Will the new California law Senate Bill (SB) 79 (the Abundant & Affordable Homes Near Transit Act) help? It came into effect this July.
One specific complaint: The BART station entrances at 16th/24th & Mission: Why not build huge apartment buildings (10/20/30 floors) on top of them? And since both locations are a pair of entrances, you can close one, then build. Then repeat with the other entrance. They seem like perfect locations. There must be a bunch more no brainer lots around the city like these.
Reminds me of that Factorio joke mod which adds bureaucracy-processing as a recipe tree. Assemblers start to shut down if you don't process paperwork fast enough. IIRC, it had biters following the player around in queues to give them complaint forms.
Dunno, if you are dumb enough to try to build a high speed line through an area where endangered species are protected then yeah you’re going to have to avoid killing them.
Very nearly half of HS2 - 64 miles - is in tunnels. This happened because the Conservative government was terrified of upsetting the Conservative voters along the route. The bat tunnel was nuts, but it's not that significant overall.
That is partly true but it's a downstream consequence of the ultimate cause. Those running and pushing the project in the early stages desperately wanted it to be a 400+kph route for "prestige" reasons.
If they hadn't been so focused on that, they could have built the new rails largely alongside the existing West Coast Main Line which would have been quicker, cheaper and much less controversial.
But because they wanted those very high speeds, the route had to be flatter and straighter than the existing WCML, which means many more tunnels, longer and more complex construction, more people objecting, inconvenienced etc and ultimately much more cost however you look at it.
Discretionary Review (Developer): I built 4,147 homes in San Francisco, 2015 to 2031. Grade A, "Builder of Some Things". Survived all eight investor reviews. 16 hearings, 3 appeals, 4 lawsuits. The city needed 82,069.
What's your "build order"? I can usually get permits for something, but struggle getting the 40 units started by the second one (if I do get permits, it doesn't pencil).
I won on Developer mode too with 4k homes built. Spent all afternoon playing this
Here’s my build order
- 3 market rate projects in supportive supervisor districts, ideally in areas without heavy neighbor or coalition opposition (use the heat maps). Pay the in lieu fee or else risk the projects not penciling by the time they’re approved
- 2 mega projects - mission rock is the best one, then pier 70. Waive prevailing wages, then Spend 2.5M on campaigning mission rock and offer community benefits
Spam community meetings and permit expediting. Don’t agree to labor agreements, don’t give density unless the commission denies your approval. This should get you past the first two investor reviews. Ideally you can complete a mega project, which gives you a buffer to option a bunch of marginal land
Then pivot to affordable around 2020 when everything stops penciling. Max out density bonuses. Start picking up projects that almost pencil but not quite because you’ll need them to get past the reviews in 2027 and beyond
Keep spamming community meetings and permit expediting, and always pay to save on build time unless your in the 20-25 doldrums where nothing pencils. Keep your pipeline full and you should win
My suspicion is San Francisco would love a Beijing-style hukou system. That lets it lock housing (and thus the built character of the city) and control immigration which in turn should result in stable housing prices provided units don't go out of use or residents don't have too many children.
> Beijing has a substantially worse median price to income ratio
As would, I’d think, San Francisco under a similar system.
It’s not a good solution. But for the preferences San Francisco’s residents seem to be expressing, it’s the only way. (Fortunately, it’s probably unconstitutional.)
Open immigration for rest of the country from around the world but closed for their city from rest of the country is what these “progressives” seem to want by their actions.
Popovers cannot be scrolled in mobile Safari without flipping the screen to landscape and back, and sometimes not even then. It tried to have an adaptive layout but didn’t nail it. Ask Claude to fix mobile scroll target handling?
I play games like Civilization and we get these tech trees and policy trees and such. And I can never help but wonder what it would be like to play these when the people of the territory act like Americans. You try to incentivize future technology and they push back. You try and prioritize education and they push back. There is always division and infighting.
Regardless, I don't think it would actually make the game more fun.
