> Every rule, vote count and case in this game is drawn from the public record. Sources are in docs/research/ in the project folder. Neighborhood politics scores and the economics are simplified for play.
Nice, I'm happy to hear that, Claude. This kind of silly game is supposed to help you understand a complex issue in a fun way. But this is missing the plot entirely. Why is this so overwhelmingly complex? Why would I spend time learning this ugly, convoluted and verbose UI? Who is this for??
These people should, instead of posting the game, just post a video of them playing through the game, as most people have no interest in playing other’s slop but may just be curious to watch someone play and provide comedic value.
...I enjoyed playing it. It's silly. But it's in a similar category as "Papers, Please." It's not like it's stressful, there is just a bunch of random diabolus ex nihilo crap flying at you, which isn't particularly unusual in a game.
There's no reason a "housing crisis" game couldn't have been done like that, with simple choices and immediate reactions. A game that respects the player's time, is easy to pick up and makes the point effectively.
Any simplification hides real problems and takes away from the point. Even your desire for simple choices and immediate reactions elides the fact that not every policy decision has visible short term effects. Some are only visibly beneficial or harmful in the long run, and may not end up that way depending on other decisions.
That game is more of an idle / clicker game, and while I quite enjoyed the one from a few months ago about being a SWE in SF, the shtick wears thin quickly especially if you’re not in the niche that identifies with all the in-jokes.
If the thesis of the game is that there's too much paperwork and regulatory burden, a simpler game would have to just tell the player "there's too much paperwork". This game--whether you liked it or not--is a lot more effective by showing you. You are the (simplified) bureaucrat, not a choose-your-own-adventure player being told that the bureaucracy is dense.
I really do think that complexity and UI obtuseness was implemented as commentary, not as a mistake.
You've completely missed what my comment was trying to convey. If it's throwaway, why is it so damn complex to play? I've seen AAA games with less features.
For equal feature sets, sure. But what I'm saying, and what you also missed, is that this game should have never been this complex in the first place. This complexity is doing a huge disservice to the message it's trying to convey.
I honestly don’t see what you’re going on about. If this was made five years ago we would have standing ovations. It’s the AI, right? I think it is great. It was fun to play. Your phd game example is boring as hell.
I actually was surprised I liked this convoluted bureaucracy. Reality is fighting you all the way, love it. Normal games are too straightforward. That said I assume it was just a toy project.
> what I'm saying, and what you also missed, is that this game should have never been this complex in the first place
I respectfully disagree. I played it twice. Once, I lost. That cued me into looking at a few more datapoints the second time around, when I made it through.
I never wound up looking at everything. I didn’t need to. That said, I could probably improve my score if I did.
You can play most games to completion while ignoring the complexity. If you want to dive deeper, however, that complexity is fun. I certainly appreciated uncovering little details around how the various metrics played together, and how, in turn, that affected how I should play.
Eh, your example is a different kind of game. Not into linear choose-your-own-adventure games myself. I think the UI of this one accurately models the many moving parts and forces in the process it's simulating, and I didn't have a problem picking it up though I skipped the tutorial. It has a sense of humor (read the speaker comments at meetings, and the news articles), and hits you with the real world outcome each development is based on. Made an impact on me.
This runs into the reality that the game maker knows who his target audience is, but you don't. If he wants to make a spreadsheet simulator or something targeted at people who like complex interfaces he can do that. I point at ASCII-UI Dwarf Fortress, one of the great games of this century, as evidence that a game does not need to be accessible to be true art.
It is frustrating to be excluded when a game developer builds a game that looks interesting but targets a niche you don't fit in.
Also those https://research.wmz.ninja/projects/phd/index.html style games are a bit vapid. At any moment a person has more than a handful of choices and the simplification abstracts away the important ones, like ranking what ideas are important or changing strategies for idea generation in this one.
I agree, but please try to engage with what I'm saying. Both the PhD game and TFA are made with the goal of teaching an issue to a broader audience. Do you think TFA is an effective tool of communication? Don't you think its messaging could have been better conveyed had it been designed with more intent, less focused on piling on feature after feature for a game that isn't designed to be replayed more than once?
Both TFA and the PhD game should be considered "educational", people won't come back to those again and again because of how fun they are. They're designed to appear in HN feed, be played once, learn maybe a thing or two in an amusing way, and never be opened again. Do you understand now why I find this complexity so counter-productive? It's fine for a game to be complex, if it's designed for players that will sink hundreds of hours into them. It's not fine for a silly project to demand the same learning effort from its players.
> This runs into the reality that the game maker knows who his target audience is, but you don't.
Have you considered that TFA was vibe-coded, and maybe the "game maker" hasn't put much thought into who his target audience could be, like, at all, and just asked Claude to make a game about NIMBYism?
> Both the PhD game and TFA are made with the goal of teaching an issue to a broader audience.
I mean, are? It looks like it might be trying to create a San Francisco housing simulator. Simulators aren't necessarily tools of education. That's why I picked DF as a comparison - it is a Moria siumulator, but it isn't supposed to educate its players on the nature of Tolkien. It is more about exploring a complex environment.
And the PhD game doesn't look like it is going to teach anyone anything. It reads to me like some guy blowing off steam without having much of substance to say. Which is also fine, it just isn't much of an educational journey.
