All Play and No Work for Jack Makes Jill a Better Planner

Several years ago I was with a group
of people who decided to approach the makers of SimCity to see if we
could convince them to develop a similar but more credible tool for
planners, enabling towns and their residents to look at real planning
challenges and experiment with different scenarios in their own
community. The response was a solid “no, we’re not interested, we’re
interested in making games.”

Can’t blame them, considering the
market for gamers is easily a thousand-fold greater than that for
serious minded planners (not to mention realistic planning tools need
real data to run credible analysis; imaginary cities don’t).

Nonetheless,
it is fascinating to follow what Will Wright, the creator of SimCity
and the Sims, is doing these days. He has taken SimCity and Sims and is
working on the next level of dynamic gaming where the user can create
and evolve whole universes with critters, buildings, road networks,
etc. and even interact with other planets that other people have
created. A year ago, at the Game Developer’s Conference in San
Francisco, Wright wowed the audience
with a product in development code-named Spore, which demonstrated new
ways of giving the user powerful tools to generate their own dynamic
content without armies of content creators.

Wright’s creatures wander through a thriving city.
(image and caption directly from http://www.gamespy.com/articles/595/595975p3.html)

Having
all that said, let’s not forget that tools like Index, PLACE3S,
MetroQuest, Facet, CommunityViz, and others already exist which, while
perhaps not as user friendly and entertaining as SimCity, do help
communities envision the consequences of their land use policy
decisions. These impact analysis tools quantify the trade-offs of
different development choices before new buildings and roads are built.
Some include policy simulator tools that also show where growth is
likely to occur as a result of different land use/tax policies.
Integrated with other tools like GoogleEarth, ArcScene, SiteBuilder,
and/or SketchUp, one can add eye catching visuals. A version of CUBE
combines transportation modeling outputs with 3D StudioMax to display
SimCity-like pedestrians and cars walking and driving through the
streetscape, visually depicting areas of congestion, bottlenecks, and
satisfactory flow.

The cool thing is that everyone is
learning from each other and more and more these tools/games are
becoming interoperable. So while the makers of SimCity may never invest
in creating professional planning tools, there is a trickle down effect
benefiting us all. Whether it’s technologies that find their way into
professional planning tools or the thousands of kids inspired to become
planners as a result of city building games like SimCity, Zoo Tycoon,
and future offshoots of gaming concepts like Spore, the planning world
has much to gain from these money making geniuses.