Nov 16, 2019 1:00 AM

Amateur planners are using video games to fix our broken cities

Cities: Skylines gives frustrated citizens a way of fixing their environments and smoothing out traffic. But real life isn't quite as straightforward

Getty Images / WIRED

The Golden Gate Bridge was redesigned last month. If you missed it, you can watch it on YouTube. The urban planner responsible realised that the bridge’s traffic, which formed a long, honking snake from its toll booths down into the heart of San Francisco, could be relieved with just a few adjustments to the width of lanes and the direction of traffic. “If you’re the mayor of San Francisco, you might want to take these sort of things into account,” he said, as clumps of cars began to unjam and smooth out.

This redesign, as you will have no doubt quickly discerned, didn’t take place in the real world, but in a video game – Colossal Order’s Cities: Skylines. The game, released in 2015, is a steadily growing masterpiece. Its latest expansion, which lets players construct college campuses, was released in May. Falling into the genre of city builder games, first popularised in 1989 by Will Wright’s Sim City, the objective of a typical game is open-ended and simple – players must construct a humming metropolis, from scratch, on a patch of rugged land.

Unlike the fantastical worlds games often imagine, city builders draw on real-life troubles, tapping into questions we pose everyday, like ‘Why are house prices so high?’ or ‘Why doesn’t South London have tubes?’

In many ways, modern urban planning, which emerged as a profession in the early decades of the 20th century, sprang from similar frustrations. Cities: Skylines lets players act on this frustration, and fix their urban environment.

“Fixing” cities is a key part of the appeal of Cities: Skylines – the game’s loyal community haunt Reddit and YouTube, offering and requesting aid and complaining about gridlock. Biffa, a YouTuber who runs the highly popular channel BiffaPlaysindiesgames, is one of Cities: Skylines premier “fixers”; (he was the planner responsible for solving San Francisco's traffic pileups.) If you send Biffa your ailing metropolis, he will fix it, accompanied by jovial commentary. “It's the creative side of things – the fact that if I think of something I want to build, I can do it,” he says of the game’s attraction. “I'm just really drawn to, the roads, the layouts – I just love cities and I love the way they look.”

The drive to fix cities, Biffa says, has bled over into the real world. He now sees traffic issues everywhere – though he acknowledges that real life urban planners don’t work with unlimited budgets. He and his wife might discuss the lack of a roundabout at a local junction, for instance. “A lot of people think I'm an urban road planner or something – I'm not,” he says. “But there’s terrible road junctions and that I drive through on a weekly basis and I think – if only they had a bit of lane management or some of the terms I've made up in my game – it would work so much better.”

He recently rebuilt Swindon infamous “Magic Roundabout – which actually functioned swimmingly in the game – but solving the problems of real cities doesn’t hold the same pleasure for Biffa as imaginary metropolises. He views following the blueprint of a recreation as a limitation on the creativity and fun of what is, at bottom, a game.

Other streamers take Cities: Skylines far more seriously. In a video series of breathtaking and slightly mad ambition, YouTuber donoteat01 – real name Justin Roczniak – uses the game to tell a panoramic history of the origins of American cities. (One YouTuber comments that his top two ‘films with intermissions’ are 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Roczniak’s two part explication of public housing.)

Roczniak, who has a gravelly, melancholy voice, infuses dense academic references – summarising the key tenets of Donald Shoup’s The High Cost of Free Parking, for instance – with bursts of amusing existential ennui. “Gonna add some sad benches, where you can sit and take your lunch deafened by the noise from cars on the suburban arterial road nearby, wondering through the din where your life went wrong,” he deadpans in one video.

He came to the idea of using Cities: Skylines as an educational tool after watching some speedbuild videos, where players talk through the thought process behind a city’s construction. Roczniak, who has a degree in civil engineering, decided he could do better. “The game probably can't give anyone a deeper understanding of urban planning issues itself, because its interpretation of them is very facile and gamified,” he says. “But it can inspire people to want to learn more about urban issues and become more involved, and that's what I want to encourage with my Cities: Skylines series.”

Skylines provided him a way to make abstract urban planning problems concrete for his viewers. “I tend to learn somewhat visually, so it made history a little easier to explain when I have a physical city in front of me I can use and manipulate to tell the stories I want to tell,” he says. His series is unapologetically leftist; one viewer says that he has turned the game into “Noam chomskylines”; another writes, “Could you imagine telling old timey socialists that young people would be radicalised by a video game tutorial?”

Many of his videos detail how American capitalism has warped the country's urban landscape, and he is less sanguine than Biffa about the options the player is presented with in order to fix their city. The game offers no critical thinking, he says, about how the automobile has “annihilated” American cities. He reels off a list of misunderstandings Skylines reinforces: buildings "upgrading" from shacks to mansions or luxury condo towers, widening roads to improve traffic flow, and his pet peeve – parking – which he labels “the biggest and most irritating urban problem which has the greatest impact on the built form [of the] city.”

Roczniak’s critiques aren’t new for the city builder genre; the idea that the game could have malign real world affects dates back to the original Sim City. In 2017, the same year, Cities: Skylines was used to help residents in Stockholm conceptualise and suggest changes to a new urban development, the academic Paulo Pedercini gave a talk outlining Sim City’s influence on generations of urban planners.

“Take a look at Reddit or YouTube and the biggest and most popular posts and videos are all about aesthetically-pleasing highway interchanges, and posts about cities with ‘81 per cent traffic flow’ or something like that,” says Roczniak. “Free-flowing traffic is prioritised above all in the virtual world even more than it is in real life.”

But even if the solutions to urban problems Cities: Skylinesoffers are sometimes questionable, the game instils in players at least two important principles. It teaches players to see their surroundings as changeable, and it encourages them to claim their right to influence that change.

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