You're implicitly assuming that you have determined the target audience and goal of the game. And while you might be accurate, you might also be inaccurate. There is a decent chance that the target audience is people who look at this and think "ooh, cool". It is great fun to criticise games but claiming that a game is in the wrong genre altogether is just a bit much for me today. If you don't like this genre that is cool, but the game maker might just be doing his own thing and having fun.
> Have you considered that TFA was vibe-coded, and maybe the "game maker" hasn't put much thought into who his target audience could be, like, at all, and just asked Claude to make a game about NIMBYism?
His target audience could be himself, in which case he's probably got a deep understanding of who they are and whether they enjoy the game.
> the PhD game and TFA are made with the goal of teaching
The PhD game came across as a blog post masquerading as a game. The city-building one was fun even if you ignore the lessons it's teaching. (You don't have to read the news articles. They're cleverly written, however, and so sort of fun to.)
Well, you should seek a better tell because I've played ASCII Dwarf Fortress quite a bit. Re-read my comments, I only have an issue with TFA's complexity, in the context of it being a throwaway educational game. It shouldn't require as much involvement from the player as it currently does. And certainly, it shouldn't even occur to people to compare it to Dwarf Fortress, which happened twice already.
You know, if an old city with a natural boundary doesn’t think you should build a bunch of profitable crap in it, maybe you could take the hint and stop acting like you’re bringing Jesus to them. San Francisco’s seen the conquistadors. In fact, many of the streets in the Sunset are named after them.
I remember before COVID I was debating with a friend of mine whether or not private property is justifiable and it's ironic that the discussion was made obsolete by nobody being able to afford private property anymore
I mean, stopping housing construction hasn’t stopped the new money from pushing out the old soul. Given the US enshrines the free movement of people in the Constitution, it’s make room or have someone outbid you for yours.
It is possible to grow in a pleasant way without mallification, seems like a lot of projecting. And it’s not like the current approach is preventing that; insanity is trying the same thing over and over and expecting different results.
Basically a CA politician told Musk to go fuck himself, he replied "message received" then shortly thereafter moved billions of dollars of tax revenue, jobs, development etc. out of their jurisdiction by moving his base of operations to Texas. All very viral / in the news.
You can tell people not to build in your city, just don't expect them to continue investing there if you fuck them over.
Locked supply. Affordable housing. Growing standards of living (or population). Pick two.
If you lock supply and want taxes and wages to grow, you're choosing unaffordable housing. That's San Francisco's current policy choice. Over decades, it filters the poor to San Francisco's "outer boroughs" or onto its streets.
For what it's worth, my friends who lived in San Francisco "took the hint" and moved out when they chose to have kids. They didn't sell their place, however, since the above policy mix together with California's property-tax system strongly disincentivizes that.
I haven't played OP's game but hopefully it accurately models the plummetting quality of life and rampant homelessness created by doing what you describe in the real world.
I’m a single family homeowner in SF and as YIMBY as they come. And contrary to my goals of development even if it deflates home prices, development lags and home prices are getting more out of control.
Ah, blue city progressivism: "Welcome to my country! Now get the fuck out of my city."
Also, note that these cities always happily welcome more offices and businesses. They just don't want to build the housing for those workers to actually live in.
I imagined something more like a sim city clone where every time you try to put down a building or zone, it’s refused with a pop up message saying why. Let me prompt that out brb
I play games like Civilization and we get these tech trees and policy trees and such. And I can never help but wonder what it would be like to play these when the people of the territory act like Americans. You try to incentivize future technology and they push back. You try and prioritize education and they push back. There is always division and infighting.
Regardless, I don't think it would actually make the game more fun.
What would prioritizing education mean in Civilization? The game's model is fairly simple:
1. There are three resources: food, industrial production, and commercial activity;
2. As the player, you can divide commercial activity between three categories: research, state revenue, and local "luxuries", which in this context just means tax relief;
3. Scientific progress occurs when you've produced enough research to learn a new technology;
4. The only appearance of "education" anywhere in the game is that there is an expensive building called a "university" that increases local production of research. (The predecessor building with the same effect at a lower cost is the "library".)
On the other hand, "there is always division and infighting" is one of the most important and fundamental mechanics in the game; if your city grows beyond a quite small population cap, new citizens are automatically unhappy and will shut down the whole city unless pacified somehow.
I mean that's kinda how Civ works already. Some civs get bonuses for education & research, others in combat, etc, and focusing on the things incompatible with your civ will "punish" you.
It sounds like you just don't agree with how they've implemented America lol.
Would you include the part where almost every technology you researched in the past made life worse or would they just hate technology for no reason in the game?
Some context, because it is definitely an insider joke.
Davis had a long and contentious civic debate on whether or not Target should be allowed to build a store in Davis, eventually Davis held a city wide vote on the matter, which did pass [1].
Davis voters reject Measure V, spiking plans to build Village Farms housing [2].
Just a couple of examples where growth that most cities would approve without thought became a city wide civic issue that the community actually voted on.
Yes. Agreed. I liked the civic engagement.
With the Target thing though, opponents were just a bit hypocritical. Davis residents were already going to a Target: they were driving to Woodland or Vacaville for their serious shopping.
It should be an option. You pay higher prices. But the community gets more control. And for a smaller city, that’s a fair choice to make. For a metropolis, it’s not.
