Hello, I'm your new creature. Same as your old creature.

Every city-building game ends up being linear, formulaic and predictable to play. 

Monte Cristo calls it "gardening", and it's a perfect description. 

Once you've figured out the precise conditions required to make your city grow in a predictable way, you often have little reason to try anything else.  Some games might take you longer than others to discover this, but once it's been "solved", you pretty much have to find something else to maintain your interest with the game or it gets shelved.

So I got thinking, wouldn't it be great if you could never truly solve a city simulator?  That every time you built a new city, it's a unique experience?  That you'll always be a mayor and never a gardener? 

It might surprise you to know that I'm a fan of SimCity.  But once the gardening syndrome sets in for me, I find it difficult to become motivated to keep playing.  Sure, I can go out of my way to make things difficult for myself, but it doesn't have the same kind of appeal.

It got me thinking about Spore and Little Big Planet, and how, in my opinion, one game has almost no replay value, while the other manages to keep me coming back to try something new.  I realize all of this might be pie-in-the-sky stuff, but, hey, this is a "what if" post, so indulge me! :)

Ok, so I'm going to go ahead and pick on Spore here, and basically admit that, as a game, it completely failed me.  And even as a toy, it was only marginally more entertaining, but after only a short while, I couldn't find any compelling reason to load it up again (if you can convince me otherwise, please do).

Thinking about Spore, it strikes me as something that has complexity, but lacks sophistication.  It seems like it has a lot of moving parts but almost all of it is ultimately meaningless.  It might look like you are able to create almost anything, yet almost none of it really matters if everything you create plays pretty much plays exactly the same. I just didn't see how any of that complexity translated into any kind of meaningful gameplay.

So when you inject more complexity into a city-builder, obviously all of that has to somehow matter.  I'm sure we can agree that something like mass transit has the potential to be very complex, not only in terms of development, but also when it comes to providing actual gameplay options.  And it has to deliver sophisticated gameplay, or else it's just fluff.

So when we players, build something like a mass transit network, we really need to feel like these options actually matter.  If we have choices between different types of road and rail, these have to be distinct, and their effects should be detectable.  In other words, I don't want to choose from a dozen different creature arms or legs that mean nothing. 

Also, the way these roads, rails and ports are arranged and combined has to have some kind of logical and appreciable effect.  I suppose that's really a basic premise for a simulator type game: being able to create conditions and to see results that are logical, yet unpredictable.

I know that some people will be quite contented with just having cosmetic differences between these options, and that's absolutely fine for sandbox play.  But as a true, meaningful, replayable city simulator, these things have to provide real depth, not just perceived complexity. 

I guess the point is this; our recent clamouring for "more complexity" probably more precisely means "more sophistication".

So take Little Big Planet.  I think the Creator Tools in that game is a good example of something that is both logical yet unpredictable.  I've wasted hours creating my own little world to run through over and over again, and I can't help but wish I could do the same with building a city.

So this Little Big Planet world is constrained by a set of basic rules that govern a limited reality:  the player can move within one of three planes; objects are affected by friction, momentum and gravity; some objects float, some can be grabbed, some are slippery, some fatal, and so on. Working along all these properties are all your tools, like gears, bolts, string, etc. 

You are able to combine these moving parts and model your own objects in limitless ways.  All the stuff that you create adheres to the gameworld's rules, interacts with other things with respect to their properties, and everything behaves and reacts logically, and yet you will never be able to predict half the things that can happen.

That basic premise of playing in a logical yet unpredictable system is what keeps me coming back; to try something new and to see what will happen this time. 

So, for Little Big Planet, despite the limited set of things you can play with, it really does feel like there are limitless possibilities.  The game forces you to improvise with what you have, and invent ways to achieve something that was not originally intended.  This same possibility exists with SimCity 4 with all the improvised road formations using clever terraforming, for example. 

So yes, maybe comparing a game like Little Big Planet to a city-building simulator is, at best a big stretch.  Even a little naive, but hey, I know what I like!  Simply put, I just want to be able to build dozens of different cities and feel like there's always a new approach worth trying.

Of course I'd be remiss for not mentioning that user created content definitely goes a long way to adding new things to a game.  But the way I see it -- and this is not to diminish all the custom content that we've created -- we're just throwing more rubber duckies into the water, and while they are all new things to play with, the water isn't any deeper.

City builder needs to be more like a living toy.  And even after a hundred cities, I should still find some surprises in how it behaves.  Is that a tall order, or what?

Related Entries:

• The dimensions of SimCity 4

City-building as a living toy