Sustainability in City-building games

Sustainability is a topic of growing concern in the design of modern cities. In the interest of evaluating how popular media may reflect this value, we modified an indicator-based framework designed for evaluating the sustainability of real-world cities to fit virtual cities. We then applied this modified framework to seven video games in the city-building genre and examined how each category of indicators (water, land use, energy, clean air, social wellbeing, population density, and trade) was represented in each game. We found that social wellbeing played a significant role in the long-term success of a city, as those with poor wellbeing struggled to maintain or increase population. Additionally, while several of these games offered sustainable options to players, the mechanics generally encouraged the use of cheaper, unsustainable alternatives. The exception to this was in games with preindustrial settings, which rewarded sustainable practices while the industrial and postindustrial games rewarded more detrimental behaviors. While there was little difference between platforms or payment models of each game, the setting was a significant predictor for modelling sustainability. The games exhibited different levels of this encouragement depending on their setting - those set in pre-industrial cities rewarded responsible relationships with the environment, while industrial era games began encouraging more detrimental behaviors and post-industrial games significantly prioritized city growth over sustainability.

ABSTRACT Sustainability is a topic of growing concern in the design of modern cities. In the interest of evaluating how popular media may reflect this value, we modified an indicator-based framework designed for evaluating the sustainability of real-world cities to fit virtual cities. We then applied this modified framework to seven video games in the city-building genre and examined how each category of indicators (water, land use, energy, clean air, social wellbeing, population density, and trade) was represented in each game. We found that social wellbeing played a significant role in the long-term success of a city, as those with poor wellbeing struggled to maintain or increase population. Additionally, while several of these games offered sustainable options to players, the mechanics generally encouraged the use of cheaper, unsustainable alternatives. The exception to this was in games with preindustrial settings, which rewarded sustainable practices while the industrial and postindustrial games rewarded more detrimental behaviors. While there was little difference between platforms or payment models of each game, the setting was a significant predictor for modelling sustainability. The games exhibited different levels of this encouragement depending on their setting – those set in pre-industrial cities rewarded responsible relationships with the environment, while industrial era games began encouraging more detrimental behaviors and post-industrial games significantly prioritized city growth over sustainability. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ii INTRODUCTION 1 METHODS 7 FINDINGS 15 DISCUSSION 22 CONCLUSION 33 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 40 REFERENCES 46 iii 1 INTRODUCTION Sustainability, the idea that humanity should be able to maintain a social, environmental, and economic balance (Egger, 2006), has been identified as vital to the long-term survival of life on our planet (World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987). Given the gravity of the current situation, it can be interesting to explore how sustainability and sustainable practices are represented and modeled in popular media, including games. In other words, what does our media say about sustainability and how it is communicated (Starosielski & Walker, 2016)? We wonder what, if anything, games might communicate representationally and/or procedurally about sustainability. A deeper understanding of how game designers are incorporating ideas about sustainability in their games can allow us to better understand, critique and examine them. In a sense, we are attempting to answer Abraham and Jayemanne’s (2017) question: “Where are all the climate change games?”, but for sustainability instead of climate change. Rather than examine a breadth of games and game types, we choose to focus on the genre of games called city-building games. In these games players must manage resources (human, natural, etc.) to build and develop a simulated human settlement (e.g. village, town, and city). Players operate in a dual role as both the city planner and the manager or mayor, and their tasks generally include placing new buildings, providing utilities, managing finances, and creating infrastructure (e.g. roads, sewers), though this varies somewhat depending on the setting and complexity of the game (Bereitschaft, 2016). We chose this genre because it is potentially the most closely aligned with concepts and ideas 2 of sustainability1. For instance, there is the potential for parallels between the rich literature on sustainability in cities and urban environments. Also, city-building games have also been called “complex games” due to their simulation elements, dynamic systems, and emergent properties and behavior (Glean, 2005). Thus, city-building games might employ procedural rhetoric (Bogost, 2007) to communicate or express ideas about sustainability. Procedural rhetoric is the “the practice of using processes persuasively” (Bogost, 2007) such that you can communicate ideas about how systems work. Bogost (2007) argued that games have the potential to illustrate, illuminate, and communicate complex ideas through their gameplay and that players can access these ideas through their interaction. As an example he discusses how The McDonalds Videogame (Molleindustria, 2006) makes an argument about the systemic problems in the global fast food industry such that commercial success inevitably requires (amongst other things) engaging in different flavors of corruption (Bogost, 2007). Other scholars have examined and used this concept to, for example, study military propaganda in games (Demers, 2014), better understand genre (Harper, 2011), or look at how games make arguments about immigration policy (Cleger, 2015). In our case we hope to examine the genre of city-building games to better understand what, if anything, they might be expressing with regards to sustainability and how they go about doing so. Are there commonalities across different titles in the genre? 1 For another genre that relates to sustainability, see Abraham’s analysis of survivalcrafting games (Abraham, 2018b). 3 Are there significant differences? Are there certain issues that are not referred to? Which issues are salient? And more. To answer these questions, we performed a study where we analyzed the most popular and commercially successful city-building games released within the last five years to see how they model and represent sustainability and sustainable practices. For example, do they allow for renewable energy and resources? What are the costs and impact of pollution? We speculate that most games require players to engage in unsustainable practices by, for example, abusing the environment by polluting and depleting natural resources in order to succeed. Similarly, we believe that even when sustainable options are available or pursuable within the game, these often occur late in the game and are rarely attractive to players in terms of their benefits. Thus, we think that these games reward play behaviors that are contrary to sustainable practices and that they ignore the costs of unsustainable development. However, before discussing the details of our study we explain what we mean by sustainability, examine some of the existing scholarly work on videogames and sustainability, and describe what we mean by city-building games. Sustainability While there are many theories on what exactly