Reminds me of that Factorio joke mod which adds bureaucracy-processing as a recipe tree. Assemblers start to shut down if you don't process paperwork fast enough. IIRC, it had biters following the player around in queues to give them complaint forms.
My suspicion is San Francisco would love a Beijing-style hukou system. That lets it lock housing (and thus the built character of the city) and control immigration which in turn should result in stable housing prices provided units don't go out of use or residents don't have too many children.
> Beijing has a substantially worse median price to income ratio
As would, I’d think, San Francisco under a similar system.
It’s not a good solution. But for the preferences San Francisco’s residents seem to be expressing, it’s the only way. (Fortunately, it’s probably unconstitutional.)
Open immigration for rest of the country from around the world but closed for their city from rest of the country is what these “progressives” seem to want by their actions.
You can "skip the tour" on the tutorial, then (probably) click the pause button (near top center). Next click off the music (near top right), and then start the tour over by clicking question-mark button (near top right).
Discretionary Review (Developer): I built 4,147 homes in San Francisco, 2015 to 2031. Grade A, "Builder of Some Things". Survived all eight investor reviews. 16 hearings, 3 appeals, 4 lawsuits. The city needed 82,069.
What's your "build order"? I can usually get permits for something, but struggle getting the 40 units started by the second one (if I do get permits, it doesn't pencil).
I won on Developer mode too with 4k homes built. Spent all afternoon playing this
Here’s my build order
- 3 market rate projects in supportive supervisor districts, ideally in areas without heavy neighbor or coalition opposition (use the heat maps). Pay the in lieu fee or else risk the projects not penciling by the time they’re approved
- 2 mega projects - mission rock is the best one, then pier 70. Waive prevailing wages, then Spend 2.5M on campaigning mission rock and offer community benefits
Spam community meetings and permit expediting. Don’t agree to labor agreements, don’t give density unless the commission denies your approval. This should get you past the first two investor reviews. Ideally you can complete a mega project, which gives you a buffer to option a bunch of marginal land
Then pivot to affordable around 2020 when everything stops penciling. Max out density bonuses. Start picking up projects that almost pencil but not quite because you’ll need them to get past the reviews in 2027 and beyond
Keep spamming community meetings and permit expediting, and always pay to save on build time unless your in the 20-25 doldrums where nothing pencils. Keep your pipeline full and you should win
Popovers cannot be scrolled in mobile Safari without flipping the screen to landscape and back, and sometimes not even then. It tried to have an adaptive layout but didn’t nail it. Ask Claude to fix mobile scroll target handling?
This page started with an amusing name, and just kept getting wilder. 182 million fish per year were expected to die without any protection -- an incredible number, almost 6 fish per second. So now I think "Yes! By all means add some ultrasonic speakers to keep them out!" And then I learn that these speakers will cost £50m... As a part of £700m in total fish protection measures! And that somehow Natural England finds that to be be insufficient!?
I feel like every fish on the Welsh coast could have its own personal concierge for that price.
What probably happened is that £699.993M got spent on corruption and then £7000 on fish protection measures. Capitalism isn't immune to Goodhart's law.
Very nearly half of HS2 - 64 miles - is in tunnels. This happened because the Conservative government was terrified of upsetting the Conservative voters along the route. The bat tunnel was nuts, but it's not that significant overall.
That is partly true but it's a downstream consequence of the ultimate cause. Those running and pushing the project in the early stages desperately wanted it to be a 400+kph route for "prestige" reasons.
If they hadn't been so focused on that, they could have built the new rails largely alongside the existing West Coast Main Line which would have been quicker, cheaper and much less controversial.
But because they wanted those very high speeds, the route had to be flatter and straighter than the existing WCML, which means many more tunnels, longer and more complex construction, more people objecting, inconvenienced etc and ultimately much more cost however you look at it.
You mean from 2h15m to 1h40m (the actual estimates)? It really wouldn't. As someone who actually does that commute - getting up for a 6:00am train isn't much different to getting up for a 6:35am train.
What I would care about, is the price drop associated with the capacity increase/reduced stress on the existing main line. Not sure if speed factors into that.
My job is reactive, and I often need to travel that route on very short notice. Having the daily travel time on those days go down from 4.5 hours down to 3.25 would be massive for me.
I dont care about price as the company pays, but my time is very valuable to me.
Yeah it's more because they wanted the high speed trains to go super fast because bigger number is better, in reality it dramatically increases the impact of the track you build - corners have to be wider, gradients have to be avoided, and offsets (and the land you need to purchase for them) need to be bigger.
I suppose we could go back to horse and carriage, or just walk everywhere, but the point of trains is to get people where they're going in a reasonable amount of time.
Dunno, if you are dumb enough to try to build a high speed line through an area where endangered species are protected then yeah you’re going to have to avoid killing them.
What a predictably one-sided take from... one of the sides.
Your link claims, technically correctly, that the bat tunnel was not forced by conservationists or wildlife protection laws. What it does not ever admit is that those laws forced something to happen, and that it was already known more than 10 years ago that the least expensive "something" was the bat tunnel.
That link says, under the section "Which other options did HS2 look at?":
> In 2021, a ‘first principles’ review was undertaken by the Department for Transport, DEFRA and Natural England, but did not identify any better solution that was able to both fulfil the requirements of the relevant legislation relating to species protection whilst also reducing cost.