I mean that's kinda how Civ works already. Some civs get bonuses for education & research, others in combat, etc, and focusing on the things incompatible with your civ will "punish" you.
It sounds like you just don't agree with how they've implemented America lol.
What would prioritizing education mean in Civilization? The game's model is fairly simple:
1. There are three resources: food, industrial production, and commercial activity;
2. As the player, you can divide commercial activity between three categories: research, state revenue, and local "luxuries", which in this context just means tax relief;
3. Scientific progress occurs when you've produced enough research to learn a new technology;
4. The only appearance of "education" anywhere in the game is that there is an expensive building called a "university" that increases local production of research. (The predecessor building with the same effect at a lower cost is the "library".)
On the other hand, "there is always division and infighting" is one of the most important and fundamental mechanics in the game; if your city grows beyond a quite small population cap, new citizens are automatically unhappy and will shut down the whole city unless pacified somehow.
I'm not American, so this is a guess, but I'd suspect people resisting "progress" are not as irrational as you perhaps suppose.
More likely, they feel they would disproportionately bear the costs, while the benefits either trickle down diffusely from the wider societal good, or worse, accrue to some private company.
For example you may feel AI is progress, they may feel the loss of the countryside near their house to a data centre, which they may believe will primarily benefit the owners of OpenAI et al. In such a case, their opposition would be aligned with their beliefs and values.
On one hand, we have opposition to industrialization and the green revolution.
On the other hand, we have Greenwich Village pushing back on being razed for a highway.
Defining "progress" is fundamentally a value judgement. In one era, undeveloped land was opportunity for progress. Today, turning developed land into parks can be seen the same way.
I imagined something more like a sim city clone where every time you try to put down a building or zone, it’s refused with a pop up message saying why. Let me prompt that out brb
Some context, because it is definitely an insider joke.
Davis had a long and contentious civic debate on whether or not Target should be allowed to build a store in Davis, eventually Davis held a city wide vote on the matter, which did pass [1].
Davis voters reject Measure V, spiking plans to build Village Farms housing [2].
Just a couple of examples where growth that most cities would approve without thought became a city wide civic issue that the community actually voted on.
It should be an option. You pay higher prices. But the community gets more control. And for a smaller city, that’s a fair choice to make. For a metropolis, it’s not.
Yes. Agreed. I liked the civic engagement.
With the Target thing though, opponents were just a bit hypocritical. Davis residents were already going to a Target: they were driving to Woodland or Vacaville for their serious shopping.
Something definitely changed around the dot com crash. The channels I slummed around in of EFNet went from excited hacker archetypes to the same people doing jobs I was am in retrospect surprised about [0]
[0] - Im general, emulator devs working for bigger corporations. But most specifically one that wound up doing stuff around customs intrediction tech, major shift from their pre emulation work.
> Every rule, vote count and case in this game is drawn from the public record. Sources are in docs/research/ in the project folder. Neighborhood politics scores and the economics are simplified for play.
Nice, I'm happy to hear that, Claude. This kind of silly game is supposed to help you understand a complex issue in a fun way. But this is missing the plot entirely. Why is this so overwhelmingly complex? Why would I spend time learning this ugly, convoluted and verbose UI? Who is this for??
This runs into the reality that the game maker knows who his target audience is, but you don't. If he wants to make a spreadsheet simulator or something targeted at people who like complex interfaces he can do that. I point at ASCII-UI Dwarf Fortress, one of the great games of this century, as evidence that a game does not need to be accessible to be true art.
It is frustrating to be excluded when a game developer builds a game that looks interesting but targets a niche you don't fit in.
Also those https://research.wmz.ninja/projects/phd/index.html style games are a bit vapid. At any moment a person has more than a handful of choices and the simplification abstracts away the important ones, like ranking what ideas are important or changing strategies for idea generation in this one.
