Professional city planners nitpick SimCity‘s realism:
Sim City: An Interview with Stone Librande Read the comments and you’ll see a bunch of urban planning nerds bitching about the game’s unrealistic simulation of traffic and parking.
how sim city greenwashes parking For more on the parking lot apocalypse that Sim City hides from its players.
Did Sim City Make Us Stupid? And some complaining about the zoning laws of the game (no mixed residential and commercial?).
I’ve gotten interested in urban planning lately so I recognize all of the criticisms, especially with how Sim City and The Sims considers the American model of suburbs and the car-centric commute to be the standard form of the city. I suppose I won’t be able to build my dream city of walkable streets, cars banned from downtown, bike lanes everywhere, commercial and residential areas mixed together to allow people to work close to home, residential buildings being mostly mid-rise apartments and interspersed with parks and cultural attractions like museums, and public transit out the wazoo with buses and streetcars and commuter rail and subways all over the place.
As you may have guessed, I voted for Jennifer Keesmat as Toronto mayor.
I dunno, maybe Cities: Skylines is where it’s at.
PS
Check out this competitive SimCity 6 game where urban planners tried to fuck over each other’s neighbouring cities.