PowerSwitch

SIM CITY was a CD-rom that my teenagers brought home.

Bascially you choose a piece of land and start creating a city by building roads etc. The houses etc appeared as you created the city in response to your provisions.

The aim was to keep the city running within the budget constraints. All areas had to be kept with water, power etc. You also needed waste disposal as well as all the power stations. Then hospitals, fire & police services etc.

I played it extensively one time... and the only way to keep afloat was to keep growing your city. I could not however manage to keep a city running without growth.... and ultimately the growth led to limits (actually ran out of land space in this simulation) and total disintegration of the city... which then happened mighty quickly...

Sounds like something I've heard more recently!

... I wonder did the programmers know something ????

It?s a nice application of DAI and aim to emulate real natural systems, so, yes, I think they new something

Oh, I used to play SimCity2000, many years ago ? early nineties I believe! Looking back, one of the things I remember is the land use zoning, residential, commercial and industrial. A lot of the traffic problems in Bristol have been put down to extreme zoning - huge areas with nothing but housing, then the other side of town with huge business parks or retail parks. No integration leading to massive intra-city traffic.

I used to play it too, many, many years ago, in the early nineties. I don't know if the programmers knew much about the limits to growth, but they certainly knew how to make an addictive game. The natural and not so natural disasters (earthquakes, riots, tornados, Godzilla attacks etc) could be switched off in the version I had, which made it easier to expand and develop the city, but less exciting as a game of course.

I stay well clear of such games now, as I recall that "I'll just play for five minutes" used to turn so easily into "where did the last five hours go?"

Erik wrote:I stay well clear of such games now, as I recall that "I'll just play for five minutes" used to turn so easily into "where did the last five hours go?"

Ditto!

yes i'm very familair with these games, i've played them all up to the latest

great fun and now i think about it, you are correct, its difficult to create a sustainable city

but then i always had the urge to expand and expand until i had filled the map and kept building up the density to achieve new highs in population

Yes, it simulates the growth of an North American, or specifically US city.

That's why they'll feel Peak Oil so much more strongly than we will. Not that we're not going to feel it strongly, but we haven't started off with a grid system - our cities are radial - and a European model would have traffic congestion appear much quicker, prompting mass transit to be built much quicker than it needs to be in SimCity.

You can achieve bounded stability, with regular cycles of regeneration and decay, for quite a while. But its much easier to do with a medium-sized city than a big one. You also have to just sit on your hands and watch things going downhill without trying to correct them. Luckily you can't be unelected.

I prefer Caesar. More violence.

Well, I just got back from a trip to Buenos Aires. That's a gridiron city too, with about 3.5 million people jammed in cheek by jowl apartment blocks in an area that might be about the size of Bristol. Then there's another 9 million out in the suburbs / conurbation. I'd never seen anywhere so densely packed, though my host reckoned Sao Paulo, Mexico City and Tokyo / Osaka were tighter still. Seen in the context of Peak Oil, Buenos Aires looked like a death trap - no room to grow food.

At least Peak Oil will stop the mad drivers on those streets, though in their defence, many already save energy by not bothering with headlights. More seriously, they keep their cars running for many more years than Europeans, and they generally don't drive anything much larger than a Golf or Clio. Another noticeable thing is that there are many small businesses, and the Argentines generally look a whole lot healthier and seem happier than typical Brits or Americans - very few are overweight.