I agree, but please try to engage with what I'm saying. Both the PhD game and TFA are made with the goal of teaching an issue to a broader audience. Do you think TFA is an effective tool of communication? Don't you think its messaging could have been better conveyed had it been designed with more intent, less focused on piling on feature after feature for a game that isn't designed to be replayed more than once?
Both TFA and the PhD game should be considered "educational", people won't come back to those again and again because of how fun they are. They're designed to appear in HN feed, be played once, learn maybe a thing or two in an amusing way, and never be opened again. Do you understand now why I find this complexity so counter-productive? It's fine for a game to be complex, if it's designed for players that will sink hundreds of hours into them. It's not fine for a silly project to demand the same learning effort from its players.
> This runs into the reality that the game maker knows who his target audience is, but you don't.
Have you considered that TFA was vibe-coded, and maybe the "game maker" hasn't put much thought into who his target audience could be, like, at all, and just asked Claude to make a game about NIMBYism?
> the PhD game and TFA are made with the goal of teaching
The PhD game came across as a blog post masquerading as a game. The city-building one was fun even if you ignore the lessons it's teaching. (You don't have to read the news articles. They're cleverly written, however, and so sort of fun to.)
> Both the PhD game and TFA are made with the goal of teaching an issue to a broader audience.
I mean, are? It looks like it might be trying to create a San Francisco housing simulator. Simulators aren't necessarily tools of education. That's why I picked DF as a comparison - it is a Moria siumulator, but it isn't supposed to educate its players on the nature of Tolkien. It is more about exploring a complex environment.
And the PhD game doesn't look like it is going to teach anyone anything. It reads to me like some guy blowing off steam without having much of substance to say. Which is also fine, it just isn't much of an educational journey.
You're implicitly assuming that you have determined the target audience and goal of the game. And while you might be accurate, you might also be inaccurate. There is a decent chance that the target audience is people who look at this and think "ooh, cool". It is great fun to criticise games but claiming that a game is in the wrong genre altogether is just a bit much for me today. If you don't like this genre that is cool, but the game maker might just be doing his own thing and having fun.
> Have you considered that TFA was vibe-coded, and maybe the "game maker" hasn't put much thought into who his target audience could be, like, at all, and just asked Claude to make a game about NIMBYism?
His target audience could be himself, in which case he's probably got a deep understanding of who they are and whether they enjoy the game.
These people should, instead of posting the game, just post a video of them playing through the game, as most people have no interest in playing other’s slop but may just be curious to watch someone play and provide comedic value.
...I enjoyed playing it. It's silly. But it's in a similar category as "Papers, Please." It's not like it's stressful, there is just a bunch of random diabolus ex nihilo crap flying at you, which isn't particularly unusual in a game.
You've completely missed what my comment was trying to convey. If it's throwaway, why is it so damn complex to play? I've seen AAA games with less features.
For equal feature sets, sure. But what I'm saying, and what you also missed, is that this game should have never been this complex in the first place. This complexity is doing a huge disservice to the message it's trying to convey.
I honestly don’t see what you’re going on about. If this was made five years ago we would have standing ovations. It’s the AI, right? I think it is great. It was fun to play. Your phd game example is boring as hell.
I actually was surprised I liked this convoluted bureaucracy. Reality is fighting you all the way, love it. Normal games are too straightforward. That said I assume it was just a toy project.
> what I'm saying, and what you also missed, is that this game should have never been this complex in the first place
I respectfully disagree. I played it twice. Once, I lost. That cued me into looking at a few more datapoints the second time around, when I made it through.
I never wound up looking at everything. I didn’t need to. That said, I could probably improve my score if I did.
You can play most games to completion while ignoring the complexity. If you want to dive deeper, however, that complexity is fun. I certainly appreciated uncovering little details around how the various metrics played together, and how, in turn, that affected how I should play.
There's no reason a "housing crisis" game couldn't have been done like that, with simple choices and immediate reactions. A game that respects the player's time, is easy to pick up and makes the point effectively.
