The board game Monopoly was designed to mock landlords and call out the greed and cruelty inherent in the real estate market.
Has Cities Skylines inadvertently done the same?
They did a lot more than that. The simulation in Cities Skylines 2 was so broken at the beginning that people couldn’t afford their rent but at the same time demanded better housing. The patch that fixed that essentially had „Removed landlords“ in its patch notes.
Isn’t it also true that they tried to put realistic parking lots in the game but it made it ugly and impossible to play?
Edit: It was SimCity
I personally doubt it. They paid lots of attention to roads that mimick traffic well which has a similar effect.
No, it's true: the cars in Cities Skylines fold up like George Jetson's car when they arrive at their destination. The devs found that if they actually included realistic amounts of parking, it would ruin the aesthetics and urban feel of the city (much like it does in real life). Nobody wants to play "Suburbs: low-rise NIMBY edition!"
A dystopian city builder with accurate parking and traffic and pedestrian fatalities would be kinda rad
I've been wanting to make a Free Software city building game that's accurate enough to also be a city planning / traffic engineering tool, but my lack of motivation has sabotaged me.
to clarify: the game monopoly plagiarized was created to mock landlords (the game in question is The Landlord’s Game)
It's so annoying that this incorrect fact is repeated so much. Thank you for correcting it.
Cities Skylines is the first domino on the new boom of people caring about city planning, walkability, public transit, micro-mobility, etc.
People build extremely dense cities then go "wait but traffic" dig into how to fix it and ultimately end up building far less car dependency into their cities as the easiest solution
The people who made Cities: Skylines previously made a public transit business game series called Cities in Motion. Skylines was started from that point design wise, so it makes sense that it’s a transit heavy game.
And Cities: Skylines succeeded because EA shit the bed with SimCity.
Kinda reminds me of a thought I had in Factorio. I was flame throwering trees to get then the hell out of my way, and I thought that this was a little on the nose about how manufacturing might actually work - fuck the environment it's keeping me from growing my factory!
Oh, yeah, once you break down everything happening in Factorio or Satisfactory, it's pretty quickly apparent that you're the bad guy in this story. I often hum "Paved Paradise, put up a parking lot" while playing them.
Similar experience in Dyson sphere program. By the time you're advanced enough to build a Dyson sphere, you've likely paved over the oceans and destroyed all the trees. The resources of the planet are completely tapped dry and you're bringing in raw materials from all over the galaxy to continue building the Dyson sphere, and killing the local inhabitants of most systems to do it.
And the endgame literally gives us a glimpse of what a type 2+ civilization would do: your planet has iron, so your entire planet’s mission is to produce iron plates. We will destroy all terrain and life to put as many conveyor belts and smelters as possible. Nothing else matters.
Your planet has iron and stone, so you will make reinforced concrete so that we may more efficiently exploit other planets. And when you're out of the resources we need we will leave you barren and forgotten.
I'my first playthrough of Satisfactory, I was like "I'm gonna leave these trees up to not completely ruin this area and make things look nice." After a few playthroughs I was full on "is it faster to use explosive rebar or cluster bombs to remove the trees?"
Isn't colonialism sucking the between-the-lines premise of Factorio? You arrive on a new planet which already has a local population. You start collecting resources, building factories&shit there, polluting the hell out of the air around you. Locals get pissed and start attacking you, you kill them without ever considering them sentient beings. At some point, you also kinda have to also reduce everything and everyone within the range of your artillery to ashes - even before they become hostile. In the process you keep polluting the air until it is black with soot, destroy entire ecosystems for land or resources, turn water into sludge. The only thing missing to make it more realistic is enslaving the locals to work for you. It's really grim if you think about the gameplay that way.
In the Space Age DLC you literally have to enslave the biters, they produce eggs that you need to advance in the science tree.
Ah cool. Horrifying, but cool in a meta way, as in it just proves my point. I stopped playing way before the DLC because it was too difficult for me already :)
It's pretty explicit. The local aliens attack you when aggravated by the pollution from your factory.
Withdraw law enforcement and non essential medical services from your slum area. Public transportation needs to be sparse and inconvenient. Don't offer any shopping or entertainment services (this means the bums will stink up nice parts of the city but in turn they'll be forced to pay premium prices and cover transportation). If none of that helps just bomb another city and allow its now desperate inhabitants to come over but don't acknowledge their education certificates and alienate them where possible so they have a hard time benefiting from any sort of community (while contributing to it substantially).
