City builders like Cities: Skylines can construct stories, so why don't they?

09 Jan 2021PCGamesN

Cities. You've heard of them, right? We live in them or near them, commute to them and through them, socialise in them, consume in them. Some of us love the endless kinetic energy within them, others choose to avoid them and stay as far away as possible. Some films and books tell us about 'big city life' as if it's a monoculture, others warn us of the façade, and peel back the many layers of which cities are comprised.

Fiction rarely tells us about the process of making cities, and for those of us in the Western world the idea of a new city is strange - these concrete beasts are well established, often built organically over long periods of time. City builder games give us a chance to take part in this process, diving into the mind of city planners, and responding to the demands of environment and population.

There is great potential within these games for narrative, but it's usually avoided. Cities: Skylines and SimCity give very little context for the player. For all their wonderful systems and abstractions of the complexities of life, they provide no story. Given the huge impact cities have on the world around them, it seems like a missed opportunity. City planners in particular are involved in everything that produces a city's personality, determining economic gain and loss, the quality of residential life, and what gets preserved or reclaimed. Planning a city is more than just zoning and pouring concrete; it's planning a society. It's planning people's lives. This is something Cities: Skylines and SimCity miss.

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