I'm currently grinding through Fire Emblem Awakening in most of my free time, but come the end of the week, I'll probably have spent at least 10 hours playing the latest version of SimCity, and many more in the coming weeks.
While I know the years I've spent playing past version didn't make me a civil engineer, older versions have proven enlightening for many people:
“The students are learning how cities work, and who knows, we could be sitting in this classroom with the next mayor of Chicago,” said Stewart, who first used SimCity 12 years ago to teach the concepts of area and perimeter.
Some of the lessons have been harsh: One student’s city burned down because he didn’t budget for a fire department, while another watched commuters run into a traffic bottleneck because there weren’t enough highways to handle their cars.
“They have to learn how to budget their revenue to provide the proper services,” Stewart said of the competition, open to students ages 12-14.
Not everything is perfect within the game (politics is often an afterthought, pensions for union/city workers are non-existent, you operate a city-state free of state or national oversight, etc) but that hasn't stopped
SimCity from being used in national competions for city design:
[S]tudents from West Ridge Middle School were to show off Austonio at the National Engineers Week Future City Competition in Washington, D.C. With the guidance of their teacher, Carol Reese, who runs Future City as an extracurricular activity available to anyone at the school, students built Austonio in the video game SimCity 4 Deluxe.
Then, they built a physical model (complete with water, lights and moving parts, all made from recycled materials) based on the virtual one...
It wasn’t easy. Reese says the students spent “hours and hours, working, working and working” both on the model and on the virtual city game, which students had installed on school computers and at home. They wrote essays as well about their city design projected 150 years into the future and about the theme.
...
Reese said the program not only teaches math, engineering and science skills, but it challenges students to take on a complex set of problems as a group and come up with innovative solutions. “It’s about creative thinking. You apply creative thinking to solve problems of the future,” Reese said.
While politicians view most games as as childish, a waste of time, or a
handy scape-goat for society's ills, games like SimCity can be pretty useful in the real world as a testing ground for policies.
Baltimore suffers from a lot of problems (too many to list here) but one is high city taxes. The Mayor has proposed getting rid of Baltimore's trash tax, and replacing it with a user fee. Could this idea help lower property taxes and increase recycling rates or will people and businesses flee the city due to the new fee? As a heavy recycler, I could come out ahead from this policy. Non-profits in Baltimore (Johns Hopkins being the biggest one) would have a new expense they have to deal with.
Would the policy help or hurt the city?
Instead of implementing the policy and hoping for the best, why not fire up a virtual Baltimore on SimCity and test out the idea a few times? If the policy is a failure, at least the victims are digital instead of inflicting possible real harm to real life people. And if the policy works, the charts provided in-game can be analyzed to see why, unexpected consequences can be discovered, and politicians can claim "we tested this policy x number of times on the model and it didn't fail once" and have the data to prove it.
SimCity could also be used to democratize city planning, least on some level. Give citizens a copy of their virtual city, and solicit suggestions on solving local problems. If I happen upon a winning model, others can test it out to see if they get the same result. In Baltimore, I think turning a lot of the vacant and abandoned buildings into parks and green spaces would do wonders for the city. I could test out the idea on SimCity a few times at a much lower cost than trying it in real life and potentially failing.
Not every real life woe could be tested in SimCity (yet), but wouldn't it be better if your electeds can say "this policy has a 95% success rate in the SimCity model"? And at the least, the game forces the player to balance the budget. Maybe then Baltimore wouldn't be facing a grim fiscal future.