sustainability encompasses, commonly prevailing definitions rely on two ideas: longevity (Lorr, 2012; Mori & Christodoulou, 2012; Morris, 2004; Tanguay et al., 2010) and the holistic concept of the triple bottom line (Dunn & Hart-Steffes, 2012; Egger, 2006; Elkington, 2006; Mori & Yamashita, 2015; Yan et al., 2018). Longevity means that sustainability requires meeting the needs of 4 the current generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs (World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987). The triple bottom line concept explains sustainability as a focus on three dimensions: Social, Environmental, and Economic (Slaper, 2011). The inclusion of social and economic dimensions in the considerations of sustainability may run counter to commonplace notions that sustainability is limited to environmental factors. However, these dimensions are vital for understanding the variety of factors that interact with the environment (Dunn & Hart-Steffes, 2012). This three-dimension concept is also often referred to as the 3 P’s (people, planet, and profits). In the triple bottom line, the social dimension refers to the importance of considering the wellbeing of the individuals within the community. This can refer to measures such as health, safety, unemployment, and quality of life. If these measures suffer, the results may impact the other dimensions – too many sick laborers can lower production, or high unemployment rates can limit a governments’ tax income and budget, for instance. The environmental dimension involves preserving natural resources. These resources include fresh water, undeveloped land, and wild animals, for example. Destroying these resources can cause other issues such as insufficient food supply for a community or an inability to harvest or produce goods that could have been traded or sold. Finally, the economic dimension requires a consistent flow of capital. This means that, in the case of a city, its inhabitants and local businesses must keep making money in order to pay their expenses or facilitate growth. Financial instability can impact the funds needed to provide services to residents or to harvest resources for production. 5 The triple bottom line is popular because it takes into account how relationships between different dimensions can impact sustainability. Most governments consider the triple bottom line when evaluating sustainability in real cities (Mori & Christodoulou, 2012), making it highly applicable in evaluating city-building games. Finally, we see that balancing the triple bottom line for a brief period is insufficient – sustainability requires ongoing stability to meet the needs of the current generation as well as those of future generations (World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987). In using both the triple bottom line and the idea of longevity, sustainability is understood as the need to ensure the social, environmental, and economic balance long term (Dunn & Hart-Steffes, 2012). Thus, broadly speaking, a system is viewed as sustainable to the extent that the values of indicators deemed significant from each of the dimensions are both positive and can be maintained over time. Sustainability and Games The literature on sustainability and games is often framed as “environmental communication, ’sustainable media’, ‘eco-media’, or ‘green popular culture’” (Chang & Parham, 2017). Broadly speaking, there are three areas of inquiry: (1) studying the sustainability of the games industry with regards to the production, manufacture, distribution, sale, and use of its products and the demands of the technology required to engage with them (e.g. Mazurek, 1999; Milburn, 2014), (2) the design and use of games as rhetorical and educational tools useful to communicate and inform about sustainability 6 (e.g. Chapman, 1973; Tragazikis & Meimaris, 2009; Bell-Gawne et al., 2013; Meadows et al., 2016; Fjællingsdal & Klöckner, 2020), and (3) the critical analysis of specific videogame titles and their interpretation and meaning (e.g. Abraham, 2018a; Milburn, 2018). Scholars have also studied the sustainability of videogame play as an activity in and of itself. For example, by looking at the energy consumption of dedicated gaming computers (Chuah et al., 2014; Mills & Mills, 2016). City-Building Games Moss argues that The Sumer Game “was the first computer game to concern itself with matters of city building and management” (Moss, 2015). Since then numerous titles have built upon that concept, adding new features and gameplay that loosely define the genre called city-building games. As described earlier, these are games where players manage resources in the process of creating and developing a simulated human settlement. These games are also generally open-ended with players expected to follow their own goals and interests. Though some city-building games allow for micromanaging individual citizens, the player is still responsible for the entire city’s population and must balance managing all of their constituents at once. SimCity (Maxis, 1989) is widely considered an exemplar of the genre (Moss, 2015; Bereitschaft, 2016) with multiple sequels released over the years. The genre has also expanded thematically, for example including fantasy (e.g. D&D Stronghold, Zeus: Master of Olympus) and science-fiction (e.g. Aven Colony, Surviving Mars) environments. While videogame genres are flexible and dynamic as new game designs 7 are created (Apperley, 2006), the city-building genre has remained relatively stable in terms of its core gameplay. That being said, as we will detail below, there is still a large variety of styles of city-building games. Methods Game Selection Our primary goal when selecting games to analyze was to get a broad view of the design space of city-building games via the genre’s exemplar titles. To ensure that our selections were current, we limited our choices to those released within the last five years (20142019). To find these games, we checked the Steam PC game store for the term “citybuilding game” and also performed online searches for articles about recent city-building game releases for multiple platforms including game consoles and mobile devices. These results included reviews, official pages for games, and more. We combed through these results for games that involved building and managing the infrastructure of a city as their primary mechanic, eliminating those which focused more closely on managing an individual household (e.g. The Sims 4) or those that that prioritized another mechanic over city-building (e.g. competing against other civilizations in Civilization VI). This process resulted in 18 games released within our time period. For each game we then examined its description, marketing materials, and reviews. We excluded games with consistently poor reviews as we felt they did not align with our desire to focus on exemplar titles of the genre as evidenced by the low popularity and the assumption that 8 these titles had fewer players.2 This initial selection process resulted in 16 titles for further consideration. We felt a broad overview would help us achieve coverage of the primary variations and types of city-building games. So, we identified some loose categories and then “placed” each game within these (these were in addition to platform and business model). Our first category was “Realism” or generally the idea of how closely the game seemed to represent the world as we know it (e.g. humans living on Earth). This category mostly differentiates games with clear and strong fantasy and science fiction elements from those that don’t. Second, we considered the scale or size of the city-building activities identifying two common types: town and city. Finally, we categorized games based on their (approximate) time period: prehistoric, pre-industrial, industrial, present, and future. These categories are obviously not precise (e.g. what’s the difference between a large town and a small city?) – but our use in this case is not for precision but rather to ensure coverage of the salient thematic representations of the genre. At this point we decided to exclude science-fiction and fantasy games, i.e. those that were not set on Earth (and with human beings), as issues involving sustainability faced on other planets may be inaccurate or irrelevant when comparing with real life sustainability in Earth cities. Similarly, we also excluded games set in the future as future issues and solutions involving sustainability may not be applicable to current cities. We also avoided 2 Games excluded were Cities XXL and Urban Empire. 