[popeshoe]

It's an amusing thought, but I imagine that most of these people realise homelessness isn't really a problem you can simply fix by following some set of procedures. Ultimately it's a game to be played for entertainment, and if you can get some people to think about social issues as they play it that's wonderful, but it's still supposed to be enjoyable. Clearly homeless people in the game are impeding some peoples enjoyment and it's a problem that is not obvious to solve.

Some games that offer more freedom let you solve problems like these in more interesting ways, for example when I played Dwarf Fortress (years ago now), a common strategy was to make the nobledwarfs accommodation floodable with lava, so if they got too uppity with their demands (sometimes nobles would insist that you make certain items or not sell a certain items or they'd get furious and make everybody else unhappy) they could be dispatched. I think it'd be funny if Sim City offered a similar option.

[chipsy]

To paraphrase from around 19:10 of [0] - readings of games throughout the ages have flip flopped between two moralistic binaries; between a wholesome pastime for young children, and a depraved and immoral one suited for soldiers, gamblers, or angry youth.

In saying the game is "supposed to be" something one elides the nature of play: As players interact with the game's systems, they reify what the systems allow and encourage, not any particular targeted messages.

Simcity's presentation of homelessness is intentional. It could easily design this out and immediately disappear people who no longer have a home; it makes this exact kind of assumption in making Sims gender and race-blind. Neither does it present homelessness within a simplified framework where you just push a button to make it go away. It molds the issue into a front-and-center strategic consideration, one balanced against others.

Now, not every game can tackle every issue. What is presented in Simcity is a popularized conception of "problems a city planner must deal with." Different versions of Simcity have emphasized different parts of the city. Although more detail and more simulation can always be added, there's ultimately some pivotal focus it tends to revolve around, one which tells us the sensibilities of its maker(s). This is true even of Dwarf Fortress; the point of the simulation there is to deepen the storytelling and provide believable details about its fantasy world.

So, complaints about homelessness as it's experienced in Simcity are very much a part of the discourse - whether we say "it's not really like that" or "I have a better solution," the game is prompting a kind of criticism that doesn't appear within the typical news-reaction cycle.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLDizDa_rXw#t=1150

[pgeorgi]

None of that requires "psychology, anthropology, philosophy", as the book author claims, since (as you noted), it tells us the sensibilities of its makers.

Bittani could build a city simulation with blackjack an...erm psychology, anthropology, philosophy, and see if who is interested in that - and if it's not just another reflection of the maker's opinions (just one that Bittani happens to prefer).

[simonh]

The 'final solution' option? It's been done in real life of course many times in many countries, but I don't think adding an option to Sim City to round them all up and shoot/gas/incinerate them, or build a 'killing fields' facility is really what people are looking for in that game. In DF we can get some distance from it because it's explicitly a fantasy world, but Sim City is a bit too close to emulating real life for something like that to be a reasonable option.

[ajuc]

There's value in giving people choice and making them uncomfortable with the consequences of easy options. The Witcher series is famous for that, and I'd like to see more games took that approach (show what can be done, even give in-game bonuses for evil behaviour, don't judge but show consequences).

DF skips over this problem because it's more abstract, and it's just not this kinds of game. Another example - Crusader Kingdoms 2 - this game is all about incests, backstabbing and assasination, but somehow it's funny not deep.

I agree it's probably not good idea for games targeted at children.

[spdustin]

Bioshock was the first to make me uncomfortable with a choice. Do I harvest the Little Sister, and get more powerful? Or do I "rescue her", which itself looks a bit like torture at first, and send her off in a place that is filled with psychopaths who'd want to kill her anyway.

Later in the series, when I experienced what it's like to BE a Little Sister, it almost made me regret "rescuing them" before, because the way they see the world as a Little Sister is quite beautiful, and they did serve a profound purpose.

The final choice seems to be a moral absolute, but it was a deeply unsettling choice, for me, to make, and to revisit again later.

[tsotha]

It's not really a choice, because in the end you get more powerful by not harvesting the Little Sisters. The only reason to do it is to see the evil ending cut scene.

[Dylan16807]

And you get that world-conquering evil cut scene for even a single slip. Immediately you are irredeemable.

[tsotha]

Heh. I didn't realize that. When I'm evil I don't do it by half measures.

[spdustin]

Would you kindly not spoil the game too much.

(See what I did there?)

[spdustin]

I didn't know that until, you know, the end.

[arprocter]

Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri offered 'nerve stapling' [0] as a method of quelling riots

[0] http://civilization.wikia.com/wiki/Atrocities_%28SMAC%29

[shanusmagnus]

Great comment. The critical part is "show consequences."

[frobozz]

Is Sim City really closer to real life than GTA? I am no more the near-omnipotent mayor of a new town than I am a crook for hire with a penchant for running over ISKCon members.

