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MOBILE GAMES, SIMCITY BUILDIT, AND NEOLIBERALISM
NOVEMBER 9, 2016 (HTTP://WWW.FIRSTPERSONSCHOLAR.COM/MOBILE-GAMES-SIMCITY-BUILDIT-AND-NEOLIBERALISM/) / BRADLEY J. FEST
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Bradley J. Fest teaches at Carnegie Mellon University. His essays on
contemporary literature and culture have appeared in boundary 2
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(http://widescreenjournal.org/index.php/journal/article/view/105/145). He
also blogs at The Hyperarchival Parallax (https://bradfest.wordpress.com/).
(https://twitter.com/BradleyFest)
EA Mobile’s SimCity BuildIt, released for iOS and Android in 2014, is the newest entry in the historic
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SimCity franchise. With forty million players worldwide, SimCity BuildIt is also the most played
SimCity game ever released (http://toucharcade.com/2015/06/08/simcitybuilditmostplayed
Dimensions of Identity in Games
(http://www.firstpersonscholar.com/dimensions
simcitygameever/) (Lazarides, 2015). Its expansive international community seems, at first, to
ofidentityingames/)
procedurally deliver on the promises of free market globalization, achieving an equitable marketplace in
First Person Podcast Episode 18
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which anyone, anywhere can participate. While playing SimCity BuildIt, I have traded goods with
players who speak Arabic, French, Japanese, and Russian (though we have never exchanged a word). I
have competed in weekly competitions with people from Germany and Korea (and mostly lost). While
traveling in the game to purchase goods, I have seen nearly identical virtual cities named for real places
in South Africa and Australia.
Dr. Livingston in No Man’s Sky
(http://www.firstpersonscholar.com/dr
livingstoninnomanssky/)
Becoming Sensate
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C AT E G O R I E S
(http://www.firstpersonscholar.com/wp
content/uploads/2016/11/festfig1.png)
Figure 1: SimCity BuildIt (Redwood City, CA: EA
Mobile, 2014). Global trade interface. Ingame
screenshot
At times, SimCity BuildIt makes me think that the mobile game has the potential to be the silent film of
the twentyfirst century, able to cross national and linguistic boundaries, uniting audiences not because
of a shared language, but because of the signifying capacities of gestures, music, and iconography. The
mobile game, in this way, seems poised for building cosmopolitan communities united in collective
global play. But the current realities of mobile gaming significantly temper any end of history
utopianism.
Instead of demonstrating the aesthetic, ludic, critical, or procedural possibilities of the form, SimCity
BuildIt is paradigmatic of the repetitive, accumulatory, and exploitative informatic logics of
contemporaneity. It demonstrates how games played on smartphones and tablets do not cut across
national boundaries because of their potential to create communities of players through nonlinguistic
signification, but rather because of a shared economic system made possible by the standardization of
global communication networks. Mobile games depend upon what Alexander R. Galloway (2004) calls
“protocol”; they are protocological artifacts that use distributed information networks to create a
shared “world,” a flattened space in which anyone connected can participate. However crude, SimCity
BuildIt is a tiny global economy that circulates its digital goods in the same networks that make financial
markets hum in the twentyfirst century. And, like the pervasive inequalities of the present, many
players of the game are simply left out regardless of how skilled they may be or how hard they work.
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Therefore, it should come as no surprise when I suggest that the game’s procedures and systems
resemble neoliberal economic practices and ideologies. Like neoliberalism, SimCity BuildIt emphasizes
free market economic policies, views the legitimacy of the state only in terms of how governments can
POWERED BY:
support and create markets, incorporates inequality as a structural norm, attempts to apply
marketization to things not previously subject to market forces, and puts the accumulation of profit
above all other concerns.
The Mechanics of Inequality
(https://uwaterloo.ca/gamesinstitute/)
SimCity BuildIt is a freetoplay game that adapts some of the mechanics and graphics from the recent
PC reboot, SimCity (2013), and introduces others uniquely suited for mobile play. Like Will Wright’s
original SimCity (1989), and its more complicated sequel SimCity 2000 (1994), SimCity BuildIt’s
(http://immerse.network)
primary mechanic is time. To grow their cities, players have to wait for things to happen. The rate at
which taxes are collected or land develops is fixed, and so what a player can do is temporally limited. But
unlike earlier games in the franchise, SimCity BuildIt does not allow players to control the rate at which
time passes, nor any of the simulation’s other parameters.
(uwaterloo.ca)
In some ways, SimCity BuildIt is a strippeddown husk of previous Sim games. In other ways, however,
the game is disturbingly successful in understanding how players use mobile devices, as it is designed to
be played in idle moments of threetofive minutes (e.g., I find myself playing while waiting for the bus
in the morning, starting timeintensive processes which I reap the rewards of on the ride home). During
these few minutes of play, players set the production of goods in motion. Raw materials can take a
minute to make (steel) or up to seven hours (electronic components). A shovel, made with plastic, steel,
and wood, takes twentyfour minutes, which can be combined with seeds to make tree saplings, which
can be combined with more seeds to make berries, which can be combined with cheese and flour to make
cheesecake, which can be used to improve a building, fulfill the order of a shipment, or be sold to other
players. Such production and transformation is repeated again and again, over and over, without end or
telos, ad nauseam.