10 SimCity BuildIt Mobile Freemium X Table 1: Selected Games for Analysis Framework for Analysis With our games selected, we needed to find a way to analyze and understand what “sustainable” might mean within games. This includes whether or not we could determine how sustainable the city-building was in each title we selected. To our knowledge, there aren’t any existing sustainability frameworks for analyzing the sustainability of virtual/game cities. However, there is research on sustainable practices and a variety of frameworks to measure sustainability in real-world cities. Thus, we needed to select an existing framework for measuring sustainability and adapt it for analyzing city-building games. We determined criteria to help us select one of these frameworks. We wanted to measure a variety of indicators of environmental, economic, and social sustainability to develop a full understanding of our city’s sustainability. We also wanted a framework that took into account the longevity of sustainability, considering how future generations would be affected by our current behaviors rather than just the short-term impacts. Finally, we needed a framework that could be practically applied to a virtual city. The indicators and measurements that many real-world cities collect and keep track of are more complex than those used in most games, so our assessment could not rely on those precise numbers and specific calculations. Similarly, many games might not keep track of certain X 11 information or do not make it available to the player – so we needed a framework we could use without that level of detail. The most commonly used frameworks are flexible indicator-based frameworks. These include categories of social, environmental, and economic issues and several indicators of how the city is performing in each category (Hiremath et al., 2013). For example, indicators for a category of water use may include gallons of fresh water consumed, quality of water supply, and percent of waste water treated. There are many such frameworks, each varying in which categories are considered and what indicators may be used to measure them. Indicators have been found to be highly effective for measuring the complex concept of sustainability (Hiremath et al., 2013). They’re most effective, however, when applied evenly across every city using a manageable number of measurements (Tanguay et al., 2010). We selected the assessment index system described in Yan and colleagues’ urban sustainable development case study (Yan et al., 2018). This framework considers the impact of a city through input and output indicators, calculating the sustainability of a city through its relative efficiency. The three inputs are the natural resources provided by the environment, measuring how well humans utilize these resources without depleting them. The eight outputs describe the impacts humans have, and these include the environment as well as the economic and social dimensions of city sustainability. For instance, the square meters of land used for construction could be an indicator of the input of natural land, while an output indicator could be measured by the acres of 13 Population Density Trade How much living area each person has access to How much the city contributes to other cities Table 2: Indicators for City-building Sustainability, adapted from (Yan et al., 2018) Second, we realized we could not apply the measurements from Yan et al.’s framework directly. For example, while every residence in a real city consumes some measured amount of water, games would not generally include or measure such a minute detail. Further, we realized that even when measurements were tracked, they might not be consistent across games: different titles might use “a tile”, an acre, or some other measure as a unit of land. Also, some games might not explicitly tell the player the area of land that a building takes up. So, instead of utilizing the precise measurements in Yan and colleagues’ framework (Yan et al., 2018) (e. g. ton of water per person, m2 of living area per person), we developed a set of descriptive indicators for tracking and collecting information regarding indicators in the original framework. These descriptive indicators are framed as questions indicating the things that we needed to look for and describe in our analysis. We describe these below: x Water: Are there mentions/representations of pumping systems or pipes, thirst, residential or commercial water access, sewage, or water pollution? x Land Use: Are there measurements of available green land, how much of the land was developed, presence of resources (e.g. trees, animals, rock, ore), and ground pollution? x Energy: Are there resources that are used as fuel or to create energy? Are there structures used to generate fuel or energy (e.g. power plants)? Is there any mention of 14 how or where energy is used? Are there problems arising from lack of energy and structures where electricity is needed? x Clean Air: Are air pollution, noise pollution, and impacts of air cleanliness measured, represented, and/or reported? x Social Wellbeing: Are there measurements of happiness, health, living standards, employment, education, and any other quality of life measurements? What factors impacted these measurements? x Population Density: Are any of the following tracked or communicated: population, birth and death rates, and reasons citizens may migrate to or from the city? x Trade: Are there situations where outsiders exchange goods or money with the city? How is currency is gained, tracked, and spent, and what does import and export of resources look like, if present? With our framework tested and adjusted, we began to apply it. We played all seven game, taking detailed notes for each with columns for each of the seven indicator categories. In these notes, we described every instance of each indicator and how it was presented. This included any measurements, mechanics, or text mentioning the indicators. We played each game long enough to develop a strong familiarity with all mechanics of each game and reach a point where no new content was being revealed. For each game this point was determined differently. In Dawn of Man, Cities: Skylines, and SimCity BuildIt, this meant playing for a minimum of 30 hours to unlock all available buildings and/or technologies. For Frostpunk, we completed the main scenario – A New Home – twice, playing through both the Path of Faith and the Path of Order. Pocket City allows players 15 to continue leveling up indefinitely, so we reviewed player discussions and the developer’s comments on the game’s Discord channel and Reddit. From this we determined that the main content of the game is unlocked at level 60, so we played Pocket City through that achievement. Both Banished and Anno 1800 allow players to unlock all of the buildings within a few hours, so we researched their gameplay on each game’s respective wikis to ensure that there would be no new mechanics or buildings appearing later on. Upon confirming this, we played a minimum of 30 hours in each game to make sure we had thoroughly explored the game mechanics. Once we had finished applying our framework to each game we began analyzing our data. For our analysis we wanted to determine whether or not there might be patterns, commonalities, or unexpected connections across games. We synthesized the notes from each game into one large