit, and wrote a book, Democratic by Design: How Carsharing, Co-ops, and Community Land Trusts Are Reinventing America (2015), that laid out his vision for better communities. “Things aren’t right in America today,” Metcalf wrote: 

the emergence of a more unequal class structure; the corruption of our democracy by unlimited campaign spending; our inability to do anything about climate change; the wasteful sprawling of suburbia across the landscape; and the general sclerosis of our political system, which seems to preclude solution-seeking. 

In interviews, both Sramek and Metcalf referenced prior city-building efforts. Sramek told one journalist that he wanted to avoid high modernist failures like Brasília, where “developers came in with some kind of singular vision they were going to impose on the city […] this perfect kind of master plan.” And Metcalf’s plans, detailed in an 88-page PDF, synthesize New Urbanist ideals with real-world inspiration. In the California Forever plan, all residences are less than half a mile from schools, shopping, transit, and parks. Streets will have Copenhagen-style protected bike lanes that would make Jan Gehl proud, so that “every street [can] feel comfortable and safe for biking, regardless of ability or age.” Residential areas will be zoned for mixed-use, mixed-density construction, to support “missing middle” housing and improve neighborhood economic diversity. (A similar policy might be Minneapolis’s ban on single-family zoning, which—despite some controversy—has been lauded for improving housing supply and affordability.) Climate-sensitive tactics like renewable energy, stormwater recycling, and a tree canopy (to reduce urban temperatures) are intended to make the project “the most environmentally sustainable city in North America, serving as a model for the entire world.” 

To turn these plans into reality, however, California Forever needs voter approval. In 1994, after a San Francisco developer tried to build a new city in Solano County, residents passed the Orderly Growth Initiative to restrict development to the county’s existing cities only. The company collected enough signatures to qualify for a ballot measure in November, but opposition to the project was fierce. Critics pointed out that the new city needed to obtain water rights that didn’t infringe on existing agricultural landowners, a major concern in a drought-prone state. Others highlighted the need for regional transit connections. Residents who lived inside the proposed transit utopia would still need to rely on the Bay Area’s already-congested highways when leaving. In response, California Forever suggested a bus, which could charitably be seen as replicating the bus rapid transit (BRT) systems that have worked well in Curitiba and Bogotá, or uncharitably as an extension of the Bay Area’s privately run tech worker buses. 

But most of the antagonism seemed to come from the money involved. “It’s disrespectful,” the mayor of one of Solano’s existing cities said, “and it also reminds me so much of why people get angry about our financial systems in the United States, where you have these billionaires that can come in and just play with us like we’re toys.” To sway voters, the California Forever ballot initiative promised up to $1.4 billion in funding, if the city met its population goals, for existing Solano residents and cities. These funds would be used to help residents buy homes, retrain for new jobs, and improve existing Solano downtowns and green spaces. And in May—six months before voters had to weigh in on the initiative—they awarded $500,000 in grants to Solano nonprofits, which they stressed came with “no strings attached.” “We’re going to spend as much as we need to win,” Sramek said. But California Forever’s conspicuous spending may be what’s alienating Solano voters. The company spent two million dollars in the first three months of their campaign, and retained the PR firm that helped Uber handle negative press. Meanwhile, the community group No to California Forever raised just $7,000 in the first three months of 2024. 

But money, it turns out, doesn’t get you the control that an authoritarian dictator—or even a SimCity player—gets. In July, after months of negative press, a provisional city assessment raised concerns about the environmental and fiscal impact of the new city. After conversations with county officials, California Forever pulled the ballot measure.  

Greenfield development, whether for cities or for software, has always been more appealing for big thinkers. Instead of dealing with the dull constraints of existing environments, you can start from scratch—with nothing to curtail your ambitions. But as Metcalf observed in his 2015 book, “In the real world there is no way to start from scratch. The roads and the buildings may be new, and […] even some of the cultural norms may be new, but these experiments inevitably take place within a set of existing social institutions.” 

They take place, too, within existing political institutions. For now, the utopian ambitions of California Forever’s backers and planners have been stalled. But is this a victory for the democratic process or a tragedy for American cities? For now, it’s unclear, although Sramek still hopes to bring a new ballot measure—now rebranded as the East Solano Plan—to voters in 2026.  

Sramek and Metcalf’s struggles may explain the enduring appeal of SimCity, which—14 sequels and spin-offs later—gives millions of people the opportunity to build the city of their dreams. In the early stages of SimCity’s development, Gingold writes, many were skeptical that an open-ended game about urban planning could enchant players. But SimCity’s success may be less surprising when we consider how few people, especially those without billions of dollars in funding, have the ability to reshape their built environment. Working with others, we may be able to realize a shared vision—but our ambitions are often compromised by other people’s agendas. No wonder, then, that people turn to simulations. Games like SimCity offer a consolatory fantasy of control—where we can imagine what it’s like to realize our visions without constraint.