Culture: SimCity and Fan Productivity

SimCIty has had a massive following from the first success and the proliferation of the internet as allowed fans to engage with products in a variety of ways not before seen. It is therefore not surprising that the franchise stands at the center of fan productivity.

Maaike Lauwaer offers a way to approach this topic by differentiating between external and internal levels of play, either happening outside or inside the gameworld respectively. She goes on to note that both internal and external activities of gaming can intersect with one another. For example creating user-created-content (UCC or UGC, user-generated-content) is an external activity, but installing and loading it into the game turns it into an intermal mode of operation. (Lauwaert 199-201)

She combines this with intended and unintended practices of play, which she defined as engaging with a game in a way that falls into line with the expectations of the game's rules and those of it's creators i.e. the game industry. (Lauwaert 195)

Though I do have to make a counterpoint against the division between intendend and unintended practice of play, simply because it is in many ways dependent on the arbitrary choice of the developer and/or publisher what constitutes which practice of play according to Lauwart's definition of the term, especially on the external level. Many games released during the early 2000s had and still have vibrant modding communities, such as Battlefield 2, or Command and Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars, generating fancontent. However this trend, of modding-friendly videogames, reversed slowly reversed over the last decade as "the game industry" exerted ever tighter control over their products using always-online requirements and digital rights management (DRM) suits, making the development of user-created-content for newer titles downright impossible in most cases. And even before that modding was, for the most part, only implicitly endorsed by developers and publishers insofar that it presented a means to prolong a products lifespan without further investment on their part. A strategy that itself grew obsolete as digitial distribution, downloadable content (DLC) and microtransactions allowed developers to feed content into a game at a profit.

We can make the argument, then that the high levels of fancreativity concentrating specifically on titles released in this specific timeframe (ca. 2000-2010) is in large parts due their dependence on physical distribution via CD/DVD at the time and limited online functionalities. Early enough to not be affect by "supply-side" content moderation, but late enough that people had the basic computer knowledge to readily engage with the product in ways that enabled fan productivity and user-content creation.

In the case of SimCity 4, this is readily visible by the large number of online forums and social media platforms, such as subreddits on reddit, that are dedicated to the game and it's player creations, as Bradley Bereitschaft notes in regards City-Building-Game (CBG) communities:

CBG communities play a key role in disseminating
knowledge not only of the game and game mechanics,
but also of urban patterns and processes more generally.
[...] Often strategies employed in the real world to mitigate
such issues as traffic, crime, or pollution may also be
applied successfully within the game. Players also commonly
share pictures and stories of their cities, eliciting
feedback regarding city design, mechanics, and aesthetics.
[...] Through these juxtapositions, players can identify both
the strengths and limitations of the CBG as a model of
real urban systems. (Bereitschaft 52-53)

But Lauwert rightfully expands this list by adding tool- and content creators to this list. (Lauwaert 202-203) One of the most notable fanpatches for SimCity 4 would be the Network Addon Mod. It initally started as a "simple" fanpatch that overhauled SimCity 4's rundamentary traffic simulator where Sims would always chose the metrically shortest route, instead of the fastest one, which use high-capacity roads, but at this point it has balloned into a giant content patch, featuring custom made roads, trams and custom system of modular highway pieces. Custom content in SimCity 4 can range from overhauled terrain graphics, custom buildings and automata graphics to custom made regions shared among the userbase. So, while fan productivity, as it applies videogames, does seem to be a minority phenomenon it can diversify quickly and grow resilient enough to outlast the effective lifecycle of more traditional forms of media for a longer period of time.

Another interesting usage to consider would be using the game as means of artistic expression. "Magnasanti" is an digital art installation that set out to beat "SimCity" by optimizing the number of residents to the highest number possible, albeit in SimCity 3000 but the two titles are similar enough to also warrant inspection here.

(Source: Vincent Ocasla, Youtube)

No schools, no hospitals and a honeycomb system repeated ad infinitum to achieve the most optimal result of residential density paint a stark picture of a social order that is simply unreal and could only be realized with a computational model operating on limited inputs and processes that exclude stresses put on a system by social factors. Magnasanti paints an extreme picture of dystopia that might outcompete even Orwells "1984" or Huxleys "Brave New World" in terms of bleakness if it would be depicted in any traditional narrative, which in turn would probably make Magnasanti as an urban vision fairly uninteresting if it would be presented in any other context other than that of being a result of .

However we have to consider that this "optimal" solution is specific to SimCity 3000s simulation and can't be readily replicated 1-to-1 in SimCity 2000, 4, or other city builders to the same degree of scale and density, due to the games more simplified traffic simulation.

So, while we might consider Magnasanti as an abstract metaphor representing the consequences and human cost of the prioritisation of profit and growth over human wellbeing it also underscores the "artificialness" of simulations of real things. Pilots can be trained in simulations because the limited physical inputs and forces an airframe is subject to can be emulated to such an degree that it is, at least on paper, close enough to physical reality as to be indistuingishable, but in contrast the sheer plurality of social realities and the complex and intertwined dynamics they produce refuse to be so easily categorized and emulated. Driving simulations into their most extreme states possible will, neccessarily bring out the most glaring shortcomings and omissions inherent in them.