chart, with columns for each game, rows for indicators we found within each indicator category, and details in the cells on how each indicator was represented in each game. We color coded cells that described similar uses of an indicator to identify patterns across multiple games. This simplified our pages of notes for each game into a manageable format, visually identifying any similarities or differences between how each indicator was portrayed and allowing us to draw connections. Findings We now report on our findings for each of the seven indicators from our game-city sustainability framework: water, land use, energy, clean air, social wellbeing, population 16 density, and trade. For each of these we describe how they are represented and appear in different games highlighting features we felt were notable or otherwise interesting. Water Water generally plays up to three roles in city-building games: it is presented as a resource to be utilized or consumed, as a source of food, and as an enabler for transportation. All citizens need access to fresh water through water collection mechanics in Cities: Skylines, Dawn of Man, Pocket City, and SimCity BuildIt. Villagers in Dawn of Man collect buckets of water from rivers and lakes by hand, while homes and buildings in the three post-industrial games receive access if they are close enough to water pipes. While water intake is present in all four of these games, waste water surprisingly only exists in two: Cities: Skylines and SimCity BuildIt. Both games allow the player to pump sewage back into a body of water with or without treating it first. Furthermore, water treatment plants are expensive, late-game buildings providing minimal improvements to the city. Treatment plants in SimCity BuildIt don’t cause pollution in the surrounding lots (unlike untreated sewage pumps3), and treatment plants in Cities: Skylines are only necessary if the sewage begins to contaminate the fresh water supply. This concept of 3 The negative consequences of untreated sewage pumps are limited to causing unhappiness for citizens in the surrounding area. 17 contamination makes Cities: Skylines unique, in that it is the only game which does not consider every water source to be fresh and potable. Considering how many games incorporate water use, we expected more of them to cover the similar concept of waste water and the consequential water pollution. Even in Cities: Skylines, there is no mention of the ecological damage caused by dumping raw sewage. Water is also used indirectly in some games as a source of food. The player can assign villagers to fish from any body of water in Dawn of Man. Anno 1800 and Banished also include a fishing mechanic, though they additionally require a fishery or dock building respectively. While this is indirectly tied to water – overfishing exists in both Dawn of Man and Banished. Fish are spread evenly throughout each body of water and replenish over time, but fishing too much in one area prevents the population from recovering. Notably, Banished does not inform the player of this concept – instead, they must learn through trial and error. Finally, water is a method of transportation in Banished, Anno 1800, and Cities: Skylines. All three games incorporate trade by boat. Tourists arrive on ships in Anno 1800 and Cities: Skylines, providing income for the city. Anno 1800 also uniquely allows the player to control ships to carry out diplomatic quests and warfare against other civilizations. We found that water in city-building games is commonly featured and generally treated as a resource. However, the management and treatment of waste water or the need to 18 treat/process water such that it can be used is rarely included. In this sense, water is considered an unlimited resource in all of the games studied. Unexpectedly, though bodies of water were available as a potential food source, we found that over-exploitation was often modelled. Land Use Unsurprisingly, we found that land is a key resource in city-building games in several ways, through both direct and indirect uses. The most prevalent use of land across all seven games is for development. Natural land is paved over for every building, street, and even parks within the city. Every game presents land as a finite resource, at the most basic level by limiting the size of the map. Anno 1800 and Frostpunk employ natural boundaries such as oceans and cliffs to restrict where players can build. All three post-industrial games initially give the player access to one parcel of land, with surrounding parcels available for purchase once the player can afford it. Land is also used directly as a space for the city’s output of physical waste. Garbage must be collected and disposed of in SimCity BuildIt and Cities: Skylines4. Both games offer waste management in the form of garbage dumps and incinerators, with SimCity BuildIt also offering recycling as a supplement. Garbage dumps are available at lower levels and 4 Physical waste is also mentioned in Pocket City, however only in the form late game recycling plants. There’s little discussion of waste management or the impact that recycling has on the environment, as this facility is purely available as a perk. 19 are the cheapest to build, but they take up a large portion of natural land. Recycling plants and incinerators are more expensive and must be unlocked at higher levels. For example, a small garbage dump in SimCity BuildIt has a capacity of 15 units of garbage and costs 6000 simoleons to build (“simoleons” is the name of the in-game currency). The first available recycling facility has a capacity of 70 units of garbage and costs 60,000 simoleons, making the cost of 5 small dumps half as expensive and with greater capacity than one recycling center. Similarly, Cities: Skylines limits players to a 4,000 dollar landfill until they can purchase the pricey 30,000 dollar incineration plant made available at the sixth level. Since only Cities: Skylines and SimCity BuildIt include mechanics for managing garbage, they are the only games out of the seven we studied to use waste as a cause of pollution. Similarly, land pollution caused by industry and powerplants only exists in Cities: Skylines, SimCity BuildIt, and Anno 1800. Additionally, when pollution is considered, the only effect is discomfort for local citizens. Citizens become unhappy or sick when they live near polluted areas and land value drops, but there is no mention of damage to local plants, animals, or soil. Considering how significant industry and waste are in real world cities as well as most of these games, and how prevalent the issue of pollution has been in real world cities during the period in which these games were released, it’s surprising to see so little attention on pollution in these games. Curiously, death is also treated rather clinically as a form of waste taking up natural land. Mechanics in Dawn of Man, Banished, Frostpunk, and Cities: Skylines cause lower 20 happiness if corpses are left in homes instead of being managed appropriately. These four games offer burial in the form of cemeteries or burial mounds, which take up space but lessen the negative impact on happiness. Cities: Skylines also offers a crematorium, which diminishes the need for more burial space but is not available until the eighth level. Frostpunk also includes the option to preserve the dead in a pit of snow instead of burying them, which does not take up any land. Most of these games also use land indirectly, namely as a source of resources. While SimCity BuildIt does not recognize that its building materials come from the environment, the other two post-industrial games at least acknowledge that natural resources exist and that some land is more fertile than other land. The industrial-era games, meanwhile, place a heavier focus on gathering natural resources as a vital means of collecting supplies and trade income. While most of these (e.g. clay, iron, fish, etc. in Anno 1800) are available in infinite supply, the