Back in December, my brother gifted to our household a copy of SimCity 4 (Deluxe Edition -- with "Rush Hour" module). For those of you.... Back in December, my brother gifted to our household a copy of SimCity 4 (Deluxe Edition -- with "Rush Hour" module). For those of you unfamiliar with the game, introduced perhaps a decade ago, the concept is that you, the player, get to build a city. Build a mecca of commerce, an urban powerhouse or a suburban blanket. You're the Mayor; you make the call. The kicker is that you also have to manage things like trash, crime, traffic, your budget, etc. Fail to do these, or let your budget fall into the red and it's game over.

My brother (himself a recent, and mild, advocate of urban sustainability) inserted the game cum gift into our household to test a premise: Can the game support the theories of urban sustainability as put forward by the likes of New Colonist and others, or will the two forever collide? An interesting test. After all, the two come from opposite sides of a spectrum. Okay, so I'm game. Hypothesis-free, let's play.

I'm no sustainability expert, understand, but I have a reasonable idea of what's what. After all, I read New Colonist, right? So, I launched the game and proudly took my post as Mayor Defacto. My first impression is that it is a heck of a lot harder to be Mayor than I thought!

Why bother giving valuable column space to a game? Awareness: Subways or elevated? Where and when to use busses? How big should a lot be? Encourage high tech businesses? Commercial services or commercial offices? Is low density or very-high density worse... How many of you have actively addressed these questions in the last week? Good. Who else thinks about these things as they board a train or freeway headed for work?

So the question remains, does the game test the theories of urban sustainability? Let's see, shall we?