a city in my own image

Perhaps my all-time favorite computer games series is the Sim games from Maxis. I love a wide variety of these games: SimAnt, SimFarm, SimTower... but the SimCity series always reigned supreme. In junior high, SimCity 2000 was the coolest computer game ever. There was something strangely addicting about building a booming metropolis. This love would later transfer to SimCity 3000; I'd be uncomfortable admitting how many hours I wasted on that game during my early college years.

As I think back on playing SimCity, though, it's intriguing to realize how the cities I created tended to be influenced by my experience growing up in the Houston area. It didn't even occur to me that most of the metropolises I constructed emulated my hometown. For example:

- My cities were almost always located on or near a coastline, with a river (or "bayou") running through. They almost always had large, almost oversized ports, and booming industrial sectors.

- My cities rarely had mountains or elevation changes of any kind.

- I always tried to cultivate large, towering skylines, and usually had more than one true "downtown" area in my towns.

- Usually a freeway loop would surround the city, with other freeways intersecting it like a spoke-and-wheel (much like I-45 and I-10).

- Museums were usually bunched in a district together, as were hospitals.

- I would sometimes strike my towns, early in their creation, with a tornado or a hurricane, and then see how the city recovered.

- I even discovered a glitch in SimCity 2000 that allowed you to plant trees on water - thus, my cities often ever had swamps and marshes!

- I struggled with the concept of public transit, and would often find myself going back through the mostly-completed city late in its history to force in rail and bus stops, to appease a squawking transportation advisor.

I short, I created cities as I understood them. Mountains, earthquakes, land-locked valleys, commuter trains, and so on were not part of how I witnessed cities function, so they had no part of my simulated cities.

As I visited and lived in more urban areas, I've seen the diverse ways they operate, from the high-rise dotted mountains of Hong Kong to the bustling madness of Cairo to the narrow, tight alleys and blocks of Boston. Kids growing up in those cities think that what they're experiencing is "normal." I've heard a group of Utah teenagers express shock at the thought of a California neighborhood where white people are in the minority, and I've heard a group of California teenagers scoff at the thought of a Utah neighborhood with a homogenous Anglo population. I've heard people in Toronto express despair at the thought of warm winters, and I've heard a college student in Kuala Lumpur distressed that the outside winter temperature could get colder than the air conditioning in a library.

I've expressed variations on this thought multiple times, and I'm sure I will again in the future, but it's amazing to think about how my little assumptions about what "normal life" looks like influence even tiny details in my lifestyle - even details like how I played a video game in junior high.