This Sunday editor must admit that he has spent (my wife would say wasted) many an hour becoming the master of the universe by building the cities of my dreams on the Sim City computer game. While the game can be addicting, it is certainly true that the Sim City designers have assumed a particular set of largely materialistic values into the game. That will now change with the introduction of Sim City Societies that will allow the game players to choose from a wider assortment of value systems:
Since its debut nearly two decades ago, Electronic Arts’s (EA) SimCity has allowed its players to become the masters of their own mini-domains. But there was always a nagging feeling that the game judged their moves based on some preset moral compass. No more: in the new version of the game SimCity Societies, set to hit stores on November 15, zoning and infrastructure planning requirements designed to keep city planners on the right track have been replaced with a much broader definition of success.
SimCity Societies encourages its virtual architects to design cities that maximize any one of a number of different values, including authority, creativity, knowledge, productivity, prosperity and spirituality. Players determine whether their cities turn out to be capitalist meccas or artistic hippie societies based on criteria such as the power source, types of buildings and the proximity of those buildings to one another.
The goal is to produce a high level of “societal energy,” by developing a city with one or more of the game’s six values. Societal energy is a fairly intangible force, but players know they have it when their cities grow and their citizens are happy and productive. “If you put the city together right, it has the right energy,” says Rachel Bernstein, producer of SimCity Societies. Players place buildings within their cities in order to maximize the values most important to them, whether they are productivity and prosperity or creativity and spirituality.
Read it all here.