Anita Western

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SimCity Summary

SimCity is a city-building computer game that was designed by Will Wright and released on October 3, 1989. Will Wright’s vision for SimCity grew from the game Raid on Bungeling Bay. Raid on Bungeling Bay enabled him to develop his own maps, which sparked his imagination for all of SimCity. In SimCity, the players are instructed to create and cultivate a city, maintain a secure budget, keep the city’s citizens happy. The cities may not be people, but each and every one has its own personality. Will Wright fostered SimCity around an assortment of lives and buildings, each with their own identities and characteristics.

After being released, the computer game was incredibly successful and today there are multiple sequels. Until The Sims was introduced in 2000, the SimCity games were the best-selling line of computer games developed by Maxis. In early January 2010, the source code for SimCity was liberated under the free software GPL 3 license with the title Micropolis.

Stimulating Detroit v. SimCity

As stated in the article Simulating Detroit: A city with cars and crime but no races from playthepast.org, Detroit is known worldwide for one thing, automobiles but that began to change in the early 1970’s. Granted the city has been struggling but in order for Michigan as a whole to be powerful again, Detroit needs to be on the path to be a great city again. The article explains how there is huge potential for growth and jobs in Detroit, but it’s not only the city’s finances have to be fixed so the city can grow and prosper. It suggests that race and the racial lines that are rarely blurred in Detroit could keep the former automobile empire from being a safe and attractive place for people to live, work, invest and do business.

Mark Sample points out that this game is very flawed. As the player, if you fail to “rebuild the automotive industry” the punishment is not unemployment it is crime. In the game, in order to make Detroit’s streets safer (lower the crime rate), one must build a prosperous town. When the player fails, the streets do not swarm with people rioting for their Civil Rights, instead they fill with “algorithmically-determined mobs” that loot and vandalize the city. This simulation game is not realistic enough and does not appropriately teach the player what current events were actually happening in the early 1970’s in Detroit.

Social, cultural, and political importance of SimCity

In this SimCity game, race and the riots occurring in the early 1970’s in Detroit are molded into one single issue of crime. Though cars are known to describe Detroit and in the game the player has the ability to save the city because the auto industry is failing, that is not a correct analysis of history. Detroit, like a multitude of other places in the United States, has a long history of racial discrimination. Even after the Civil Rights Movement, the racial tensions in Detroit continued to escalate.

The 1967 12th Street race riot was prominently featured in the news media, with television exposure, widespread newspaper commentary, and broad stories in Time and Life magazines. These riots that were portrayed in multiple types of media never featured one thing, cars. The cars were not what Detroit was known for in the 1970’s, they were known for their violence and rioting, yet the SimCity game shows otherwise. This is why the author suggests that this game should not be used for any educational purposes.