post-industrial games incorporate some finite resources such as abandoned ruins and fallen trees. Finally, the pre-industrial games primarily focus on the collection of resources as the only means for survival. Many renewable resources such as wild plants and animals, trees, and mud take time to regenerate, and overuse of such resources can cause deforestation, overhunting, and extinction. Practices such as mining and quarrying produce natural resources, but create irreversible scars on the land. These pre-industrial games are most realistic in this sense, as they accurately treat resources such as ore and stone as finite while resources such as fish and berries are infinite provided that humanity doesn’t deplete them. There are no 21 infinite resources in reality, and these two games emphasize the importance of preservation in that it is necessary for maintaining real world renewable resources. Here we found a difference between games set in different time periods. The preindustrial games have greater consequences if land is used poorly - recklessly harvesting resources can prevent their replenishment, and finite or seasonal resources (e.g. fruit, nuts, tannin) force players to plan ahead carefully. Players are taught to mitigate their actions by allowing time for regrowth, farming their own sources of plants and meat, and in Banished, foresters even help the environment recover by planting new trees. Meanwhile in the post-industrial games, players have no responsibility to care for the environment and depleting resources is not a concern. Money plays a more important role, allowing players to purchase what they need from other cities instead of interacting with their own environments. While all of these games use land, the post-industrial games are more distanced from its use and preservation. The last way that land is used is for recreation and entertainment. All three post-industrial games as well as Anno 1800 incorporate some indicator to assess land value. This measures the proximity, number, and quality of parks, recreation lots, and landscaped areas. Land value has a significant positive effect on the happiness of local citizens. We found that the concept of land value interestingly prioritizes man-made parks over natural open space. While Pocket City, SimCity BuildIt, and Cities: Skylines calculate a higher land value for beachfront property, landlocked natural land does not count towards 22 the value. Citizens demand access to man-made parks, encouraging players to pave over natural land to build “unnatural” parks. This dichotomy is odd, considering that the parks largely resemble the natural land that they are replacing. To summarize, we found that land in city-building games is featured or used directly as a place for building (development) and waste management, as well as indirectly as a source of natural resources and recreation. Also, undeveloped land is considered worthless (has no value). Clean Air Clean air is rarely acknowledged in these games, and is only referenced when pointing out pollution. Cities: Skylines is the only game including the concept of noise pollution, which comes from industrial areas, infrastructure such as power plants, and highways. It has a negative impact on the land value nearby, causing unhappiness and complaints. Pocket City also frequently mentions that the player’s environmentalist choices can improve air pollution, but to our knowledge there are no mechanics or systems included to support this. Similarly to our findings with pollution of land and water, air pollution is surprisingly absent from these games. It is unclear in Anno 1800, Cities: Skylines, and SimCity BuildIt how much of the pollution described affects the ground versus the air, so it’s possible that these games intended to tackle issues with clean air but illustrate it very subtly. However, 23 there are so few mentions of pollution in any form that these games do not accurately represent the air quality problems that real world cities face. Another interesting finding is that, while traffic is treated as a social problem in all three of the modern games, it is oddly not one of air quality. Although traffic is a source of noise pollution in Cities: Skylines and can result in backups of dozens of cars, they do not create air pollution. Social Wellbeing Social wellbeing is the second aspect we identified as being central to city-building games. Social wellbeing is represented in a variety of ways, but primarily through indicators of happiness, population health, public safety, and education. Happiness is calculated in every game and is usually represented via a numerical score (and accompanying graphic). Its role is central for player success since unhappy citizens desert the city and migrants are drawn to live in happier cities. Worker productivity is also affected, as unhappy workers are less productive. The tourists of Cities: Skylines and Anno 1800 prefer to patronize happy cities. In SimCity BuildIt, citizen income taxes even increase with happiness, directly impacting the city’s income. A number of factors contribute to happiness, as it is used in these five games to represent social wellbeing as a whole. However, the way it is calculated is bespoke to each game. In Pocket City, for example, happiness is broken down as a factor of availability of recreation, quality of environment, crime safety, health, fire safety, traffic congestion, traffic accessibility, and 24 tax satisfaction. Each of these is shown only as a percentage, with happiness calculated as the average of the percentages. Meanwhile happiness in Frostpunk is measured more simply as a balance of hope and discontent meters, and later through obedience, faith, and/or fear meters. The player’s decisions cause these meters to increase or decrease, with the player attempting to balance high levels of hope, obedience, faith, and/or fear with low levels of disobedience. Health is present in some form across all seven games. The pre-industrial and industrial games have a lower-level focus on individual health, employing mechanics for illness and, except in the case of Anno 1800, mechanics for injuries. Poor diets, cold weather, and pollution can cause illness, while injuries result from warfare or dangerous jobs such as hunting. Left untreated, poor health lowers happiness and worker productivity. Extreme cases result in death, or in the case of Frostpunk, they occasionally require amputations. Except for Dawn of Man, however, these games each have some form of medical post or hospital for ill or injured citizens. In contrast, the three post-industrial games take a higher-level approach to health. In these games, health focuses on the number and proximity of healthcare facilities, as well as proximity of pollution, rather than focusing on individual injuries and illnesses. An insufficient number of nearby healthcare facilities lowers happiness in these games. Public safety concerns in these games are represented via crime/police, fires, and natural disasters. Banished, Anno 1800, and the three post-industrial games combat fires with wells or fire stations. Police stations handle crimes and riots in each of the industrial and 25 post-industrial games. Natural disasters occur in both mobile games, and though these curiously don’t result in any injuries or deaths, the player must purchase replacements for buildings destroyed by these meteors, tornadoes, and other disasters. The final significant factor in wellbeing is education. All but one game includes some kind of school mechanic, with the exception being Dawn of Man. Citizens in Anno 1800 and Cities: Skylines become unhappy without sufficient access to education. The remaining games consider education to be optional, but it can provide happiness or other perks. Highly educated adults in Cities: Skylines can work in office buildings, which provide greater tax income for the city. Students in Banished become more efficient adult workers. Frostpunk has a slightly different take with the “child shelter”, which allows children to apprentice in medicine or engineering – providing extra labor to the engineers working in those fields. We found that social well-being in city-building games is featured through measures of happiness, health, public safety, and education. One finding is that citizens with poor social well-being have differing levels of recourse, varying between the time periods in which each game is set. Citizens in the pre-industrial games can’t do anything about their poor conditions. They have no way to complain or desert the town if their needs aren’t met – at most, they will eventually die from poor health. These pre-industrial games take a much more personal approach to describing poor wellbeing, allowing the player to view statistics for each villager and lessening the focus on average health, hunger, etcetera of 26 the village. Players can address low wellbeing by instructing individual villagers to eat, go home, etcetera instead of continuing to work. On the other hand, unhappy citizens in the three post-industrial games complain regularly. If their complaints are ignored for too long, they will abandon the city. Displayed wellbeing statistics are much more general, encouraging the player to focus on the happiness of neighborhoods and regions more than that of individual citizens. While the player has no control over individual citizens, they can improve wellbeing in an unhappy area by building parks, hospitals, or whichever facility the region is lacking. In the industrial games, players have slightly more individual statistics similar to the preindustrial games, but can only make improvements at a larger scale like in the postindustrial games. However, unhappy citizens are actually able to cause damage. In addition to complaining, the citizens can riot. Rioters quit working, cause damage, and convince others to join them – and, if the movement isn’t subdued, Frostpunk’s rioters abandon the city. This is interesting, as the industrial games are generally the middle ground between pre-industrial and post-industrial rather than the most extreme. Thus, we see that depending on the game’s time period, social well-being is operationalized at different scales. Pre-industrial games focus on the suffering of individual members of society while the post-industrial games present players with wellbeing at the societal level – while presumably individual citizens may be unhappy, the player is unable to directly influence their well-being as in the pre-industrial games. 27 Population Density As significant as population is to all of these games (see Social Wellbeing earlier), population density plays a surprisingly small role. Only the three post-industrial games discuss different densities for each size of land that can be developed. Pocket City describes residential lots as small, medium, and large, and indicates the amount of water they each need - 50, 100, and 200 respectively. There is no mention, however, of the number of residents in each house. Cities: Skylines allows low density and high-density residential zones, but is not specific as to how many families live in high versus low density housing. Residential lots take up varied space, making it virtually impossible to calculate the difference between house and apartment capacity. SimCity BuildIt shows buildings growing in size as the player purchases improvements to them, but there is no reference to how many people live in each one and, as they each have unique randomized styles, it’s impossible to visually compare their sizes. The aspect of population density more relevant in these games is more about how many people can fit within the city than about the density of each lot. In all of the games except for Frostpunk5, population cannot increase through immigration or birth unless sufficient housing is provided. However, new citizens in every game require resources and infrastructure to support their social wellbeing. If social wellbeing drops, population will drop as some citizens die and, in the case of the post-industrial games and Frostpunk, 5 Immigrants in Frostpunk will move into the city regardless of the available housing, though homeless citizens become unhappy and dangerously cold without shelter. 28 other citizens chose to move out. In this sense, population density is a measure of capacity in these games – how many citizens the city can physically house and meet the social needs of. This is, of course, different from what happens in real-life cities, in which the capacity of a city to handle a population is elastic and flexible – rather than a hard limit as we see in these games. To summarize, we found that population density in city-building games is vaguely mentioned in the post-industrial games. There are no specific measurements given for population density. The most involvement the player has in population density is through selecting high or low density zoning in Cities: Skylines or upgrading residential lots in Pocket City and SimCity BuildIt. However, in considering population density on a larger scale as the density of the entire city, there is a maximum number of citizens that each city’s housing and infrastructure can support across all games. If this population density is exceeded, social wellbeing will drop and citizens will die or move out. Trade Trade is present in every game except for Frostpunk, either through barter of goods or through exchange of goods for money. Both pre-industrial games use the barter system, while the remaining four games use currency. Cities that use the barter system engage in trade much less. They must wait for a nomadic trader, which visits infrequently. The exchanges favor the trader, making trade expensive. Additionally, traders carry few goods, making it hard for the player to sustain their city 29 off of trade. Cities with currency, however, engage in trade constantly. Anno 1800 and SimCity BuildIt allow players to negotiate deals, and cities in all four games can seek out trade at any time – often without the player actively controlling the process. These differences impact cities beyond trade deals. Bartering cities can’t import what they need easily, so they are forced to interact with the environment constantly to meet their needs. Additionally, since they can’t purchase building supplies, bartering cities take a more hands-on approach to construction – laborers must collect specific resources and spend time building to create any new structure. Meanwhile, cities with currency don’t maintain such a close relationship with the environment because they can purchase whatever they need. These cities can produce new structures without gathering resources, time, or laborers – the player simply pays a flat fee and instantly has a new building. Anno 1800 and SimCity BuildIt do still require construction resources, but allow players to purchase those resources from foreign cities – essentially allowing players to assemble any structure if they have the money. One notable finding is that these games with currency are the only ones in which citizens pay taxes to the government and earn income through foreign trade and tourism. Another finding is that our framework loosely considers trade to correlate positively with sustainability – trade can be used both as a way to generate wealth and also as a way to profit off of excess resources and goods that would have otherwise gone unused. The post-industrial games engage in significantly more trade than the pre-industrial cities do, making the former more sustainable in terms of trade than the later. 