blackwater wrote:

SimCity is actually a radical leftism simulator. All of the initiative in the game comes from the player, who simulates the Great Helmsman or Soviet Premier, making his 5-year plans. Private industry never builds anything, never asks for anything, except for what the player has explcitily enabled. All power plants, roads, power lines, trains, busses, etc. are owned by the government and controlled by the Premier. They can be demolished instantly if needed.

As the game simulates a world in which the proletariat has seized the means of production, there is no need for individual capitalists any more. Instead, the state provides for all-- to each according to his need, from each according to his ability. A panel of trusted advisors (the politburo) advises the supreme executive in his difficult role as servant of the People. The people have transcended religion, the old opiate of the people, and arrived at the final destiation of a workers paradise carefully managed according to the scientific principles of dialectical materialism.

Needless to say, construction of government projects is instantaneous. Nor are there cost overruns or complications in building things such as power plants.

See what I did there? Do you feel more informed after reading that? Or did I just jerk off for a few paragraphs and try to manipulate your emotions with content-free spew?

Simcity's tax simulation is dumb because Simcity was a game written on the Apple ][ years ago. And when more powerful machines arrived, Maxis discovered that more accurate simulations were not more fun, which the goal of games (remember?) It's not a vast political plot to convert you to Ayn Rand's way of thinking. And people realize this. When Herman Cain proposed his flat tax rate, it was mocked as "the SimCity tax plan." People understand that this shit is not real. They don't need the Offenderati to tell them that stealing cars is bad EVEN THOUGH GTA is all about stealing cars.

A full discussion by an economist of why Simcity's tax code and economic model are inaccurate would be extremely boring to most people. Even a partial discussion that just touched on the high points would probably make most people close the tab pretty quickly. The solution isn't to write some clickbait piece about how it's all a vast Libertarian/Republican/Democrat/Reptilian conspiracy, but to keep your mouth shut about things you don't understand or care about. If you don't care about economic modelling, don't write about it. And there will be less uninformed garbage on the tubes.

Same thing here. Some guy wrote a stupid model of how his virtual Sims interact. I don't need a games journalist to tell me that dumb models of people as simple finite state machines are dumb. But is it fun? Does it fit with the mood of the game? That is what a games journalist should be writing about (assuming you believe games journalism should even exist any more.)