> The most feasible engineering options were also subject to an additional independent design review by the consultants Arup, which concluded that the solution now being taken forward provided the best balance of value for money and risk mitigation, from the four viable options that were shortlisted.
> Choosing any of the other options would have opened-up the risk of legal challenge, delay and subsequent extra cost.
> Options considered included a bored tunnel beneath this area, a shallower ‘cut and cover’ tunnel and rerouting the railway away from the wood altogether. Consideration was even given to permanently slowing down trains as they run past the area.
Regarding my earlier "known 10 years ago" claim, it says:
> The need for the structure was identified by HS2 Ltd more than 10 years ago, following extensive surveying of bat populations by our own ecologists.
Finally, it also says:
> Despite the passing of the 2017 Act, HS2 Ltd still had to gain almost 8,500 environmental or planning consents along the 140-mile route from London to the West Midlands.
8500 consents. Your link claims that other causes, like "underfunding" and "bad project management" are to blame for cost and time overruns, and that environmental consents are being used as a scapegoat. That would be easier to believe if that consent number was, say, two orders of magnitude smaller.
They picked the route. HS2 wanted the train to travel at 400km which seems not to be motivated by practicality. The whole project has been managed abysmally in so many dimensions. Most of the route is covered tunnels.
As one of your citations points out, they could have just slowed down briefly.
Are 8500 environment consents a lot for a 140 mile incredibly fast rail system? How much work does each consent require? Could the planning process have started earlier and mitigated the need to get so many environmental consents? Have environmental requirements caused as much delay and consternation as residents along the route have?
Will the new California law Senate Bill (SB) 79 (the Abundant & Affordable Homes Near Transit Act) help? It came into effect this July.
One specific complaint: The BART station entrances at 16th/24th & Mission: Why not build huge apartment buildings (10/20/30 floors) on top of them? And since both locations are a pair of entrances, you can close one, then build. Then repeat with the other entrance. They seem like perfect locations. There must be a bunch more no brainer lots around the city like these.
It’s kind of mind-blowing to remember that what’s the basic residential building standard everywhere else in the world is already “huge” in most American cities.
I'm not sure this comment is very useful. It is much too generic. Look at most "old cities" (think Hanseatic era) in Western Europe. Over 10 floors is a huge residential building in central, old areas. Residential buildings in the central arrondissements in Paris are rarely more than 5-6 floors. Same for London. Same for Hamburg. Same for Amsterdam.
The only place in San Francisco that has many residential buildings more than 3-4 floors and is building more/new is SoMa (South of Market) and Rincon Hill. (I have not lived there for 10+ years, so please correct me if I am wrong.) Sure there are some odd ducks in Russian Hill or Nob Hill, but they are from 1960s/70s. Nothing new is built there now, except billionaires doing a tear-down/re-build.
Wild idea: What if we build 4x fifty story apartment blocks on those four blocks that I mentioned at Mission District BART stations? You could do stuff like bottom 3-5 floors are all retail (small biz plus chains), then next 30 floors are middle class housing, and the upper floors are unlimited for the rich. I think it would be a good mix. The hardest part of the build might be creating enough car parking spots for the luxury units at the top. We might need to do something bizarre/exotic underground, or buy adjacent lots to tear-down for a multi-story parking lot. To be clear: I am not excited about building new parking garages in 2020s in urban San Francisco, but it is a reasonable compromise for selling luxury units at the top of the tower. All together, this mega project could be easily a 1B USD build. Another bonus: One floor in one tower near the top could be reserved as an observation deck/floor. That would be very cool, like a modern Coit Tower for the 2020s.
So is New York City. See Brookln, Queens, Bronx, and Staten Island. This comment doesn't say much. When people talk about density in SF, they are talking about the northeast quadrant. That is some of the most dense urban residential areas in the United States.
The city boundaries, which I admit is kind of arbitrary/weird for LA (city). If you include the county, or MSA it's obviously way less dense.
What bothers me the most is how so many Americans seem to have this irrational fear of cities. They think they are more dangerous, dirty, difficult, etc than they really are, by a wide margin. And they vastly under-estimate the amenities and quality of life they bring, along with the extent to which they make all of the wealth of the country even possible.
They wring their hands and complain that allowing more building will turn their city into NYC, which is just crazy on the face of it.
Look, I've visited NYC and there's a lot of nice things, such as mass transit that basically works, food options everywhere, etc. I liked it more than I expected I would.
But there's not a lot of peacefulness. There's certainly not peacefulness outside my bedroom windows anywhere I could afford to live. Sleeping with windows open and waking to birdsong rather than traffic sounds is quality of life for me.
I can't find it now, and I'm pretty sure it was featured on HN, but there was a board game like this where you had to cooperatively add housing to the Bay Area under all the constraints you have to operate under, and, when playing, we discovered that the only way to do it was to massively upzone some remote East Bay city.
I did best by acting like a real world developer - low-ball everything, everything non-union, ignore community activists at all costs, pay for access, sell for a profit, etc.
It is January 2015. San Francisco is short of housing in the middle of a tech boom, and most of its land has a 40-foot height limit. You are a resident with a fully paid of mortgage living in the home you love. Nearby, three project teams "landed" with a list of parking lots. Your goal is to keep your neighbourhood 'till 2031 when "tech" will abandon the valley.