(http://www.firstpersonscholar.com/wp
content/uploads/2016/11/festfig2.png)
Figure 2: SimCity BuildIt. Raw materials. Ingame
screenshot.
SimCity BuildIt lends itself to patient and methodical play. It can take days to assemble the materials to
repair a disaster area or earn enough money to purchase a new park. But, as is so common with the free
toplay model that dominates mobile gaming, players have other avenues for collecting goods as well. At
certain times players can choose to watch a thirty second advertisement and be rewarded with a rare
item. More perniciously, players can use actual US dollars to acquire units of SimCash, which can be
used to purchase items instantly, upgrade buildings immediately, and fulfill shipments with a few screen
taps. When I travel to other cities, it is obvious that some players have spent hundreds of dollars
improving their tiny, widgetproducing metropolises. In SimCity BuildIt there is a visible, unbridgeable
gap between the haves and the havenots.
This gamic inequality was not really a big deal up until recently; those who did not care to purchase the
biggest city possible could be content with the daily rhythms of production sans real expenditure. But in
early 2016, the game introduced a new patch that allows players to compete in weekly competitions. In
these competitions, one hundred players are pitted against each other to see how quickly they can
complete specific tasks. At the end of a few days, the players with the most points receive ingame
money and gifts, and can advance to a more competitive league that offers even greater rewards. Players
who spend real money have an inordinate advantage over those who do not, and their success in one
competition will make them more likely to win in the future. To be even remotely competitive on the
game’s global stage, players need to spend large sums of money. In this way, SimCity BuildIt is a clear
allegory for contemporary financial inequality. The game hardwires inequality into all of its processes,
allowing those with the most disposable income to subvert the game’s central time mechanic, accruing
an advantage that others, no matter how hard they work, can never overcome. As historian Philip
Mirowski has written of neoliberalism, the game treats “inequality of economic resources . . . not as an
unfortunate byproduct of capitalism, but a necessary functional characteristic of [an] ideal market
system” (2013, 63). In other words, manufacturing ingame inequality is how EA Mobile makes
money.
(http://www.firstpersonscholar.com/wp
content/uploads/2016/11/festfig3.png)
Figure 3: SimCity BuildIt. A city built without
spending any real US dollars. Ingame screenshot.
(http://www.firstpersonscholar.com/wp
content/uploads/2016/11/festfig4.png)
Figure 4: SimCity BuildIt. A city (most likely) built
with the aid of real money. Ingame screenshot.
A recent update to the game makes this kind of reinforced inequality graphically visible. In June 2016,
EA Mobile introduced the OMEGA Corporation: a new set of goods, buildings, and production facilities
disconnected from the game’s regular economy. Players can only upgrade OMEGA buildings with
OMEGA items produced in special OMEGA research facilities. OMEGA buildings do not produce
Simoleons, the typical ingame currency, but NeoSimoleons, which are stored in a separate NeoBank
and can only be used at the NeoMall for highvalue items. Normal city services like fire departments and
police stations do not monitor the new buildings. Rather, drones and the ominously named ControlNet
patrol the skies around them. Though I imagine the dystopian sounding nature of all of these elements
was not apparent to the game’s designers, the introduction of OMEGA Corp creates a visible
representation of elite sims, a sequestered economic enclave of the 1% protected not by the government
but by an exceptional corporation unregulated by any of the game’s other systems.
Neoliberalism Simulator
By now I hope it is clear how forty million people around the world devoting a few minutes a day to
producing widgets in a game that procedurally privileges the nonhuman logic of free market ideology
and visibly celebrates systemic inequalities might be troubling. SimCity BuildIt’s understanding of
contemporary economic activity can be disturbingly cynical, abandoning the series’s previous ambitions
to create simulations that encouraged intellectual contemplation about complex systems in favor of the
easy gratification of consumerism. After the release of SimCity and SimCity 2000, some significant
attention was paid to how those games explore the relationship between simulation, policy, ideology,
and capital. Paul Starr, in an article on the potential for simulation games to inform public policy
(http://prospect.org/article/seductionssimpolicysimulationgame), celebrated SimCity, suggesting
that it has the ability to teach “the management of complex systems based on ‘intelligent scanning’ of
streams of constantly changing information” (1994). Sherry Turkle, thinking about how best to
understand computer literacy, saw a need to promote “readership skills for the culture of simulation” so
that players could understand how “the assumptions that underlie simulation [are] a key element of
political power” (1997). And following these initial discussions, Ted Friedman criticized
(http://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/660/575) the way that SimCity “rests on the
empiricist, technophilic fantasy that the complex dynamics of city development can be abstracted,
quantified, simulated, and micromanaged” (1999). In all these ways, the SimCity franchise is founded
upon, connects to, and reproduces certain dominant ideological assumptions, particularly ones about
the social and economic realities of late capitalist life in the US.
