Just a video game

[threestooges]

This article from the recent LA Times caught my attention when a friend sent it my way. I found it amusing that it noted "No iteration of “SimCity” has ever accurately depicted the staggering amount of a city's square footage that's spent on parking lots." which is something folks on this site opened my eyes to in my early days of the game (and it reshaped the way I built my industrial areas; something that annoyed me in the newer Cities Skylines), and corrected with the addition of custom lots. I'd be curious to hear the thoughts from you all here how much your city building style in your individual game reflects your city/town around you, or what inspires the way you build.
-Matt

[monkeywater]

I like trying to build futuristic cities.

So not American-style parking lot farms.

[j-dub]

Author must have not played SimCity 4 with custom lot mods which then those would contradict the article.

I myself have taken advantage of the diagonal painted 1x1 parking lots. When using the regular scale Maxis cars or Cycledog cars in those spaces, they are more realistic that the car doors actually have enough room to open up, whereas the chunkier pack of cars that came with the textures are just fatter cars. I was using SAM street parking before, but they complained pavement doesn't grow on trees, and those rely on 5 spaces jammed on a single tile instead of the wider 4 spaces. I only agree with the article by default creation. The default don't work, because they assumed access to the parking lots on all sides of the properties, but the game simply just don't work this way, so parking is blocked or non existent. Whereas modders have made it possible for serious amounts of space in SimCity 4 to be wasted by only parking lots for miles of city blocks. I don't mean the custom lots of real world stores and restaurants that do have parking, but other players were well aware of the parking situation, and released all sorts of custom parking lots. I just setup that sort of thing myself though, but I mean the MAPP amusement park pack has 4 separated parking lots, and all together, they take a serious amount of space. The only other option for players is the parking decks, which near by a Maxis default development, they seem to make perfect sense.

Cities Skylines to compare seems to even incorporate more on-road parking filled with several more cars, much more than SC4 don't even have by default or even with mods, as no matter what modified street mod I've had, only seems to have parallel parking every 2 spaces instead of every one, unless you use SAM. That however, along with parking decks, is something Cities Skylines just can not deliver at.

However, when it comes to SimCity 4, I have a lot of suburbs opposed to limited skyscraper cities, and of course I go for realism, so of course I reflect the space taken.

[fantozzi]

Interesting, Mrs. Roy tells only half of the story - how EA purchased Maxis.But she doesn't tell what EA did to Maxis in 2015.

The only thing I don't like and highly doubt - that people can learn social behavior and empathy and dealing with personalities from algorithms. And KI isn't really learning but shaping prejudices. A KI can't recognize own prejudices.

But there are educational software. And of course games are excellent tools to learn about the principle of causality, systems and how parameters may influence each other. You can't regard games only as closed world like Mrs. Roy does.

The forums are a good example. The game is disucssed and compared to real world. And this way the game is only a stimulus to reflect on certain real life problems. Means: learning from the game isn't limited to the closed scenario of the game but can extend to a meta-level = community.

Why not - why shouldn't games help this way to discovery your professional interests. I learned modding from this community I gained real life skills by dealing with the game.

Wild life predators learn fighting and hunting by playing to.

Playing is a very important foundation of brain development.

But keep an eye on what you play. Scientists discovered the brain of teenager is formed PHYSICALLY by computer games - the formation of synapse. So from playing to much you can become a computer yourself.

As social interaction you can only learn from other humans. It has a different logic, non-algorithmic.

I play only my home region. I always try to make it better than it is actually. I always fail. Interesting. It's also funny to recreate my hometown and have all those famous NY bats growing there. Basically these are only pixels. Still most part of the fun is done by our imagination. Regarding education of imagination a good game is always better than a bad book. Some people learn nothing from books. But the wisest men don't need media at all. They learn by watching the world.

It's not about realism. It's more about discussing possibilities. Playing with possibilites - to see how many different aporaches of settlement and growth there is, different key models, options, decisions - that's the point. And custom content plays an important role, of course, it adds possibilites.

Things they used to be right 20 years ago today create big problems. The clever mind is a flexible mind, able to find better ways each day. THAT's what you really can learn by playing SC4.