30 Energy Energy is present in some form in every game we played. At its simplest, wood is needed for fuel in the pre-industrial games. Dawn of Man villagers use fires to cook and bake, while those in Banished freeze in the winter if they don’t have enough logs to burn in their homes. In the industrial and post-industrial games, energy is more widely employed. Except for in Anno 1800 (which introduces electricity much later in the game), every building needs access to electricity to stay happy and functional. Energy is also present as a source of pollution in Cities: Skylines and SimCity BuildIt, as pollution surrounds all power plants. This can be avoided through the use of renewable energy in both games, which is produced by solar farms, wind turbines, and dams. These sources do still produce noise pollution in Cities: Skylines, but they aren’t surrounded by the physical pollution present around other power plants. Clean alternatives are predictably more expensive, though, and must be unlocked long after the polluting power plants are available. It is also worth noting that pollution doesn’t exist in Frostpunk, Anno 1800, or Pocket City, so clean energy is irrelevant in those games. DISCUSSION We found that not all of the seven indicator categories (water, land use, energy, clean air, social wellbeing, population density, and trade) are equally significant and represented across the genre of city-building games. Of these, social wellbeing made the most significant difference in a city’s sustainability. Land use was also vital to sustainability across all of the games, but with fewer calculations and variables than the more fleshed- 31 out complexities of social wellbeing. Water, energy, and trade played lesser roles in the survival of a city, and population density and clean air were inconsequential and barely present in any of the games. The fact that social wellbeing is perhaps the most significant and sophisticated (in its representations, mechanics, and systems) across most of the games came as a surprise to us. Beyond the basic measures of happiness and morale, we found 14 different factors contributing to social wellbeing across the 7 games - with some titles focusing only on basic food and health needs and others expanding to cover working conditions, traffic, and even access to luxury goods. Social wellbeing also consistently had a more significant effect on player success than any other indicator. While poor performance measured through other indicators can significantly impact sustainability, the extreme consequences such as death or desertion resulting from low social wellbeing can cripple an otherwise sustainable city. Considering that environmental sustainability is a more widely discussed aspect of sustainability in our society, it’s surprising to see it presented as having less of an impact on a city’s success than social sustainability. Land use was less of a surprise to see as a vital indicator of sustainability, as city-building games place a heavy focus on developing land and expanding. While it seemed strange that land use was less frequently employed through mechanics than social wellbeing, it was still very present across every game. However, we did expect to see vital resources such as water and energy play a similarly significant role. A lack of water or power in the 32 games that utilize them can destroy a city’s population within minutes, yet these still play smaller roles mechanically. We were also surprised by the contrast we found between each game’s time-period setting. The pre-industrial games demonstrated a much closer relationship with the environment, encouraging players to preserve the natural land and build smaller, less invasive villages. From an economic perspective these villages engage minimally in trade, and socially the villagers have few desires beyond basic human needs such as water and shelter. Meanwhile, the post-industrial games encourage nearly opposite behaviors. Tax income and trade are vital, and citizens must be kept happy in addition to healthy and safe. These cities are encouraged to sprawl with no concern for the natural land, to import what they need instead of manually gathering natural resources, and to largely disregard their pollution and waste products. While the pre-industrial games are skewed more towards environmentalism, their balance of the triple bottom line is overall more sustainable than the balance we noticed in the post-industrial games. We saw this dichotomy as a telling reflection of the real world – cities often focus more on money, convenience, and the desires of citizens than on the natural land we destroy to achieve these things, choosing to distance ourselves from the environmental damage we cause instead of addressing it. We found little difference, however, between platform or payment models. Both mobile games contained surprisingly similar mechanics to the other platforms, playing much the same as the post-industrial PC game Cities: Skylines. Payment model also did not have 33 much of a role, with the only difference being that progress is much slower in the freemium game SimCity BuildIt if the player doesn’t make in-app purchases of virtual currency or resources to build improvements. The differences we saw between village and city scale games was more significant, but it was hard to tell whether these differences could be attributed more to the scale or the setting, as the only village-scale games we found were pre-industrial. Within the pre-industrial games, we found no differences between prehistoric or modern settings. Finally, we considered what it would take to create a sustainable city in the postindustrial games. Due to the way in which these games are balanced, environmentally friendly alternatives, such as renewable energy production, are rewarded too minimally to offset the cost of purchasing these more expensive facilities. Many of these environmentalist options are not unlocked until reaching higher levels, meaning that a beginning player could not create a pollution-free city from the start. They would be forced to pollute and dump waste initially, with the option to prevent further damage with new facilities later – though they will only be able to repair some of the damage their old facilities had done. Even then, while some facilities are able to avoid causing any pollution, most are only able to mitigate the effects. In order for a city to have sufficient power, waste management, and transportation, it would be nearly impossible to prevent all pollution – even without considering how expensive these environmentally friendly facilities would be. So, while the post-industrial games manage economic and social needs well, they don’t give the same treatment to environmentalism. As a result, cities 34 will be impacted by pollution, destruction of natural resources, and lack of land to build on – making them, overall, unsustainable. CONCLUSION Our study’s aim was to examine a sample of city-building video games in order to understand if (and how) they included representations and modelling of sustainability. In order to evaluate how these virtual cities might be considered sustainable, we modified an existing framework (Yan et al., 2018) for evaluating the sustainability of a city such that we could apply it to game-cities. In applying our modified framework, future studies will be able to measure the sustainability of other virtual cities. Upon applying the modified framework and analyzing each game, our findings did, overall, support our original hypothesis. While environmentally responsible options are sometimes offered in city-building games, they aren’t rewarded in an effective way – if at all. With mechanics (and dynamics) that encourage economic and social growth over environmental conservation, and minimal discussion of how actions impact the environment, players are encouraged to build unbalanced, unsustainable cities. Unfortunately, this does seem to mimic the way that our society approaches the triple bottom line – and by encouraging this behavior, players aren’t taught the importance of environmentalism. Curiously, the exceptions were the two pre-industrial games we studied. These games have a subtle message of environmentalism, demonstrating a strong, almost co-dependent relationship with the environment. The balance that the preindustrial games create between maintaining human needs, working in tandem with the 35 environment, and