[the_af]

I don't know about GTA, but Sim City is certainly closer to real life than Dwarf Fortress.

I agree with the person you're replying to: having the "final solution" in a city management game would be extremely unpalatable to say the least. We do not expect mayors and city planners to behave like that.

[TeMPOraL]

I'd actually love to see a game going in that direction. If you try to set up some evil scheme for dealing with homeless, you'd have riots on your hand and citizens storming with guns into your office.

Or say, you decide to create a police state, with full surveillance and all the like. You see everyone is happy... unitl the whole thing goes to hell - because people weren't actually happy, your metrics just were wrong.

[the_af]

I don't think this is possible in a mainstream management game, for the same reason a mainstream extermination camp simulator is not feasible. Just imagine the outrage if Maxis did this.

[TeMPOraL]

I agree. This would be better suited for an indie production or a third-party mod.

[ccvannorman]

We don't expect it, and yet that's exactly what they do.

The fact that it's illegal to give my friend a sandwich in some cities sickens me.

http://www.infowars.com/feeding-the-homeless-banned-in-major...

Edit: I realize making feeding homeless illegal and outright killing them is different -- But the tragedy of these laws is palpable. Those that vote for them either grossly misunderstand the issue, or would simply do whatever they can to get rid of homeless, or both.

[tbrake]

Mass murder isn't a real life option/goal of very many mayors so in that respect yes it would be dissimilar, whereas very nasty guns for hire occasionally do very nasty things?

There's an implied benevolence to being a sim mayor - keeping people happy and employed while keeping the city clean and profitable is "success" as defined by the game. I mean, feel free to play it however you want but that's the stated metric for the game.

[tsotha]

Rockstar got plenty of grief for GTA.

[hueving]

It would be more interesting if they had that option just too see how often players would resort to something like that.

[kalmi10]

In FallOut 3 I was given a choice between blowing up a town and saving it. I went with the evil option, as that seemed to offer a greater reward. Later I went back to the town, and I saw the used-to-be-good-looking NPCs now disfigured, but some still alive. That made me feel really bad about what I did. Also, later I also heard about it on the in-game radio multiple times, which really felt weird, and made me feel bad about what I did even more. At that point I felt that my actions in this game have consequences, and after that I made my choices more carefully. But the game did not let up, it kept me remembering what I did by putting some of these disfigured NPCs into quests later on.

(It might have been only one NPC that survived, details are fuzzy.)

[djur]

The one NPC that survives is the one who gives you the series of "survival guide" sidequests which are meant to help encourage you to explore the game. What's interesting about that to me is that her quests are pretty much the only valuable (in game mechanics) thing about Megaton after the nuke quest is resolved -- and they end up letting you do them either way. It's actually cited by people as an example of the game not following through on the consequences of an evil act. But your interpretation makes more sense to me; the idea that a game has to 'punish' in-game evil by means of a mechanical penalty is itself kind of discomfiting.

[SixSigma]

In Fo:nv I have taken out the NCR's Camp Forlorn Hope but not become a full enemy. Everywhere I go, NPC's tell me how terrible it was that someone did it. "Yeah, that was me".

[Danieru]

All of them. It is a common accepted reality in game design that players will take any shortcut offered. Players will go so far as skipping content just to "solve" a challenge with the fastest method.

Players would jump at genocide if it solved their problem. It would be an interesting result if it was not so predictable.

[gambiting]

Unless the outcome is not clear. Killing off all homeless people would get rid of homelessness(obviously) but it might have a long term negatives, so not everyone will elect to do it.

Just like in many RPG games you can make "evil" and "good" choices. In many instances, going with "evil" makes the game much easier - instead of doing a 2 hour long quest to find someone's lost ring, you can just kill the person and take their money you would get as a reward, so the immediate outcome is the same. But people like to roleplay and people don't make decisions just because they make the game easier.

[Vaskivo]

> In many instances, going with "evil" makes the game much easier

I agree. I find that many games present the moral choices in a way that become a "what possible reward do I want" choice.

One of the best ways moral choices were presented were in Skyrim, with the Deadric Princes' quests. You usully had to do some horrible thing (murder, cannibalism, torture, etc.) and you would be rewarded with a cool magical item. The moral choice is glarangly present while not being explicitly stated. You either do the quest or you don't. And that resonated with me because I believe that while there are many motivations for being evil (selfishness, greed, desire of power, sadism), the motivation and reward for being good is itself.

[SixSigma]

+1 wisdom

Not useful for a Melee Class

[ajuc]

Depends on the game. See people role-playing nethack as vegans or pacifists for a counterexample.

Or look at few chapters of some The Witcher 2 let's play.

If your game is abstract puzzle (like simcity) then sure - few people would roleplay chess after all.

