Most city-building games let players draw roads, place buildings, and watch a convincing skyline appear. Cristian Gonzalez kept noticing what was missing: homelessness, discrimination, parking, disconnected jobs, and the people who bear the cost when the economy turns. By leaving those things out, the games teach players to see cities as collections of buildings rather than places shaped by transportation, inequality, public services, and human behavior. His indie game Microlandia reverses the usual formula with cartoonish graphics and a demanding simulation that challenges the simplified logic of traditional city-builders, where growth often arrives without transportation constraints or social consequences. Microlandia gives players a place to test what happens when those tradeoffs enter the model and see how one decision reshapes the rest of the city.
Hi there, folks, and welcome to Bottom Up Shorts. I’m Norm with Strong Towns, and part of my mission is to connect people with the stories, ideas, and people that are inspiring or thought-provoking, or create the conditions in which you say, “Huh, that’s an interesting way of looking at a community, the way that we live, and some of the challenges that face us as we go about making our community stronger.”
With me today is Cristian Gonzalez, who is the game designer for a really interesting indie game called Microlandia. Microlandia is described on the site as a brutally honest city simulator. Cristian, welcome to Bottom Up Shorts.
Thanks for the invitation.
Let’s dive right in. You’re developing a computer game, and maybe it’s old-fashioned to call it a computer game, but that’s essentially what it is. It’s available in the Steam store, and it’s a simulation, but you’re trying to break the mold a little bit. Why was that important to you?
The concept is not new. It’s called a city builder. It’s a genre of games that started with the original SimCity. I’ve been a fan of the genre since I was very little, but I started to realize there were gaps in the city-building genre.
I was a kid playing SimCity on my Super Nintendo for an embarrassing amount of time, and I used to live in Santiago, Chile. Walking through my city, I started to see it through SimCity eyes. It’s when a magician reveals a secret. You somehow think, “Okay, the game is not telling the whole truth. Where are the homeless people? Where is the discrimination?”
I started to think about this many years ago, but much later in life, I started reading, for example, Mr. Jarrett Walker, who is a professional urbanist, being very categorical in saying, “Did SimCity make us stupid?” I think that was around 2009, and he was talking about how it greenwashes parking lots and all the space that parking lots need.
Then I thought, “Okay, I am not the only one thinking about this.” Some years ago, I realized this idea was still true. For example, in a modern city builder such as Cities: Skylines, you can create a mine on an island, and people just go to work even if they’re disconnected. You think, “How do they get there? Did they swim there?”
That’s just one example. I love these games, but they feel as though they’re for people who are Lego builders or are trying to carry out some architectural idea they have to build a city. They look like real cities, but the simulation is a cartoon of a simulation. I thought, “Why don’t we make the opposite idea? We make a game where it looks like a cartoon, but the simulation is hardcore.”
This should answer the curiosity of players. For example, how much would it cost for me to have universal basic income? If there’s an aging population, what are the side effects? What are the second-order effects in my city? How does that interplay with the health service I have to provide? I started to follow my curiosity and find people who, just as Jarrett did, also had these curiosities. People started playing it. It’s an ever-evolving game, and we are developing it.
That’s so cool. I’ll say I spent several hours and a couple of evenings playing it. If you’re listening to this and thinking, “Oh, I’m not normally a gamer,” I would say go and check it out because it’s very intriguing on many different layers.
A couple of things stood out to me. This is a spoiler, so don’t listen for the next 10 seconds. As I was going about building my city, all of a sudden a recession hit. A recession meant that my revenues were way down, and I was really struggling. That game event was one of those things where I thought, “You moron. Why did you not expect there to be economic simulation factors in here?” It was a moment where I thought, “Come on, Mr. Mayor, do better.”
I was doing okay and was finally getting my budget to balance, and then a recession hit. I thought, “Of course it should, and of course I should have had contingencies and things like that.”
The other thing that stood out to me was that I immediately wanted a bus line. I am several hours in, and people are still not using my bus line. Part of that is a Jarrett Walker observation as well: if you have not connected it with core productive areas, people are not going to use it. It’s this drain on my system to have this bus line that’s a luxury, or actually not a luxury, a millstone. Here I am trying to plug along.
I find this fascinating, and all the different layers of what you’ve built into the simulation or the game are really interesting. I love that language of the cartoonish look but the very serious simulation. It’s definitely a real contrast.
As I think about it, I had a friend who worked for an oil company, Nexen Oil, and his job was to create training simulators for oil field staff. That way, they would learn, in a somewhat fun and enjoyable way, how to simulate real emergencies and real disasters. They also had it on their corporate side for how to manage the selling and buying of oil futures and things like that.
Matt was an idealistic person, and I thought, “Bless you. You’re doing some work that’s necessary, but I can imagine it kind of hurts the soul a little bit.” You’re doing work to build out a training simulator, and I would love to hear from mayors, council members, or city staff who are diving into it and saying, “This is training me for real-world situations.” Was that part of your vision, and have you seen people who said, “I actually started to dive into this,” and hit some of those same observations? Of course a recession comes, or of course a poorly designed bus line is not going to get service.