This was a really fun game… although it’s a bit of a gallows humour and made me horribly happy I’m not having to try to live there. It’s near impossible to build at a profit unless you dole out a lot of money for what is basically corruption, and the end result is really expensive housing.
For context I’ve personally been responsible for building entire homes in numbers of excess of what goes for a multimillion dollar project in this game. Ouch.
My take-away from playing the game (which is probably not what the author of the game intended) was that the thing stopping housing from being built is not bureacracy and NIMBYs but the developer's Investors demanding outrageous profits. Even if you play in such a way that projects get done, you lose anyway because "investors want 14%" or whatever.
I think the problem is that we build it the wrong way around
It should be:
* city decides which area need more housing or re-development, open to community feedback ideas.
* developers pen up proposals
* city picks one
* city keeps an eye on timelines and quality
Developers get the job with less fighting the city, city gets what it wants, where it wants, and hopefully there is less pathologic development all around
thrance | a day ago
> Every rule, vote count and case in this game is drawn from the public record. Sources are in docs/research/ in the project folder. Neighborhood politics scores and the economics are simplified for play.
Nice, I'm happy to hear that, Claude. This kind of silly game is supposed to help you understand a complex issue in a fun way. But this is missing the plot entirely. Why is this so overwhelmingly complex? Why would I spend time learning this ugly, convoluted and verbose UI? Who is this for??
EDIT: I'll link to an example of what I think this game should have been: https://research.wmz.ninja/projects/phd/index.html
A game made with intent, that is easy to pick up, respects its player's time, and makes its point effectively.
rjh29 | a day ago
Like most vibe coded projects, it is for the person who created it. And usually only them.
deadbabe | 23 hours ago
[OP] JumpCrisscross | 21 hours ago
karl11 | a day ago
thrance | a day ago
There's no reason a "housing crisis" game couldn't have been done like that, with simple choices and immediate reactions. A game that respects the player's time, is easy to pick up and makes the point effectively.
zdragnar | 23 hours ago
thrance | 23 hours ago
Apocryphon | 23 hours ago
Z_I_F_F | 22 hours ago
Apocryphon | 18 hours ago
zbentley | 21 hours ago
I really do think that complexity and UI obtuseness was implemented as commentary, not as a mistake.
howunfortunate | a day ago
thrance | a day ago
howunfortunate | 23 hours ago
thrance | 23 hours ago
zijzjsjwjw | 16 hours ago
I honestly don’t see what you’re going on about. If this was made five years ago we would have standing ovations. It’s the AI, right? I think it is great. It was fun to play. Your phd game example is boring as hell.
I actually was surprised I liked this convoluted bureaucracy. Reality is fighting you all the way, love it. Normal games are too straightforward. That said I assume it was just a toy project.
rrr_oh_man | 14 hours ago
[OP] JumpCrisscross | 14 hours ago
I respectfully disagree. I played it twice. Once, I lost. That cued me into looking at a few more datapoints the second time around, when I made it through.
I never wound up looking at everything. I didn’t need to. That said, I could probably improve my score if I did.
You can play most games to completion while ignoring the complexity. If you want to dive deeper, however, that complexity is fun. I certainly appreciated uncovering little details around how the various metrics played together, and how, in turn, that affected how I should play.
mulmen | 23 hours ago
phoghed | 23 hours ago
TulliusCicero | 13 hours ago
jkestner | 23 hours ago
pluc | 23 hours ago
roenxi | 23 hours ago
It is frustrating to be excluded when a game developer builds a game that looks interesting but targets a niche you don't fit in.
Also those https://research.wmz.ninja/projects/phd/index.html style games are a bit vapid. At any moment a person has more than a handful of choices and the simplification abstracts away the important ones, like ranking what ideas are important or changing strategies for idea generation in this one.
thrance | 21 hours ago
> Also those https://research.wmz.ninja/projects/phd/index.html style games are a bit vapid.
I agree, but please try to engage with what I'm saying. Both the PhD game and TFA are made with the goal of teaching an issue to a broader audience. Do you think TFA is an effective tool of communication? Don't you think its messaging could have been better conveyed had it been designed with more intent, less focused on piling on feature after feature for a game that isn't designed to be replayed more than once?
Both TFA and the PhD game should be considered "educational", people won't come back to those again and again because of how fun they are. They're designed to appear in HN feed, be played once, learn maybe a thing or two in an amusing way, and never be opened again. Do you understand now why I find this complexity so counter-productive? It's fine for a game to be complex, if it's designed for players that will sink hundreds of hours into them. It's not fine for a silly project to demand the same learning effort from its players.
> This runs into the reality that the game maker knows who his target audience is, but you don't.
Have you considered that TFA was vibe-coded, and maybe the "game maker" hasn't put much thought into who his target audience could be, like, at all, and just asked Claude to make a game about NIMBYism?
roenxi | 20 hours ago
I mean, are? It looks like it might be trying to create a San Francisco housing simulator. Simulators aren't necessarily tools of education. That's why I picked DF as a comparison - it is a Moria siumulator, but it isn't supposed to educate its players on the nature of Tolkien. It is more about exploring a complex environment.
And the PhD game doesn't look like it is going to teach anyone anything. It reads to me like some guy blowing off steam without having much of substance to say. Which is also fine, it just isn't much of an educational journey.