supplementing the village through trade models a more sustainable city. Also, to be fair, it was not the case that sustainability (and its principles) were not present in city-building games at all, but rather that there wasn’t necessarily a balance between the factors that are considered important. Social well-being, for example, was a central element of both gameplay and representations. Similarly, the economic aspect of sustainability was also often present. In this sense, city-building’s “weakest link” is the environmental aspect – and what we found was that, for the most part, environmental concerns are rarely present or consistent with the realities of the real-world. These findings could indicate an issue with how city-building games model sustainability for players. Those who play industrial and post-industrial city-building games may be learning poor sustainability practices, which they may then carry over into their real lives. On the other hand, players of pre-industrial city-building games may learn more sustainable practices from the behaviors that those games reward – albeit practices that are perhaps less relevant in our post-industrial world. This study illuminates a key area in which city-building games are not only inaccurate, but potentially harmful as players are trained to engage in unsustainable practices. It also identifies a need for post-industrial city-building games teaching sustainable behaviors more applicable to modern life than those of the pre-industrial games. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 36 Thank you to the University of Utah Sustainability Office for their generous support through their Sustainable Campus Initiative Fund (SCIF). BIBLIOGRAPHY Abraham, B. (2018a). Video Game Visions of Climate Futures: ARMA 3 and Implications for Games and Persuasion. Games and Culture, 13(1), 71–91. Abraham, B. (2018b). What is an Ecological Game? Examining Gaming’s Ecological Dynamics and Metaphors through the Survival-Crafting Genre. TRACE A Journal of Writing Media and Ecology, 2. http://hdl.handle.net/10453/121683 Abraham, B., & Jayemanne, D. (2017). Where are all the climate change games? Locating digital games’ response to climate change. Transformations, 30, 74–94. http://hdl.handle.net/10453/121664 Apperley, T. (2006). Genre and game studies: Toward a critical approach to video game genres. Simulation & Gaming, 37(1), 6–23. Bell-Gawne, K., Stenerson, M., Shapiro, B., & Squire, K. (2013). Meaningful Play: The Intersection of Video Games and Environmental Policy. World Future Review, 5(3), 244–250. Bereitschaft, B. (2016). Gods of the City? Reflecting on City Building Games as an Early Introduction to Urban Systems. Journal of Geography, 115(2), 51–60. Bogost, I. (2007). Persuasive Games. The MIT Press. Chang, A., & Parham, J. (2017). Green Computer and Video Games: An Introduction. Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment, 8(2), 1–17. 37 Chapman, G. P. (1973). The Green Revolution: A Gaming Simulation. Area, 5(2), 129– 140. Chuah, S., Yuen, C., & Cheung, N. (2014). Cloud gaming: A green solution to massive multiplayer online games. IEEE Wireless Communications, 21(4), 78–87. https://doi.org/10.1109/MWC.2014.6882299 Cleger, O. (2015). Procedural Rhetoric and Undocumented Migrants: Playing the Debate Over Immigration Reform. Digital Culture & Education, 7(2), 19–39. Demers, D. (2014). The Procedural Rhetoric of War: Ideology, Recruitment, and Training in Military Videogames [MA, Concordia University]. http://spectrum.library.concordia.ca/978449/ Dunn, M. S., & Hart-Steffes, J. S. (2012). Sustainability as Moral Action. New Directions for Student Services, 2012(139), 73–82. https://doi.org/10.1002/ss.20024 Egger, S. (2006). Determining a sustainable city model. Environmental Modelling & Software, 21(9), 1235–1246. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsoft.2005.04.012 Elkington, J. (2006). Governance for Sustainability. Corporate Governance: An International Review, 14(6), 522–529. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467- 8683.2006.00527.x Fjællingsdal, K. S., & Klöckner, C. A. (2020). Green Across the Board: Board Games as Tools for Dialogue and Simplified Environmental Communication. Simulation & Gaming. https://doi.org/10.1177/1046878120925133 Glean, N. (2005). Growing Complex Games. Proceedings of the DiGRA 2005 Conference. DiGRA 2005, Vancouver, Canada. library/publications/growing-complex-games/ http://www.digra.org/digital- 38 Harper, T. (2011). Rules, Rhetoric, and Genre: Procedural Rhetoric in Persona 3. Games and Culture, 6(5), 395–413. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1555412011402675 Hiremath, R. B., Balachandra, P., Kumar, B., Bansode, S. S., & Murali, J. (2013). Indicator-based urban sustainability—A review. Energy for Sustainable Development, 17(6), 555–563. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esd.2013.08.004 Lorr, M. J. (2012). Defining Urban Sustainability in the Context of North American Cities. Nature and Culture, 7(1), 16–30. https://doi.org/10.3167/nc.2012.070102 Maxis. (1989). SimCity. Maxis. Mazurek, J. (1999). Making Microchips: Policy, Globalization, and Economic Restructuring in the Semiconductor Industry. MIT Press. Meadows, D., Booth Sweeney, L., & Martin Mehers, G. (2016). The Climate Change Playbook: 22 Systems Thinking Games for More Effective Communication about Climate Change. Chelsea Green Publishing. Milburn, C. (2014). Green Gaming: Video Games and Environmental Risk. In S. Mayer & A. Weik von Mossner (Eds.), The Anticipation of Catastrophe: Environmental Risk in North American Literature and Culture (pp. 201–219). Milburn, C. (2018). Respawn: Gamers, Hackers, and Technogenic Life. Duke University Press. Mills, N., & Mills, E. (2016). Taming the Energy Use of Gaming Computers. Energy Efficiency, 9, 321–338. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12053-015-9371-1 Molleindustria. (2006). The McDonalds Video Game. 39 Mori, K., & Christodoulou, A. (2012). Review of sustainability indices and indicators: Towards a new City Sustainability Index (CSI). Environmental Impact Assessment Review, 32(1), 94–106. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eiar.2011.06.001 Mori, K., & Yamashita, T. (2015). Methodological framework of sustainability assessment in City Sustainability Index (CSI): A concept of constraint and maximisation indicators. Habitat International, 45, 10–14. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.habitatint.2014.06.013 Morris, N. (2004). Sustainability: What is it? Power Engineer, 18(5), 11. https://doi.org/10.1049/pe:20040511 Moss, R. (2015). From SimCity to, well, SimCity: The history of city-building games. Ars Technica. https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/10/from-simcity-to-well-simcitythe-history-of-city-building-games/ Slaper, T. F. (2011). The Triple Bottom Line: What Is It and How Does It Work? The Indiana Review, 86(1). http://www.ibrc.indiana.edu/ibr/2011/spring/article2.html Starosielski, N., & Walker, J. (Eds.). (2016). Sustainable Media: Critical Approaches to Media and Environment. Routledge, New York. Tanguay, G. A., Rajaonson, J., Lefebvre, J.-F., & Lanoie, P. (2010). Measuring the sustainability of cities: An analysis of the use of local indicators. Ecological Indicators, 10(2), 407–418. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolind.2009.07.013 Tragazikis, P., & Meimaris, M. (2009). Engaging Kids with the Concept of Sustainability Using a Commercial Video Game – A Case Study. In M. Chang (Ed.), Transactions on Edutainment III (pp. 1–12). Springer-Verlag. 40 World Commission on Environment and Development. (1987). Our Common Future. Oxford University Press. Yan, Y., Wang, C., Quan, Y., Wu, G., & Zhao, J. (2018). Urban sustainable development efficiency towards the balance between nature and human well-being: Connotation, measurement, and assessment. Journal of Cleaner Production, 178, 67–75. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2018.01.013