The Next L.A. / Reinventing Our Future : Digital City : Your Mission: Build the Ideal City (Don’t Panic--It’s Only a Game)

How to play the game

You’re the mayor. Your goal is to make your residents happy. Figure out how to maintain their quality of life without taxing them so much that they move away. Try to attract business but strike the right balance between light and heavy industry. Divide up spending on police, firefighters, health and welfare, public transit and education. Work out a damage control plan for earthquakes, riots and fires. Don’t be intimidated. Eighth graders seem to handle this just fine.

Start by creating residential, commercial and industrial zones. Install power lines and surface roads. Soon the “Sims” will start moving in. And don’t worry: If they’re unhappy, they’ll let you know.

What if?

No freeways and few surface streets.

How it works:

Don’t touch that road icon--the little picture that looks like a highway on the left side of your screen. Instead, hoist the rail icon and start laying rail lines and don’t stop till everything of consequence is connected.

The Benefits:

Traffic jams vanish as people take the trains. Air pollution noticeably declines. The old, selfish one-driver, one-car standard vanishes. Residents read the newspaper more on their way to and fro, so they are better informed--although it’s hard to tell because the Simses don’t talk much among themselves.

Costs

Check out that budget window. To pay for all that mass transit, taxes have been raised across the board to an astronomical 20%. Other city services like education, police and fire stations have been slashed by 75%. Voters form picket lines right there on the computer screen. The mayor’s popularity rating plunges into negative numbers. Simses are moving out.

What if?

An environmentally correct city

How it works

Build a power grid based solely on windmills and solar power.

Benefits

Air pollution almost nonexistent. People can breathe easily.

Costs

Low industrial development. Wind and solar power cannot generate enough power (or jobs) to support a sizable metropolis and a large educated work force.

What if?

A crime-free city

How it works

Under the Sim rules, the more police stations you build, the less crime there is. To achieve a zero crime rate, put a police station on every block.

Benefits

No crime.

Costs

To pay for all that police power, you have to slash just about everything else. Most seriously cut is education. An uneducated population leads to soaring unemployment due to an untrained work force. In the long run, this erodes the tax base, creating a budget deficit. Sim City goes down the tubes.

Those struggling to satisfy all of the Simses all of the time should know about the embezzle key. It balances even the reddest budget.

But watch out. Embezzle four times and your city gets an earthquake.