You're implicitly assuming that you have determined the target audience and goal of the game. And while you might be accurate, you might also be inaccurate. There is a decent chance that the target audience is people who look at this and think "ooh, cool". It is great fun to criticise games but claiming that a game is in the wrong genre altogether is just a bit much for me today. If you don't like this genre that is cool, but the game maker might just be doing his own thing and having fun.
> Have you considered that TFA was vibe-coded, and maybe the "game maker" hasn't put much thought into who his target audience could be, like, at all, and just asked Claude to make a game about NIMBYism?
His target audience could be himself, in which case he's probably got a deep understanding of who they are and whether they enjoy the game.
[OP] JumpCrisscross | 20 hours ago
The PhD game came across as a blog post masquerading as a game. The city-building one was fun even if you ignore the lessons it's teaching. (You don't have to read the news articles. They're cleverly written, however, and so sort of fun to.)
zer00eyz | 22 hours ago
Tell me you never played the old TUI dwarf fortress without telling me.
thrance | 21 hours ago
zugi | 22 hours ago
My guess is that's the point - now you understand how San Francisco property developers feel.
hyperhello | a day ago
Bratmon | a day ago
gchamonlive | 23 hours ago
Andrex | 22 hours ago
crooked-v | 21 hours ago
s1artibartfast | 21 hours ago
TulliusCicero | 13 hours ago
MentalM | 19 hours ago
Apocryphon | 18 hours ago
bobthepanda | a day ago
scrame | 23 hours ago
bobthepanda | 23 hours ago
lokar | 8 hours ago
howunfortunate | a day ago
hyperhello | 22 hours ago
howunfortunate | 17 hours ago
You can tell people not to build in your city, just don't expect them to continue investing there if you fuck them over.
[OP] JumpCrisscross | 23 hours ago
Locked supply. Affordable housing. Growing standards of living (or population). Pick two.
If you lock supply and want taxes and wages to grow, you're choosing unaffordable housing. That's San Francisco's current policy choice. Over decades, it filters the poor to San Francisco's "outer boroughs" or onto its streets.
For what it's worth, my friends who lived in San Francisco "took the hint" and moved out when they chose to have kids. They didn't sell their place, however, since the above policy mix together with California's property-tax system strongly disincentivizes that.
sebzim4500 | 23 hours ago
margalabargala | 23 hours ago
I haven't played OP's game but hopefully it accurately models the plummetting quality of life and rampant homelessness created by doing what you describe in the real world.
rubicon33 | 22 hours ago
smugma | 16 hours ago
TulliusCicero | 13 hours ago
Also, note that these cities always happily welcome more offices and businesses. They just don't want to build the housing for those workers to actually live in.
treebeard901 | 23 hours ago
deadbabe | 23 hours ago
nico | 23 hours ago
eclipticplane | 18 hours ago
nico | 18 hours ago
doginasuit | 23 hours ago
sixothree | 23 hours ago
Regardless, I don't think it would actually make the game more fun.
thaumasiotes | 23 hours ago
1. There are three resources: food, industrial production, and commercial activity;
2. As the player, you can divide commercial activity between three categories: research, state revenue, and local "luxuries", which in this context just means tax relief;
3. Scientific progress occurs when you've produced enough research to learn a new technology;
4. The only appearance of "education" anywhere in the game is that there is an expensive building called a "university" that increases local production of research. (The predecessor building with the same effect at a lower cost is the "library".)
On the other hand, "there is always division and infighting" is one of the most important and fundamental mechanics in the game; if your city grows beyond a quite small population cap, new citizens are automatically unhappy and will shut down the whole city unless pacified somehow.
sixothree | 21 hours ago
whaleofatw2022 | 23 hours ago
howunfortunate | 21 hours ago
It sounds like you just don't agree with how they've implemented America lol.
cowlevel | 10 hours ago
philipallstar | 4 hours ago
mrhyyyyde | 23 hours ago
TeMPOraL | 23 hours ago
Drunk_Engineer | 21 hours ago
CalRobert | 14 hours ago
TeMPOraL | 11 hours ago
CalRobert | 8 hours ago
thekuanysh | 22 hours ago
minimaxa | 22 hours ago
I started something similar as a meme game, but I'm just too busy to keep working on it: Data centre slumlord - https://binary-mirror.itch.io/data-centre-slumlord
SubiculumCode | 22 hours ago
SubiculumCode | 21 hours ago
Davis had a long and contentious civic debate on whether or not Target should be allowed to build a store in Davis, eventually Davis held a city wide vote on the matter, which did pass [1].
Davis voters reject Measure V, spiking plans to build Village Farms housing [2].
Just a couple of examples where growth that most cities would approve without thought became a city wide civic issue that the community actually voted on.
[1] https://localwiki.org/davis/Target/History [2] https://www.abridged.org/news/davis-measure-v-election-updat...
fooqux | 20 hours ago
SubiculumCode | 20 hours ago
ChickeNES | 19 hours ago
CalRobert | 16 hours ago
[OP] JumpCrisscross | 15 hours ago
TulliusCicero | 13 hours ago
Laws and code should be transparent.
peri-cl | 22 hours ago
parlortricks | 12 hours ago
Conscat | 11 hours ago
wolfram74 | 5 hours ago
[OP] JumpCrisscross | 21 hours ago
bobthepanda | 20 hours ago
[OP] JumpCrisscross | 19 hours ago
As would, I’d think, San Francisco under a similar system.