This comment goes hard.
I sure hope this isn't something that regularly occurs throughout many civilizations over the past few thousand years.
I read well more than half of this before I realized it was not advice for Cities Skylines. lol
Related/unrelated.
I played Sim City at an early age and ever since then I've always looked at riots and large-scale social unrest as a failure on the part of the player. IE: if you are tasked with running, managing and creating policy and housing and jobs for your citizens, and then they riot or protest, it's because YOU fucked up.
I cannot fathom how this basic, simple "game mechanic" has been lost across such a large swath of the population.
This game removed landlords to fix high rent cost issue lol. if only life imitates art
Is there a game mechanic for funding right-wing populism and making the rejection of education a badge of belonging?
I think there is a NIMBY policy that encourages people to use less public transit. Idk about the sequel.
Make a shit river that keeps them all too sick to travel. I'm not kidding. Have all the sewage dump into a canal that runs through the poor industrial district and fill it with coal power plants and landfills. You can also put only one road going in and out, and make it very difficult to get to the rich part of town from the poor part. You can also make people even more sick by having a special water system only for the poor district that just sucks in the shit water from the rich district and discharges it back into the same canal. Now of course, this will make people extremely sick so you need a lot of hospitals in the poor district but unfortunately you can't make them cause massive medical debt that make people more tied to their jobs.
"in this video essay I will describe the pervasive conditions in our current society and their roots..."
You mean how Qatar did to their guest workers when they built the 2022 Football Stadiums?
The way Cities Skyline saved this was by making unions and a policy called “smart industry” because it was a real problem
The game actually has a solution for this, it’s what the district option labeled “Schools Out” is for. It will prevent people in that district from pursuing education beyond high school.
IRL, this is why conservatives are working so hard to turn community colleges into vocational schools as opposed to low-cost ways to transfer to 4-year schools.
History and systemic racism did a great job of making sure that going straight from HS to 4-year schools is only possible if you come from privilege (for the most part), and community colleges fought back to give all people access to traditional college education. So now, conservatives are trying to incentivize CC's turning into vocational schools while pushing to cut their funding at every opportunity.
Source: I teach in a CC and have watched all sorts of right-wing talking points get pushed onto us under the guise of student success. Turns out, ~~forcing unprepared students to leave~~ cutting funding to their community college if they don't finish fast enough is not really about student success; it's about limiting their options. edit: they're not truly forcing them to leave, just penalizing colleges if it takes students more than 3 years to transfer and trying to make it illegal to offer foundational math/English courses
In Surviving Mars, I had a similar problem.
SM unlike the usual city builders, builds a command economy and starts with no colonists (just drones) and then they show up ten or twenty at a time. There are no higher salaries or higher standards of living; what they make for the community is there for everyone.
And then I directed them to build a university. Education was open to everyone. PHDs for everybody!
But then everyone wanted to be a scientist or engineer. It wasn't enough to be smart yet stuck with the job of grocery operator, or in freight inventory management. They wanted to use their newly developed skills, and explore strange new worlds and seek out new life and civilizations (even if in the lab rather than by starship)
Underemployment was a factor, and my custodial staff empowered with degrees in philosophy would lose morale and eventually go renegade (turn to crime) when I forced them to just continue to work the cranes and stock the grocery shelves.
imagine a crime ring entirely comprised of philosophers
That's where the android breakthrough comes in handy. Just a locked down slave dome without any non essential services and only inhabited by androids.
Get this man a position in the Trump Whitehouse!
Have you tried creating a drug epidemic?
In CS1 you can still grow the economy with industry and offices. Various typess of industry need various types of education. Idk about CS2 though.
Read a newspaper
Do that
Give preferential tax treatment to income from investment, remove any regulations on trading on housing real estate or land ownership concentration, and lower interest rates to made passive investment strategies unappealing thus incentivising wealthier people to go into assets such as real estate, so that over time house prices shoot up and lower income people stop being able to move and they and their descendants are stuck doing low income jobs.
Certainly that's how it works in real life, though I'm not sure of Cities Skyline has a deep enough simulation for that.
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