On the surface, Ian Bogost’s Video Games Are Better Without Characters is a nostalgia piece about SimCity:

Such was the payload of SimCity: not a game about people, even though its residents, the Sims, would later get their own spin-off. Nor is it a game about particular cities, for it is difficult to recreate one with the game’s brittle, indirect tools. Rather, SimCity is a game about urban societies, about the relationship between land value, pollution, industry, taxation, growth, and other factors. It’s not really a simulation, despite its name, nor is it an educational game. Nobody would want a SimCity expert running their town’s urban planning office. But the game got us all to think about the relationships that make a city run, succeed, and decay, and in so doing to rise above our individual interests, even if only for a moment.

But later on it turns into a strong argument for games that are about bigger issues in society. Games not about fighting one’s way out of a prison or getting off a deserted planet, but games that focus on living systems, politics, and the economy. Great article.