It’s not a good solution. But for the preferences San Francisco’s residents seem to be expressing, it’s the only way. (Fortunately, it’s probably unconstitutional.)
patatero | 20 hours ago
anovikov | 16 hours ago
thesmtsolver2 | 17 hours ago
Open immigration for rest of the country from around the world but closed for their city from rest of the country is what these “progressives” seem to want by their actions.
artemonster | 21 hours ago
jandrese | 20 hours ago
artemonster | 7 hours ago
jakzurr | 3 hours ago
CalRobert | 14 hours ago
jwsteigerwalt | 20 hours ago
AlbinoDrought | 20 hours ago
Discretionary Review (Developer): I built 4,147 homes in San Francisco, 2015 to 2031. Grade A, "Builder of Some Things". Survived all eight investor reviews. 16 hearings, 3 appeals, 4 lawsuits. The city needed 82,069.
JimboOmega | 19 hours ago
manic85 | 17 hours ago
Here’s my build order - 3 market rate projects in supportive supervisor districts, ideally in areas without heavy neighbor or coalition opposition (use the heat maps). Pay the in lieu fee or else risk the projects not penciling by the time they’re approved - 2 mega projects - mission rock is the best one, then pier 70. Waive prevailing wages, then Spend 2.5M on campaigning mission rock and offer community benefits
Spam community meetings and permit expediting. Don’t agree to labor agreements, don’t give density unless the commission denies your approval. This should get you past the first two investor reviews. Ideally you can complete a mega project, which gives you a buffer to option a bunch of marginal land
Then pivot to affordable around 2020 when everything stops penciling. Max out density bonuses. Start picking up projects that almost pencil but not quite because you’ll need them to get past the reviews in 2027 and beyond
Keep spamming community meetings and permit expediting, and always pay to save on build time unless your in the 20-25 doldrums where nothing pencils. Keep your pipeline full and you should win
kistaro | 20 hours ago
behringer | 19 hours ago
Steven420 | 17 hours ago
satisfice | 17 hours ago
Merkur | 16 hours ago
CalRobert | 16 hours ago
https://www.ign.com/games/car-park-capital
MisterMunchkin | 14 hours ago
[OP] JumpCrisscross | 14 hours ago
Source? (To be clear, not doubting you.)
Ntrails | 13 hours ago
tomatocracy | 12 hours ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fish_Disco
reaperducer | 11 hours ago
akoboldfrying | 11 hours ago
I feel like every fish on the Welsh coast could have its own personal concierge for that price.
cowlevel | 10 hours ago
yardstick | 6 hours ago
PaulRobinson | 13 hours ago
> The estimated cost of the structure is c. £95 million in 2019 prices. This can also be expressed as £114m in 2022 prices.
rwmj | 13 hours ago
masfuerte | 13 hours ago
tomatocracy | 12 hours ago
If they hadn't been so focused on that, they could have built the new rails largely alongside the existing West Coast Main Line which would have been quicker, cheaper and much less controversial.
But because they wanted those very high speeds, the route had to be flatter and straighter than the existing WCML, which means many more tunnels, longer and more complex construction, more people objecting, inconvenienced etc and ultimately much more cost however you look at it.
yardstick | 6 hours ago
bertmuir | 4 hours ago
What I would care about, is the price drop associated with the capacity increase/reduced stress on the existing main line. Not sure if speed factors into that.
alt227 | 4 hours ago
I dont care about price as the company pays, but my time is very valuable to me.
EdwardDiego | 11 hours ago
DangitBobby | 8 hours ago
alt227 | 4 hours ago
trollbridge | 47 minutes ago
dmazin | 13 hours ago
Dunno, if you are dumb enough to try to build a high speed line through an area where endangered species are protected then yeah you’re going to have to avoid killing them.
[OP] JumpCrisscross | 12 hours ago
Razengan | 12 hours ago
akoboldfrying | 11 hours ago
Your link claims, technically correctly, that the bat tunnel was not forced by conservationists or wildlife protection laws. What it does not ever admit is that those laws forced something to happen, and that it was already known more than 10 years ago that the least expensive "something" was the bat tunnel.
Specifically your link says regarding the tunnel:
> HS2 Ltd, a government-owned company, proposed the structure. You can read what they have to say about it here (https://www.hs2.org.uk/building-hs2/environmental-sustainabi...).
That link says, under the section "Which other options did HS2 look at?":
> In 2021, a ‘first principles’ review was undertaken by the Department for Transport, DEFRA and Natural England, but did not identify any better solution that was able to both fulfil the requirements of the relevant legislation relating to species protection whilst also reducing cost.
> The most feasible engineering options were also subject to an additional independent design review by the consultants Arup, which concluded that the solution now being taken forward provided the best balance of value for money and risk mitigation, from the four viable options that were shortlisted.
> Choosing any of the other options would have opened-up the risk of legal challenge, delay and subsequent extra cost.
> Options considered included a bored tunnel beneath this area, a shallower ‘cut and cover’ tunnel and rerouting the railway away from the wood altogether. Consideration was even given to permanently slowing down trains as they run past the area.