Any simplification hides real problems and takes away from the point. Even your desire for simple choices and immediate reactions elides the fact that not every policy decision has visible short term effects. Some are only visibly beneficial or harmful in the long run, and may not end up that way depending on other decisions.
That game is more of an idle / clicker game, and while I quite enjoyed the one from a few months ago about being a SWE in SF, the shtick wears thin quickly especially if you’re not in the niche that identifies with all the in-jokes.
If the thesis of the game is that there's too much paperwork and regulatory burden, a simpler game would have to just tell the player "there's too much paperwork". This game--whether you liked it or not--is a lot more effective by showing you. You are the (simplified) bureaucrat, not a choose-your-own-adventure player being told that the bureaucracy is dense.
I really do think that complexity and UI obtuseness was implemented as commentary, not as a mistake.
Eh, your example is a different kind of game. Not into linear choose-your-own-adventure games myself. I think the UI of this one accurately models the many moving parts and forces in the process it's simulating, and I didn't have a problem picking it up though I skipped the tutorial. It has a sense of humor (read the speaker comments at meetings, and the news articles), and hits you with the real world outcome each development is based on. Made an impact on me.
Well, you should seek a better tell because I've played ASCII Dwarf Fortress quite a bit. Re-read my comments, I only have an issue with TFA's complexity, in the context of it being a throwaway educational game. It shouldn't require as much involvement from the player as it currently does. And certainly, it shouldn't even occur to people to compare it to Dwarf Fortress, which happened twice already.
You know, if an old city with a natural boundary doesn’t think you should build a bunch of profitable crap in it, maybe you could take the hint and stop acting like you’re bringing Jesus to them. San Francisco’s seen the conquistadors. In fact, many of the streets in the Sunset are named after them.
Locked supply. Affordable housing. Growing standards of living (or population). Pick two.
If you lock supply and want taxes and wages to grow, you're choosing unaffordable housing. That's San Francisco's current policy choice. Over decades, it filters the poor to San Francisco's "outer boroughs" or onto its streets.
For what it's worth, my friends who lived in San Francisco "took the hint" and moved out when they chose to have kids. They didn't sell their place, however, since the above policy mix together with California's property-tax system strongly disincentivizes that.
Ah, blue city progressivism: "Welcome to my country! Now get the fuck out of my city."
Also, note that these cities always happily welcome more offices and businesses. They just don't want to build the housing for those workers to actually live in.
I haven't played OP's game but hopefully it accurately models the plummetting quality of life and rampant homelessness created by doing what you describe in the real world.
Basically a CA politician told Musk to go fuck himself, he replied "message received" then shortly thereafter moved billions of dollars of tax revenue, jobs, development etc. out of their jurisdiction by moving his base of operations to Texas. All very viral / in the news.
You can tell people not to build in your city, just don't expect them to continue investing there if you fuck them over.
I remember before COVID I was debating with a friend of mine whether or not private property is justifiable and it's ironic that the discussion was made obsolete by nobody being able to afford private property anymore
I’m a single family homeowner in SF and as YIMBY as they come. And contrary to my goals of development even if it deflates home prices, development lags and home prices are getting more out of control.
I mean, stopping housing construction hasn’t stopped the new money from pushing out the old soul. Given the US enshrines the free movement of people in the Constitution, it’s make room or have someone outbid you for yours.
It is possible to grow in a pleasant way without mallification, seems like a lot of projecting. And it’s not like the current approach is preventing that; insanity is trying the same thing over and over and expecting different results.
Will the new California law Senate Bill (SB) 79 (the Abundant & Affordable Homes Near Transit Act) help? It came into effect this July.
One specific complaint: The BART station entrances at 16th/24th & Mission: Why not build huge apartment buildings (10/20/30 floors) on top of them? And since both locations are a pair of entrances, you can close one, then build. Then repeat with the other entrance. They seem like perfect locations. There must be a bunch more no brainer lots around the city like these.
