I spent a lot of time playing SimCity as a kid.

SimCity is essentially a roads and zoning game.

You're saluted as the mayor, but really you're an urban planner.

As such, you chart the course of highways, build trains, and subways, and you relentlessly zone residential, commercial, farmland, industrial dumps.

Then, in my experience, you get bored and you destroy the city with Godzilla or aliens or floods.

And then you move on with your life. Preserving the Sims in an unchanging

hellscape of fires and extraterrestrial attack on an abandoned

PC in your mom's closet. Anyway, Sim City is a game of micro management.

It rewards sophisticated urban planners who can meticulously

organize their city from the top down,

make decisions on behalf of apartment dwellers and homeowners as to cultivate perfect

hyper rational neighborhoods, instruct commerce and industry where they should operate

so that the city is not a heap of chaos, but a glorious, beautiful Swiss clock.

And it's wrong.

I played multiple versions of SimCity before I got tired of it and blew everything up with an alien attack. And I never encountered an option for let people figure things out on their own.

Probably because that would make for very boring gameplay.

All the same, I suspect there's an entire generation of video game enthusiasts who have been trained from childhood to intuitively understand society as the work of top-down planners.

Now if the phrase, let people figure it out scared you or worse had I said

let markets sort it out like some kind of capitalist death villain from Robocop.

If that sounds like insanity,

counterpose to all that is good and holy in Sim City.

Let me introduce you to the concept of emergent order.

...