Taj Makki
In “Simulating Detroit, A City with Cars and Crime but No Races,” Mark Sample discusses and critiques the simulation of Detroit in the video game Micropolis. Micropolis is a city-building simulation video game where the player’s mission is to save his or her city from an imminent disaster. The player can choose from a collection of preset city scenarios (e.g., San Francisco, 1906; Tokyo, 1957; Rio de Janero, 2047). In one of the scenarios, Detroit, 1972, the player’s task is to repair the city’s falling automotive industry. Failure to do so results in exorbitant crime outbreaks and riots in the city due to a plummeting economy.
Originally designed by Will Wright and first released as SimCity in 1989, the game was very popular throughout the 90s and into the 2000s. In late 2007, Electronic Arts (EA) donated SimCity to the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative so that the game could be freely distributed to each OLPC recipient. In accordance with OLPC guidelines, EA was required to also release the SimCity source code. EA therefore released Micropolis, the free and open-source version of SimCity in 2008.
Sample’s article is essentially a critique of the way developers chose to represent Detroit in the Micropolis/SimCity simulations. Sample argues that Micropolis Detroit is a misrepresentation of the real Detroit. According to Sample (and history), race and class struggles have shaped the essence of the real Detroit, particularly so in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. However, Micropolis Detroit does not capture these struggles. Instead, it portrays the city in its most popular light: As none other than the notorious Motor City, a place defined by the automotive industry and detached from race riots and warranted civil outbreak.
Sample uses excerpts from popular media to demonstrate this disparity. He begins by describing Detroit in terms of its Motor City identity, as if to be stating the facts and simply describing a nationally accepted status quo. He calls attention to Detroit’s perceived power in shaping the economy through its role in the automobile industry. He uses Clint Eastwood’s 2012 Chrysler Super Bowl commercial to showcase this popular image of Detroit. In the commercial, Eastwood consoles a recession-hit America, contending that Detroit, through its production of motor vehicles, is fighting once again to restore the economy and bring the USA back to its feet. Sample’s problem with this representation of Detroit is that it ignores Detroit’s fundamental roots and perpetuates an incomplete identity of the city.
In contrast with the Chrysler commercial and in an attempt to illustrate what he believes to be the real Detroit, Sample calls to a Time Magazine cover from August 1967. The cover, printed in light of the 1967 Twelfth Street race riots in Detroit, showed men, women, fighters, pedestrians, officials, and firemen situated around a chaotic street scene featuring fire and smoke. Sample argues that although this image of Detroit is dramatized, it nonetheless serves to capture the true elements of Detroit, such as grave and violent race problems, which are often ignored when Detroit is framed as the Motor City. Micropolis Detroit not only ignored the problems surrounding race, but also “whitewashed” the riots so that race was de-emphasized entirely.
Sample acknowledges that simulations, particularly video game simulations, can never be expected to capture a real-life scenario with full accuracy. He also acknowledges that simulations must “reduce complexity” by removing extraneous factors and focusing on the presentation of core, defining elements of the scenario. He therefore concludes that despite the challenges of virtually simulating a real environment, developers are responsible for identifying the “essence of the system being modeled.” He does not believe that the creators of Micropolis were successful in achieving this in their video game simulation of 1972 Detroit. Nonetheless, Sample ends by delegating responsibility to the user, noting that it is our job to fill in the sociocultural blanks in both virtual and concrete environments.
Commenters unanimously supported Sample's ideas, each lightly discussing the intricacies and difficulties surrounding video game simulation. They called attention to the difficulties faced by developers when attempting to simulate American society in a virtual world, including the challenge of choosing between sociocultural accuracy and game optimization. One commenter noted that each gamer brings his or her own background knowledge to the gaming scenario, more or less implying that sociocultural awareness is the player's responsibility and game optimization is the developer's responsibility. Another commenter noted that modeling race is a delicate and potentially problematic task, which has also been avoided in the development of other video games (e.g. Colonization). In my opinion, it is clear that technology has advanced to an extent where more accurate simulations are possible, but sociocultural and marketing concerns limit game developers from exercising this potential to its fullest.
