Blog: SimCity and the fictional town of Shrowsberry

Blog: I was playing SimCity the other day.

For those who don't know, it's a computer game where you become the mayor of your own city.

In an American Boss Hogg kinda way you run the town, not in a British kinda way where you're just forced to wear ridiculous robes and open fetes.

In the game, you start your town from scratch and build it up until it is, as Jeremy Clarkson would say, the greatest city IN THE WORLD.

So there I was building up nicely. I made some roads, built some houses, a few shops, a park - the usual thing. After a while I stopped and had a couple of beers before returning to my game. That was a mistake.

At first I just did silly things in my little town - which I'd chosen to call Shrowsberry (the name just came to me). I thought it would be funny to make a statue to a famous son of the town but make it look like, well, nothing really. And I gave it a name which bore pretty much no relevance to its subject matter.

But then I just started getting plain stupid.

At one point I stuck a massive piece of concrete in the middle of one of the main streets. In my slightly drunken way I thought it would be good for people to help them cross the road. Beer had made me forget I had already built a bridge for the self same purpose not 50 yards away. Anyway, turns out all I had done was create a chicane for drivers. How there wasn't an accident I'll never know.

Then I thought I'd build a massive supermarket on the outskirts of the town. I accidentally made it bigger than I'd first planned. People stopped shopping in the town and my mayor rating with the citizens dropped. I thought it would be funny to make the supermarket bigger.

Then, because making the residents angry was giving me a giggle, I decided to stop the remaining people visiting the town by putting up parking charges. Seeing that this was about to bring up the message GAME OVER, I decided not to press on with that.

Early in the game I had build some really rather nice restaurants and bars. I didn't build many car parks, because car parks are boring. But by now I was growing tired of bars so I thought I would see if I could close them down by making my traffic wardens go out at night and stop people parking in the street. Much better to have the cars driving around and around all night looking for a proper parking space, rather than pulling up and spending the money in the bars and restaurants. AND the added bonus that at night, they're much more likely to crash into that concrete block thing. That'd be funny.

I'd also tried to build up the night time economy of my town further by letting bands play in my park. But then three or four of my virtual characters came to see my in my office so I made the bands turn the music down.

Then I got bored and made a monster crash all the trains.

Silly really.

Thank god I don't run an ACTUAL town.