I think the idea of these events, such as recessions, is—let me go back a bit to first principles. The idea is that, through these problems we’re throwing at you, we are trying to get you to think about being a mayor as someone who needs to care for people. Who gets affected most by a recession? Is it the companies, or is it normal people?
When you get to this event in the game for the first time, you are in shock and you don’t know what to do. That’s perhaps completely normal. But the second layer of the game is the community, and we have a Discord channel where we talk about the game. Every conversation eventually ends up being about real life. We discuss how our cities are and what the economic policies are in the real world. There is this discussion about the real world, and I think that’s the intention.
If we are doing a good job, we’re throwing a problem at you and you’re going to try to solve it, but hopefully something is there for you to think about slowly the next time you see news about a recession.
By the way, there was an attempt to make an oil refinery simulator that didn’t work. I think it was during the 1980s or 1990s. One cool thing about the modern era is that these ideas can be retried now. You could interpret that I’m talking trash about the original SimCity, but it ran on a 25-megahertz processor. You couldn’t do a lot of stuff. You had to cut corners. Right now, we have very powerful laptops that are 500 times what a Super Nintendo was. We can do these kinds of things.
As I think about it, I know that I am the five-term mayor of my city in Microlandia. But what about you? Can you share a little bit about your backstory and some of the things that led you to be involved in this, taking the observations from streets and places that you’ve been and putting them into this project?
For me, it was my own curiosity. I come from Santiago, Chile, originally. Now I live in Berlin, but in Chile, the fire brigades are voluntary, and they do a very good job. The problem is funding, but the problem is never the incentive of them not doing a good job because they’re not getting paid.
I think this kind of thing is part of my culture, and I respect this type of work a lot. In discussions, somebody could very easily think that if you don’t pay people, they’re not going to take care of something. For example, with universal basic income or grants for people, there are people who think that if you don’t give an economic incentive, community doesn’t exist. Everything must have an economic incentive. But things are a lot more nuanced.
That is the kind of idea that makes me think, “Okay, simulators are just very simple things, and all these nuances are missed.” You might think, “Okay, this is very hard to simulate because it’s very subjective,” but if you start looking into papers about this, there are a lot of people who are very interested in this problem, and they are all thinking in the academic world.
This is not a new problem. This is not a new curiosity. The problem is that it is in the academic world, and that world, for me and maybe for many others, is unreachable. What is reachable is the game world. It is a different way of expressing the problem, thinking about the problem, and experiencing the problem.
The fascination for me in bringing all of this from the academic world into games is that maybe a super cool idea about how to build future cities does not come from people with university backgrounds. Maybe it comes from a video gamer who is very savvy about designing a city. Maybe that’s where a cool idea comes from, and it doesn’t have to be a top-down type of thing.
Of course, there are a lot of smart people whose work we read, but it shouldn’t be a top-down conversation: “I went to academia, so I know about cities, and this is how cities should be.” Games give us, maybe people who are just nerds, the opportunity to think about the problem and also participate in the discussion from another point of view.
That establishes the myriad ways in which there is organized complexity and really leans into complex systems needing reinforcement, then spinning off consequences in many different ways, sometimes that we can capture and sometimes that we didn’t expect.
Cristian, we could do a long episode on this as well, and perhaps down the road we will. I did want to share that Cristian generously shared three Steam codes with me. The first three people to email me at [email protected] will receive a Steam code if they want to check out the game for themselves.
Otherwise, how would people access this, Cristian? What’s the best way for them to dive in and learn a little bit more, check out their curiosity, or become one of the hardcore people really involved in it?
Right now, the game is on Steam. You need a Mac, PC, or Linux computer, and hopefully we will bring it to other platforms eventually. Right now, that’s the way to get it. There’s also our website, microlandia.cd.
One cool thing about our website is that we publish all the academic papers we use for the game simulation. I make a mistake every single day, so you could point out parts of the game that we didn’t get right. We have a Discord channel where we’re always discussing how getting closer to reality is really impossible.
To close this conversation, I think the main philosophy is that George Box said, “All models are wrong, but some of them are useful.” I think we’re trying to be as useful as we can as a test tube for a city. Of course, we cannot get to reality, but I think we are doing a useful job. Hopefully.
Cristian, it’s been fantastic to shine a spotlight on Microlandia and the work that you’re doing. It’s a treat to be able to hear from you and the thoughtfulness that has gone into this. I really appreciate it.
For our Local Conversation groups in particular, maybe you could do a group play test or work through it. I would definitely recommend it. It feels very social in its own way, and for those who dive in, you’ll also discover that even the tutorials are clever. They made me laugh out loud a bunch of times.
It’s a really great experience, but also one that left me with a lot of good Strong Towns questions, so it is definitely recommended. Cristian, thanks so much for coming on Bottom Up Shorts today.
Thank you. I’m a super big fan of your work, and I will continue reading Strong Towns. A good part of our research was reading a few Strong Towns blog posts.
That’s excellent. It’s great to hear that. With that, I hope that not only you, Cristian, but everyone listening has a great day. Take care, and take care of your places.
This episode was produced by Strong Towns, a nonprofit movement for building financially resilient communities. If what you heard today matters to you, deepen your connection by becoming a Strong Towns member at strongtowns.org/membership.