Reminds me of that Factorio joke mod which adds bureaucracy-processing as a recipe tree. Assemblers start to shut down if you don't process paperwork fast enough. IIRC, it had biters following the player around in queues to give them complaint forms.
Here's the mod https://mods.factorio.com/mod/administratorio
Of course, there’s also Car Park Capital, a game for what the city actually wants
https://www.ign.com/games/car-park-capital
We need one for HS2 where every time you try and build a small section of track, they demand a bat tunnel or a newt ramp or a fox power plant.
This was a good reality check about the bat tunnel controversy: https://www.bats.org.uk/news/2025/04/hs2-bat-tunnel-dangerou...
Dunno, if you are dumb enough to try to build a high speed line through an area where endangered species are protected then yeah you’re going to have to avoid killing them.
It looks like a good idea. It didn’t need to cost £100 million.
Very nearly half of HS2 - 64 miles - is in tunnels. This happened because the Conservative government was terrified of upsetting the Conservative voters along the route. The bat tunnel was nuts, but it's not that significant overall.
That is partly true but it's a downstream consequence of the ultimate cause. Those running and pushing the project in the early stages desperately wanted it to be a 400+kph route for "prestige" reasons.
If they hadn't been so focused on that, they could have built the new rails largely alongside the existing West Coast Main Line which would have been quicker, cheaper and much less controversial.
But because they wanted those very high speeds, the route had to be flatter and straighter than the existing WCML, which means many more tunnels, longer and more complex construction, more people objecting, inconvenienced etc and ultimately much more cost however you look at it.
> a bat tunnel or a newt ramp or a fox power plant
Source? (To be clear, not doubting you.)
https://www.hs2.org.uk/sustainability/environmental-sustaina...
> The estimated cost of the structure is c. £95 million in 2019 prices. This can also be expressed as £114m in 2022 prices.
https://martinrobbins.substack.com/p/i-visited-the-infamous-...
Bat tunnel is real, it cost millions. The others riffs on the theme I expect
The best I got:
Discretionary Review (Developer): I built 4,147 homes in San Francisco, 2015 to 2031. Grade A, "Builder of Some Things". Survived all eight investor reviews. 16 hearings, 3 appeals, 4 lawsuits. The city needed 82,069.
What's your "build order"? I can usually get permits for something, but struggle getting the 40 units started by the second one (if I do get permits, it doesn't pencil).
I won on Developer mode too with 4k homes built. Spent all afternoon playing this
Here’s my build order - 3 market rate projects in supportive supervisor districts, ideally in areas without heavy neighbor or coalition opposition (use the heat maps). Pay the in lieu fee or else risk the projects not penciling by the time they’re approved - 2 mega projects - mission rock is the best one, then pier 70. Waive prevailing wages, then Spend 2.5M on campaigning mission rock and offer community benefits
Spam community meetings and permit expediting. Don’t agree to labor agreements, don’t give density unless the commission denies your approval. This should get you past the first two investor reviews. Ideally you can complete a mega project, which gives you a buffer to option a bunch of marginal land
Then pivot to affordable around 2020 when everything stops penciling. Max out density bonuses. Start picking up projects that almost pencil but not quite because you’ll need them to get past the reviews in 2027 and beyond
Keep spamming community meetings and permit expediting, and always pay to save on build time unless your in the 20-25 doldrums where nothing pencils. Keep your pipeline full and you should win
My suspicion is San Francisco would love a Beijing-style hukou system. That lets it lock housing (and thus the built character of the city) and control immigration which in turn should result in stable housing prices provided units don't go out of use or residents don't have too many children.
Beijing has a substantially worse median price to income ratio, though
> Beijing has a substantially worse median price to income ratio
As would, I’d think, San Francisco under a similar system.
It’s not a good solution. But for the preferences San Francisco’s residents seem to be expressing, it’s the only way. (Fortunately, it’s probably unconstitutional.)
That system leads to an oversupply of single men in rural areas and single women in big cities.
Explain?
Agreed.
