Microlandia is a city builder cut from a different cloth. The city-builder developed by Information Superhighway Games is designed to be “brutally honest”. Roads are expensive, traffic jams can cost your citizens their jobs, and uncontrolled rent prices can trigger a homelessness crisis. And they’re making it even more ‘real’.

Cities are not clockwork, they are chaos machines with a mayor attached. Most of what breaks your plans is not the ordinary day, it is the ugly little surprise that arrives precisely because you acted as if it could not. Version 1.5 leans into that reality: crime is no longer a single checkbox; it’s a spectrum of consequences that can become a death spiral every single day.”

Perhaps it’s something Portland’s leadership should learn about it’s Doom Loop. I think simulators like this may be important ways to cut out a lot of politicalization of problems. Economics and the laws of unintended consequences are often MUCH more likely the cause of many problems in our society when more politically charged arguments often have much more dubious connections and policy changes based on them often result in much worse results.