SimCity is really fun and educational. I played about 50 hours of it and it’s like the old SimCity, just with a lot more complexity and better graphics. In this new SimCity, you control everything from sewage to trash collection to transportation. The game does a great job at giving you a sense of the trade-off between cheap and clean energy, how short term fixes can turn into long term nightmares, how the growth of heavy industry can affect the quality of life of residents. SimCity provides wonderful graphs and tools to monitor all sorts of city systems and issues. The game got trashed by critics when it came out for its server problems, though that has now been fixed. I loved building my city and felt I learned a lot about how a city functions from SimCity, including the dilemmas and pressures faced by city managers.

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Resources:

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• There's an upcoming documentary called My Urban Playground about video games and urban planning.

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• There was a great article in The Atlantic about the urban planning ideology of SimCity.

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• Check out this GDC presentation by SimCity lead designer Stone Librande on using one-page documents to illustrate the game's systems.

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• Check out this great podcast episode on how the original SimCity actually worked. 

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• Check out this post reflecting on agent simulation in SimCity and in real cities.

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• Check out this cost-benefit analysis of the different services in SimCity BuildIt.

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• Another city builder you might want to check out is Cities: Skylines. Although I haven’t played it, Cities: Skylines has received really great reviews and has a large number of mods (a number of which allow you to monitor your city's metrics more closely).

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• Check out this Gamasutra article on designing the traffic systems of Cities: Skylines.

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• Check out this post of 2 city planners reflecting on Cities: Skylines.

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• One recurring critique of SimCity is the unrealistic amount of control you have as mayor in planning your city. Check out this thought-provoking post on how voluntary zoning could work (zoning agreed upon by individuals in a bottom-up process instead of the top-down decision by a central planner).

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• Check out this excellent book on housing policy: Blueprint for Disaster: The Unraveling of Chicago Public Housing.

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• Check out these massive open online courses related to cities (I've not enrolled in any but they are worth checking out): Designing Cities, Management of Urban Infrastructures – part 1, Smart Cities, Future Cities, Villes africaines: Introduction à la planification urbaine, Cities are back in town : urban sociology for a globalizing urban world, Visualizing Postwar Tokyo, Part 1, Planning & Design of Sanitation Systems and Technologies.

 

If you know of other great ways to learn with this game, contact me.