Of all the games that I’ve played over the past twenty five years or so, SimCity, in its various incarnations, has to be the one that I cherish and have spent time playing the most. Ever since I laid my eyes on the first version of SimCity in the early 1990s, I became enamored with it: it possessed this rare and seemingly magical quality you’ll get by reading books — one that you seldom get by playing video games, at least as far as I am concerned: it allows you to engage your imagination, think about aspects of the game that go beyond what the game mechanics, assets and design ever intended. A bit like playing a desktop RPG game, or — even better — Diplomacy, listening to a story or reading a book.
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I’ve written about SimCity in the past, in my opinion one of the most intriguing games ever to grace a personal computer. The following videos showcase some of the fundamental changes that have taken place for the upcoming game, SimCity, a reboot of the franchise that features a brand new engine called GlassBox. The engine introduces agent-like behaviour in the objects that inhabit the SimCity universe, thus creating an extremely consistent visual representation of the internal state of the game (something that, in turn, maximises realism). One of the previous concerns of Will Wright (and perhaps the rest of the team at Maxis), especially for SimCity 4, was that it was becoming too complex to be commercially successful. In my opinion, this is completely wrong. SimCity draws its appeal from the fact that it endeavours to be a realistic yet fun city-building simulator. Complexity is not the problem, it’s a benefit and I’m sure that the new agent-based engine will allow for much more complex, yet easily-graspable and consistent game concepts with higher complexity to be playable and fun. To my mind this has always been more than just a game and the concepts behind SimCity (as well as, to my knowledge, the engine) have been used for real city management needs.

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