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‘SimCity’ Isn’t a Model of Reality. It’s a Libertarian Toy Land
Beneath its playful exterior, the beloved game that inspired a generation of real-world urban designers betrays a partisan view of social planning.
After Bill Clinton won the 1992 US presidential election on the platform of health care reform, a nonprofit foundation commissioned Thinking Tools to design a hospital-management simulator. As Keith Schlesinger writes in a review for Computer Gaming World, there was one easy way to win: “All you have to do is adopt an extreme libertarian ideology, eliminate all federal health care (including Medicare! “ SimHealth contains so much misinformation that no one could possibly understand competing proposals and policies, much less evaluate them, on the basis of the program.” He was concerned that people would mistake the game for a legitimate description of reality.
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