Problem is all such games are subject to their assumptions. Thus whatever you come up with, either it confirms my bias or I can attack it because of some obscure thing you didn't account for. There are enough obscure things for me to keep adding that you will never win (except by confirming my bias at which time someone else will jump in).
> Problem is all such games are subject to their assumptions.
Including SimCity and Cities Skylines. See:
"...through a survey of gameplay features and online discussions, I argue that CBGs present a biased urban imaginary whose underlying rules and assumptions often run contrary to contemporary best practices in urban planning and policy. Working within these constraints however, players wield considerable power to sculpt their own unique urban visions, which come to embody the ideologies of both player and developer."
In particular around automobile-centricity:
"The illusion that additional capacity solves all transit ills is compounded by the fact that no CBG to date has accurately portrayed the resultant demand for parking spaces. In C: S, vehicles may park parallel along streets and in surface parking lots adjacent to buildings. These surface parking lots are unrealistically small, however, with 10+ story buildings often having no more than a half-dozen (and often no) parking spaces. While it isn’t uncommon for dense urban environments to feature subsurface parking garages, it takes a substantial leap of faith to assume that every building in the game is equipped in this way. So what if a CBG dared to adopt a more realistic parking model? Steve Librande, a lead designer on SimCity 2013, is said to have remarked, “so much of the screen would be dedicated to asphalt that it’d be too boring to play”"
> While it isn’t uncommon for dense urban environments to feature subsurface parking garages, it takes a substantial leap of faith to assume that every building in the game is equipped in this way. So what if a CBG dared to adopt a more realistic parking model? Steve Librande, a lead designer on SimCity 2013, is said to have remarked, “so much of the screen would be dedicated to asphalt that it’d be too boring to play”"
I mean, it's also not uncommon to have surface parking garages. You can have 15 times the parking in the same land area that way, and that's what people do even in very thinly populated cities. Or suburban malls. It's not a choice between "all of the parking is underground" and "all of the parking is on the ground".
Sure, but the point is that none of these games make you account for parking or make it part of your urban planning. You don't have to build municipal parking structures or decide whether to charge for parking, or set policies around parking minimums in different classes of buildings. You don't have to deal with the blight of empty parking lots, or the challenges of reclaiming that land. There's no such thing as a park-n-ride in C:S—if you build a rapid transit line, you don't get to realize the growth associated with the greater density that would unlock in the real world because you were never bottlenecked on CBD parking availability the way the real world is.
Parking is just taken for granted as plentiful and invisible, which is why SimCity and C:S let you make a city that looks like NYC or Barcelona, but functions under the hood like San Jose.
This is problematic because non-car tranportation modes have enough trouble competing in the real world where these costs _are_ paid. How much harder is it in a fantasy where they aren't?
They are subject to their assumptions, but they also make those assumptions much more concrete. That makes them easier to version, critique, test and improve. The alternative is unstated assumptions minus the benefits, so what's to lose?
