Sim City as Mirror World
Mall of the Bluffs and cloverleaf interchange near Omaha NE, re-created in Sim City 4
Stefan Geens at the always outstanding Ogle Earth blog links to an emergent gameplay phenomenon I hadn’t heard of before: people using urban simulation/god-game Sim City 4 to build re-creations of real cities in all their mundane beauty, based largely on information from Google Earth and similar sources. Their development is chronicled in forum postings known as City Journals in the lingo of the fanbase. The re-creation of the Omaha NE area Stefan links to is chronicled in this thread on fan forum site Simtropolis, which also provides a place for players to swap assets and mods, and trade advice on developing their virtual urban areas.
While it’s tough to create a real place with a high degree of faithfulness in Sim City 4, many people seem to have made impressive approximations. The Omaha area re-created by Simtropolis member Mr. Beer is apparently one of the best — despite the fact that Mr. Beer is European and his connection to Omaha isn’t clear. Plus he’s done Baton Rouge in the past. But he’s even got the freeway interchanges right, apparently — or, almost right. As one Simtropolis member commented:
I really am enjoying your recreation of Omaha. Having been raised here I am quite honored that you are doing such a great job at recreating the metro area. I did want to point out however that Highway 75 N. (the North Freeway) actually becomes non freeway at the Storx expressway (just north of Eppley) and becomes instead a regular route with stoplights so it does not cloverleaf with I-680 but instead forms a regular intersection. Nonetheless, wonderful job.
Here’s a shot of the Rosenblatt sports complex from Mr. Beer’s City Journal, followed by a shot I found in Google Earth, just to give you an idea of the limitations of Sim City 4 as a world-mirroring tool:
Even so, you can see how Mr. Beer has done his best to cover approximately the same area with buildings of the same functionality, and to re-create the freeway interchange as best he can. Below, a comparison of the overhead view of Mr. Beer’s re-creation of Council Bluffs IA, and the same area in Google Earth:
All in all, impressive work.
What does it mean that people are willing to put so much work into such virtual re-creations of the real world, to no apparent end? It’s obviously another way to grapple with the information around us and to be more closely connected to and involved with a place. Is there more to it than that? I leave it to you, dear reader, to discuss.
Feeds
“What does it mean that people are willing to put so much work into such virtual re-creations of the real world, to no apparent end?”
Ask a model railroader…
Funny, I was just talking to my father and his cousin about getting their old model railroads set up at some point. Re-creating the physical world holds a great deal of joy, somehow. But I wonder what it is in us that urges us to do so?
Funny, I used to do just that with the older Sim City games. I will buy the latest geographical map of our city or metro and will try to duplicate it in Sim City. Glad to see I’m not alone, and there are many crazy people out there like me. I was only 10 years then if I remember it correctly.
Replicating the Real-World in Sim City…
Mark Wallace of 3pointD.com posted about Sim City as a Mirror World. He showed how people are remaking real-world geographic locations using the images from Google Earth into Sim City 4.
I used to do it during my younger days, trying to create Maka…
The beauty of a map is that so many simple symbols can represent real world information in a concise manner. Therefore, accurate maps are tedious to make and require more time to maintain accuracy. Geographic Information Systems commonly used by military, city planners, engineers, and scientists exploit database technology to relate THOUSANDS of pieces of information to a map. However, most of GIS developments use two dimensional information and overlay it according to place.
City Simulators could be more useful because they utilize 3 dimensional information, and, more importantly, the nature of the game causes people to categorize land according to use AS IT RELATES to the environment around it. Virtual worlds also have the advantage of tracking land attributes that move from one place to another in a predictable pattern, such as traffic flow, hydrology, and crime because they are “objects” in the simulator.
Those who model a virtual world after a physical one may have professional/educational interests. Those who do it for the fun are enacting the ultimate geographic inquiry: ‘just how accurate can I get?’