[jmye]

> The difference is that people shouldn't be forced to commute across the entire city to get to work because you decided to cram all of the commercial zoning into one downtown core.

Isn't the point that they should be, if that's how I choose to build a city, and they don't have to be, if you choose to build it otherwise? The entire point of a sandbox city-builder is, I assume, that it's a sandbox, and not a dogmatic interpretation of a childish Reddit meme.

[chongli]

It was pointed out elsewhere in this thread that SimCity already distorts reality in an ideological way: it lets you have tons of traffic without worrying about parking. It just gives you magical free underground parking everywhere that you never have to think about, in order to avoid the usual suburban parking sprawl hellscape.

[jmye]

What, specifically, does this have to do with my comment? Aside from being another opportunity to abuse a tired, ill-conceived soapbox?

[chongli]

The point is to illustrate that SimCity isn't a blank-slate, value-free sandbox city-builder. It has rules and those rules have been made deliberately unrealistic in ways that favour North American style cities.

It's like a fluid dynamics sandbox that causes water to flow uphill rather than settling into the valleys.