There was a justifiable reason why I was not working on the Blog over the weekend. I was spending that entire time playing SimCity 4, a 2003 city-building game. Basically, the goal of that game is to engage in city planning and construct entire cities within a geographical region. The gameplay sessions are longer than those of Workers & Resources because the in-game resources are devoted to providing a sense of scale from running massive world-cities than Soviet towns and villages. The more I play SimCity 4, the more I realize that CityState 1, a 2018 indie game in the same genre, is partly based on SimCity 4.
Of course, there is no debate here that Workers & Resources is clearly the best at presenting non-Neoliberal approaches to city-building. Cities, no matter their size, should strive to sustain themselves and their populations. The real fun to be had in Workers & Resources is figuring out how to live within one’s own means of production and trying to make do with what the land is already capable of providing. Only then is it possible to find prosperity in that game.
Anyway, from what I can tell, the two games are intended to be “simulators” as opposed to regular video games. Unlike video games, simulators are supposed provide “realistic” portrayals of Reality in order to give the player a sense of realism. However, no simulation is going to be identical with conditions in the Real World. At best, they serve as means of instructional material on theoretical concepts that could be reapplied in practice, except there is no guarantee that it will conform to actual conditions. If anything, a simulator can be used to convey ideas pertaining to a specific Weltanschauung and its associated Ideologies.
CityState 1 plays like a simplified rendition of SimCity 4. It did not take very long for me to figure out how the latter works because I already have experiences of playing the former, which differentiates itself by leaning more heavily toward the political dimensions of running a region of cities. In CityState 1, the player can create Liberal Capitalist cities and Conservative Socialist ones whilst trying to promote prosperity and stability. Environmental damage, resource depletion and poverty are major problems in that game, problems that do not exist at all in SimCity 4. Instead, I have to micromanage a lot of things, which makes my playthrough sessions a lot longer than they need to be. But this is the byproduct of SimCity 4’s developers trying to make the game immersive as opposed to realistic.
While researching information for this post, I came across a number of articles that people have written about SimCity 4 and its series over the years. The design philosophy behind SimCity 4 (and to a lesser extent, CityState) is a 1969 book on urban economics, entitled, Urban Dynamics. The book proposed designing cities on a computer-generated model and using it to test the efficacy of social policies imposed on their denizens by the Municipal governments. The author of that book, Jay Wright Forrester, maintained that most Western social policies are apparently debilitating to the long-term success of running a city. I say “Western social policies” because it is clear that Forrester’s book was in many respects a reaction to attempts by some Jeffersonians in the 1960s to continue the New Deal of FDR vis-à-vis the Great Society.
The model that Forrester envisaged began, like most city-builder games, with a vast, empty and unoccupied landscape where there is no population, no agricultural production, and no urban areas. When efforts are made to build the city, residential, commercial and industrial facilities support each other to fuel further urbanization. Here, Kapital Accumulation drives the push for construction until there is no longer any Incentives left for urbanization. At that point, people begin to leave the city in search of more attractive living space as a result of our esteemed Fourth Estate being forced to abandon their outlying communities in search of Kapital.
What readers of this Blog should know is that Forrester’s work reflected a sentiment in Liberal Capitalist thought that if a Municipal government were to “gentrify” seemingly undesirable locales through sustained influxes of Kapital, the affected communities will be better off. The problem is that the character of the location changes as a consequence of gentrification. Worse, it matters very little whether there is any actual improvement in living standards. What matters is whether Kapital had asserted itself over local communities for its own self-interests. That is how the locales of a given begin to apply Neoliberalism’s conception of social status on the basis of Quantities of Kapital and Schuld. Obviously, the ones with the most Kapital and the least Schuld are going to be biggest veneers of prosperity.
As I found out, the trick to building a city in SimCity 4 is to operate on a Production for Profit basis with some compromises for Production for Utility. Provide low taxation rates, valuable real estate, and plenty of “utilities” to encourage people to relocate there. Create the impression that the city is always open to Kapital Accumulation, even if doing so leaves a lot of false veneers about prosperous the city truly is.
Categories: Blog Post
The Fourth Estate 
Curious blog friend. Glad I found it.
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