But for all the potentially questionable things about earlier SimCity games—e.g., the way they erase race
as a civic concern or associate low taxes with economic growth—they understood there to be some tie
between public institutions and private enterprise, and held that the role of civic government was to
improve the lives of its citizens. The newest entry into the Sim series displays no such understanding. In
stripping away the complex system of taxes, expenditures, and other interconnected parameters,
SimCity BuildIt does not create some kind of ideologyfree haven of efficient bureaucracy. Rather, it
simulates the dominant cultural, economic, political, and ecological ideologies of the twentyfirst
century (on simulation and ideology, see Bogost 2006). It is a simulation of a “pure” market, a smooth
space that allows goods to circulate perfectly and fluidly, not tied down by any relationship to the
locality in which they were produced, nor to the concerns of their destination (let alone any messy
political questions!). The game’s economy, like its ontology, is flat. The player is only asked to be
concerned with how efficiently goods can be exchanged and transformed, not for the benefit of any
particular individual or group, but only so that further growth and accumulation can proceed. Like
neoliberalism understands the market, the game’s economy is treated as “a ‘natural’ and inexorable
state of mankind” (Mirowski 2013, 55), unchanging, inalterable, monolithic. Neoliberalism has often
been understood in the ways that it submits things that were not previously subject to market forces to
marketization. In SimCity BuildIt, everything is part of the market, and there is only the market.
Further, though the game simulates a “city,” SimCity BuildIt has no real sense of government at all.
Historian and anthropologist David Harvey describes the role of the state in his definition of
neoliberalism as follows: “to create and preserve an institutional framework . . . [the state must] set up
those military, defense, police, and legal structures and functions to secure private property rights and
to guarantee, by force if need be, the proper functioning of markets” (2005, 2). This is precisely how the
“services”—police, fire, et cetera—function in the game. Tax rates cannot be adjusted to provide more or
better services. If a player’s sims are provided with all the services, they will happily participate in the
market. Nothing else is demanded of or by them. The state is merely there to provide the framework for
the market. If it does so, sims’ quality of life is assured, and they will populate a player’s city.
The game is neoliberal in a host of other ways as well. For a city simulator made in the twentyfirst
century, the game is shockingly environmentally unconscious, disavowing any environmental problems
beyond pollution’s negative impact on property value. The potential for global warming and extinction
was a significant aspect of Wright’s SimEarth (1990). Over twentyfive years later, in a world that has
seen the collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, SimCity BuildIt’s players have no ecology to worry
over whatsoever; their only concern is the maximization of profits and nothing they do in the service of
that goal will harm the people they are supposed to govern, nor the generations to follow. This
blindness to any alternative is also evident in how the game understands the political agency of its sims,
as there is no space for political protest or social transformation. If a player’s sims are unhappy, they
simply move away. Further, there is the flattening of local culture that accompanies globalization.
Historical treasures like the Eiffel Tower or Himeji Castle are merely interchangeable façades. And
finally, the game incorporates “disasters” for the sole production of more capital, disturbingly
resembling what Naomi Klein (2007) has called disaster capitalism—that is, the relationship between
neoliberal economic experiments and the manufacturing of political and economic crisis for material
gain. Within the logic of the game, one can imagine that the financial collapse of 2008 would be
purposely unleashed in order to generate more capital. Quite simply, SimCity BuildIt is not a city
simulator or a government simulator; it is a neoliberalism simulator.
Given the form’s freetoplay underpinnings, it should not be too radical to suggest that the mobile
game is a form native to the era of neoliberalism. It arises from and reproduces the dominant ideologies
of our time. But we should also understand how a game like SimCity BuildIt does not merely reflect our
world, but can and does, in very real ways, produce that world. We are not simply playing a silly,
repetitive, timekilling game on the bus ride home—we are making our world.
Works Cited
Bogost, Ian. 2006. Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Friedman, Ted. 1999. “The Semiotics of SimCity
(http://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/660/575).” First Monday 4, nos. 4–5.
Galloway, Alexander R. 2004. Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Harvey, David. 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. New York: Oxford University Press.
Lazarides, Tasos. 2015. “EA Mobile Claims That SimCity BuildIt Is Now the MostPlayed SimCity Game
Ever (http://toucharcade.com/2015/06/08/simcitybuilditmostplayedsimcitygameever/).” Touch
Arcade, June 8.
Klein, Naomi. 2007. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. New York: Picador.
Mirowski, Philip. 2013. Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberals Survived
the Financial Meltdown. New York: Verso.
SimCity. 1989. Redwood City, CA: Maxis.
SimCity 2000. 1994. Redwood City, CA: Maxis.
SimCity. 2013. Redwood City, CA: Electronic Arts.
SimCity BuildIt. 2014. Redwood City, CA: EA Mobile.
SimEarth. 1990. Redwood City, CA: Maxis.
Starr, Paul. 1994. “Seductions of Sim: Policy as a Simulation Game
(http://prospect.org/article/seductionssimpolicysimulationgame).” American Prospect 5, no. 17
(Spring).
Turkle, Sherry. 1997. “Seeing through Computers: Education in a Culture of Simulation
(http://prospect.org/article/seeingthroughcomputers).” American Prospect 8, no. 31 (March–April).
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