Regarding my earlier "known 10 years ago" claim, it says:
> The need for the structure was identified by HS2 Ltd more than 10 years ago, following extensive surveying of bat populations by our own ecologists.
Finally, it also says:
> Despite the passing of the 2017 Act, HS2 Ltd still had to gain almost 8,500 environmental or planning consents along the 140-mile route from London to the West Midlands.
8500 consents. Your link claims that other causes, like "underfunding" and "bad project management" are to blame for cost and time overruns, and that environmental consents are being used as a scapegoat. That would be easier to believe if that consent number was, say, two orders of magnitude smaller.
9935c101ab17a66 | 9 hours ago
As one of your citations points out, they could have just slowed down briefly.
Are 8500 environment consents a lot for a 140 mile incredibly fast rail system? How much work does each consent require? Could the planning process have started earlier and mitigated the need to get so many environmental consents? Have environmental requirements caused as much delay and consternation as residents along the route have?
yardstick | 7 hours ago
That’s about one consent every 26.5 metres. A modern intercity train carriage is about 25 metres long.
It seems like a crazy number of consents for the distance.
trollbridge | 48 minutes ago
dependsontheq | 13 hours ago
throwaway2037 | 12 hours ago
One specific complaint: The BART station entrances at 16th/24th & Mission: Why not build huge apartment buildings (10/20/30 floors) on top of them? And since both locations are a pair of entrances, you can close one, then build. Then repeat with the other entrance. They seem like perfect locations. There must be a bunch more no brainer lots around the city like these.
pavlov | 11 hours ago
It’s kind of mind-blowing to remember that what’s the basic residential building standard everywhere else in the world is already “huge” in most American cities.
fragmede | 9 hours ago
throwaway2037 | 9 hours ago
The only place in San Francisco that has many residential buildings more than 3-4 floors and is building more/new is SoMa (South of Market) and Rincon Hill. (I have not lived there for 10+ years, so please correct me if I am wrong.) Sure there are some odd ducks in Russian Hill or Nob Hill, but they are from 1960s/70s. Nothing new is built there now, except billionaires doing a tear-down/re-build.
Wild idea: What if we build 4x fifty story apartment blocks on those four blocks that I mentioned at Mission District BART stations? You could do stuff like bottom 3-5 floors are all retail (small biz plus chains), then next 30 floors are middle class housing, and the upper floors are unlimited for the rich. I think it would be a good mix. The hardest part of the build might be creating enough car parking spots for the luxury units at the top. We might need to do something bizarre/exotic underground, or buy adjacent lots to tear-down for a multi-story parking lot. To be clear: I am not excited about building new parking garages in 2020s in urban San Francisco, but it is a reasonable compromise for selling luxury units at the top of the tower. All together, this mega project could be easily a 1B USD build. Another bonus: One floor in one tower near the top could be reserved as an observation deck/floor. That would be very cool, like a modern Coit Tower for the 2020s.
wduquette | 8 hours ago
throwaway2037 | 7 hours ago
lokar | 8 hours ago
throwaway2037 | 8 hours ago
lokar | 7 hours ago
throwaway2037 | 7 hours ago
lokar | 7 hours ago
But the absolute size matters. The actual “city like” part of SF is really small.
throwaway2037 | 7 hours ago
lokar | 7 hours ago
What bothers me the most is how so many Americans seem to have this irrational fear of cities. They think they are more dangerous, dirty, difficult, etc than they really are, by a wide margin. And they vastly under-estimate the amenities and quality of life they bring, along with the extent to which they make all of the wealth of the country even possible.
They wring their hands and complain that allowing more building will turn their city into NYC, which is just crazy on the face of it.
toast0 | 5 hours ago
But there's not a lot of peacefulness. There's certainly not peacefulness outside my bedroom windows anywhere I could afford to live. Sleeping with windows open and waking to birdsong rather than traffic sounds is quality of life for me.
sagarm | 3 hours ago
tuna74 | 2 hours ago
DeluluDon | 5 hours ago
eapressoandcats | 6 hours ago
thaumasiotes | an hour ago
emdash | 3 hours ago
Weirdly enough, we have a constant housing shortage
jacobsimon | 7 hours ago
NeutralForest | 11 hours ago
SilasX | 10 hours ago
lwhi | 9 hours ago
newswasboring | 8 hours ago
azernik | 8 hours ago
The United States is a command economy, where the only command is "no".
contubernio | 6 hours ago
webdoodle | 5 hours ago
PeterStuer | 5 hours ago
scoofy | 3 hours ago
trollbridge | 3 hours ago
For context I’ve personally been responsible for building entire homes in numbers of excess of what goes for a multimillion dollar project in this game. Ouch.
ryandrake | 46 minutes ago
PunchyHamster | 2 hours ago
It should be:
* city decides which area need more housing or re-development, open to community feedback ideas. * developers pen up proposals * city picks one * city keeps an eye on timelines and quality
Developers get the job with less fighting the city, city gets what it wants, where it wants, and hopefully there is less pathologic development all around
[OP] JumpCrisscross | 2 hours ago
Elections come around, the government changes up, and the new guys want choose a different area and we go back to square one.
If you make it to Cupertino and wonder how a town that size has like four downtowns, this is it.
BHSPitMonkey | an hour ago