There are two ways to talk about Sim City.
The first is as one of the biggest release failures in recent memory.
If I take this path, I have to tell you certain things. Sim City is a game that is always online and requires a constant connection to servers in order to run properly. The best-case reason for this, and the one that developer Maxis and publisher Electronic Arts has been feeding players, is that the game relies on being able to offload certain calculations to the game servers. This has been presented as a boon to players, with the underlying narrative being that we are very lucky that the game is always online, because if it wasn’t, there would be no game.
As various people have proved since release, this is an absolute fiction. The game minimally uses server-side calculations. Why would the creators of the game lie? The worst case scenario paints the creators of Sim City not as benevolent overlords but as cruel dictators who chain the user to an internet connection in order to do…something. The forum outrage machine isn’t very clear about what the terrible ulterior motive is, but it has something to do with DRM (probably).
There’s a third scenario, however, that I find much more distressing than if Electronic Arts is now the bastion for a lizard people Illuminati who are bent on taking hard-earned chunks of $60 from people who chose to buy a video game. This horrifying scenario renders everything nonsensical about this totally botched release, well, sensible: the absolute mixing of messages from the publisher and developer, the explicit lies that the companies have been caught in, and the server system that was so poorly implemented that it wasn’t working correctly a week and a half after release (and maybe still isn’t as you read this).
The explanation is this: There isn’t anyone evil at the top trying to rob players. Instead, there is massive incompetence on a scale so large that it is almost unfathomable as mere incompetence. The failure of such a massive network of machines and people should make us all clutch our skulls and scream like we’re on horror film posters in the 1950s. I cannot imagine that anything that happened with Sim City was unpredictable. The companies were well aware of the numbers of preorders of the game, and they knew day one sales were going to be significant on a game fueled both by big promises, like the Glassbox engine, and the pure nostalgia that so many people have for the previous installments in the series. Many, many people hierarchically related to one another looked at documents and spreadsheets that could not have matched up expectations to material realities and said, “well, I guess we’re just going to go for it.”
Unlike most people who care for the series, I’m not angry about the release of Sim City. I’m just sad. I’m sad that someone knew what was going to happen, shrugged their shoulders, and put thousands of players through the ringer for some mysterious and eternally opaque reason.
So there are two ways of looking at Sim City. Everything between there and here is the dark glass version, where we’re met by abject failure in every sense of the word. I’m going to go positive this time.
The other way of looking at Sim City is as magic. In order to get to this way of seeing the game, you have to make it through the trials of everything above. You walk uphill in the snow both ways, so to speak, in order to get home to the comforting fire of metropolis management.
I want to be very clear here: Despite all of the problems and the bad taste that the game’s release leaves in my mouth, there is still something amazing about watching a barren square turn into a teeming metropolis. I watch the buildings pop up and the people get on the streetcar to see a rock show in the middle of the city and I am instilled with a deep and strange feeling of pride.