SimCity — Policy Simulation Game Evaluation

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SimCityGreenCityExample
Example of a green city built in SimCity

We have been evaluating policy simulation games, both for design ideas, and for a sense of whether they might be useful for real world policy processes. SimCity, as you might imagine from the title, allows the player to build and run a city. The player has considerably more freedom than might be available to a municipal politician, leading to a certain lack of realism. This article discusses the 2013 version of SimCity, with the GlassBox simulation engine. 

Learning Curve: 10–30 mins

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Making Maps on D3 — Tutorial

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Over the summer, Social Innovation Simulation will be posting a series of technical tutorials designed to acquaint those interested with some of the technologies we’re working with.

This tutorial describes how you can use a JavaScript language called D3 (“data driven documents”) to do visualizations with maps.

Estimated Time: 1 – 2 hours

Dependencies: Basic HTML, basic D3, setting up a server.

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