Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of the Left podcast.

This is a sample of our recent bonus episode, usually only available to members.

These episodes are comprised of our crew of researchers, Amanda and myself, all getting together for a roundtable discussion on topics that we find interesting.

So here's a few minutes for free so you can know what all the fuss is about.

So we're starting with this wired article.

SimCity isn't a model of a reality.

It's a libertarian toy land.

And so the game launched in 1989 and article describes saying that it came to have an outsize effect on the real world, inspiring a generation of urban designers.

Many players credit the game with giving them a deeper understanding of how cities function and how effective governance ought to work.

And the design of the game itself, the guy who made it, was a game designer who was building

a world for a game that he was designing and had the thought, you know, like, it's kind of fun to build

the world.

Maybe that's a game.

Maybe people would be interested in that.

None of the publishers were interested, so he built his own company and released it,

and it became a wild success, obviously.

But his ideas for how to design the game, quote, was inspired by urban planning models created by an engineer

named J. Forrester. In his 1971 book, Urban Dynamics, he develops urban simulations

based on hundreds of equations and parameters that he deemed essential to civic functioning.

He introduces the models with the caveat that they should not be taken seriously.

Then goes on to end the book by offering concrete policy recommendations.

These, perhaps unsurprisingly, bear an uncanny resemblance to his personal libertarian political leanings, end quote.

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