[SixSigma]

I remember my first Genocide scroll

What to kill, I know shopkeepers, then I can have all the loot

    @

You are dead

Oops

[DanBC]

People kill game characters all the time, even when it's not part of the game. See RollerCoasters being ploughed into waiting crowds for one example. Or not being able to kill the child characters in FallOut3 for another.

[zanny]

> it's still supposed to be enjoyable. Clearly homeless people in the game are impeding some peoples enjoyment and it's a problem that is not obvious to solve.

This tough boss is impeding my enjoyment of this RPG because I can't mindlessly beat it.

This tough level in an FPS is impeding my enjoyment of later levels because I can't beat it.

I can't place first in this tough racing track and that is impeding my ability to enjoy it.

Homelessness is a challenge to approach however you want. It only becomes a problem in huge cities with rapid middle and upper class expansion, ie, the late game. So if you get stuck and have a skill wall in front of you to overcome but can't, that is not a deficit of the game, that is the whole reason the game exists, to impose challenge and difficulty to overcome.

[popeshoe]

I basically agree, it's more of a problem if the rampant homelessness is due to bad code that makes it too common (as opposed to imperfect design of your city), which given the history of the game isn't beyond the realms of possibility, eg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g418BSF6XBQ

[mikeash]

Your statements could be totally reasonable. Difficulty in a game can be good or bad, it all depends on why and how it's difficult. If that tough level is hard because it's well designed as an interesting challenge and you can get past it with practice and thought and it remains interesting while you do that, it's good design. If that tough level is hard because it's unpredictable and requires excessive luck to get past and forces you to go through lots of tedious replays when you fail, it's bad design.

I have no idea which category this falls into, just pointing out that your examples can be legitimate.

[spdustin]

The Sims let me have neighbors over to swim in the pool, and then I could delete the ladder leading into it.

Like in most video games, characters don't know how to climb, so the poor saps died in the 4' deep pool.

It was surprisingly easy to be evil in Sims, I don't see why one can't be evil in Sim City. It can be cathartic, and nearly everyone has those "dark thoughts", even if they don't care to admit it.

[michaelx386]

> a common strategy was to make the nobledwarfs accommodation floodable with lava

I've not played Dwarf Fortress for a while, but were there any consequences to killing the nobledwarfs like that? The game is so comprehensive I'm wondering if the creators considered that strategy.

[popeshoe]

As far as I remember it just makes his family and friends upset, and anybody who witnesses the death, which is usually always preferable to him going mental and sentencing your master metalworker to death because he refused to make -=* platinum trumpets*=-

[blueskin_]

He gets sentenced to prison, which is inconvenient, unless you don't have any space for him, then he gets sentenced to hammering (exactly what it sounds like), which is what kills or maims him, but it is possible to survive. Giving important dwarves (or just-sentenced ones) armour, removing Urist McHammerer's hammer or replacing it with a nonlethal one, or just walling him up somewhere are all viable strategies to keep important dwarves alive, but kill^H^H^H^H arranging an Unfortunate Accident[1] for troublesome nobles is arguably easiest.

[1]http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Unfortunate_accident

[Vexs]

I think this is one of the few areas of DF where players don't actually choose the most optimal path, but instead choose the most amusing, or dwarfiest, path.

I mean, you see countless arguments about stair shaft vs single floors, trap paths vs artillery paths, optimal pumps, delegation of jobs, etc, but everyone agrees that nobles should go in the lava.

[coldnebo]

IMHO, the biggest benefit from playing games like SimCity is the practical introduction to systems thinking: the obvious solution may not be the obvious solution. I often wonder if these games are giving this generation an intuitive grasp of systems dynamics that older generations simply don't get.

The meta-game of effective systems design is fascinating in its own right, because the skills learned apply to real-world systems as well.

I wonder if anyone has tried modeling the problem specific to the game using something like trueworld? http://www.true-world.com/htm/en/index.html

[probably_wrong]

> Ultimately it's a game to be played for entertainment, and if you can get some people to think about social issues as they play it that's wonderful, but it's still supposed to be enjoyable.

I have not played SimCity for a long, long time, but IIRC it's meant to be less a "game" and more of a "interactive simulation". In that context, whether the emergent behavior is fun or not would not be the main point.

Or maybe the new SimCitys (SimCities?) are not like that anymore.

[arrrg]

The main focus of these kinds of toy boxes was always less on accuracy and more on making playing with the toys enjoyable. I really don’t see the contradiction in that and Sim City being an simulation. It’s practically always only accurate when that serves it being enjoyable. That’s how it should be.

Do you really believe it was ever a serious simulation?!

[omaranto]

I suggest changing "it" to "SimCity" in the second sentence:

> Ultimately it's a game to be played for entertainment, and if you can get some people to think about social issues as they play it that's wonderful, but it's still supposed to be enjoyable.

Right now "it" seems to refer to "homelessness" from the previous sentence, which confused me a bit.

[hueving]

Homelessness punishable by death should clear it up.