Open immigration for rest of the country from around the world but closed for their city from rest of the country is what these “progressives” seem to want by their actions.
Love the idea!
I started something similar as a meme game, but I'm just too busy to keep working on it: Data centre slumlord - https://binary-mirror.itch.io/data-centre-slumlord
Whoever made this, I love you and we should be friends.
Want to share the Code? I would adapt it to the German situation and add to it - the first YIMBY Simulation
It does have the blue angels flying over the city at one point
Took me back to sim farm. The aesthetics are awesome
Needs more strawberries and oranges.
Maybe some cotton, also herbicides and pesticides too, with matching trucks or planes to spray :)
Popovers cannot be scrolled in mobile Safari without flipping the screen to landscape and back, and sometimes not even then. It tried to have an adaptive layout but didn’t nail it. Ask Claude to fix mobile scroll target handling?
I'm just jamming out to the music
The Nuclear option is an interesting choice the game has locked up.
The only winning move is not to play.
what's the nuclear option?
This game is rigged by pigs at the trough.
I'm a unclear on what high "The Neighborhood" scores mean in the right panel before approving the project, is it good or bad?
You win by not playing…
The only way to beat this game is to not play.
Reminds me of tax forms. Good times.
what a throwback feel, nicely done
I play games like Civilization and we get these tech trees and policy trees and such. And I can never help but wonder what it would be like to play these when the people of the territory act like Americans. You try to incentivize future technology and they push back. You try and prioritize education and they push back. There is always division and infighting.
Regardless, I don't think it would actually make the game more fun.
So, "If only you could talk to the monsters" but at the level of this genre?
I mean that's kinda how Civ works already. Some civs get bonuses for education & research, others in combat, etc, and focusing on the things incompatible with your civ will "punish" you.
It sounds like you just don't agree with how they've implemented America lol.
What would prioritizing education mean in Civilization? The game's model is fairly simple:
1. There are three resources: food, industrial production, and commercial activity;
2. As the player, you can divide commercial activity between three categories: research, state revenue, and local "luxuries", which in this context just means tax relief;
3. Scientific progress occurs when you've produced enough research to learn a new technology;
4. The only appearance of "education" anywhere in the game is that there is an expensive building called a "university" that increases local production of research. (The predecessor building with the same effect at a lower cost is the "library".)
On the other hand, "there is always division and infighting" is one of the most important and fundamental mechanics in the game; if your city grows beyond a quite small population cap, new citizens are automatically unhappy and will shut down the whole city unless pacified somehow.
I think you missed the point. I was pretty clear about not focusing on Civ specifically.
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Because I don't know enough about the internal divisions in other countries. But I can tell you Americans will fight progress at every turn.
I'm not American, so this is a guess, but I'd suspect people resisting "progress" are not as irrational as you perhaps suppose.
More likely, they feel they would disproportionately bear the costs, while the benefits either trickle down diffusely from the wider societal good, or worse, accrue to some private company.
For example you may feel AI is progress, they may feel the loss of the countryside near their house to a data centre, which they may believe will primarily benefit the owners of OpenAI et al. In such a case, their opposition would be aligned with their beliefs and values.
> Americans will fight progress at every turn
On one hand, we have opposition to industrialization and the green revolution.
On the other hand, we have Greenwich Village pushing back on being razed for a highway.
Defining "progress" is fundamentally a value judgement. In one era, undeveloped land was opportunity for progress. Today, turning developed land into parks can be seen the same way.
I imagined something more like a sim city clone where every time you try to put down a building or zone, it’s refused with a pop up message saying why. Let me prompt that out brb
how do you complete a tutorial when you cant mute this fucking music
Gah! Thanks for that, I didn't know there was music.
There is a button on the top right to turn off the music.
Davis, CA. lol
Some context, because it is definitely an insider joke.
Davis had a long and contentious civic debate on whether or not Target should be allowed to build a store in Davis, eventually Davis held a city wide vote on the matter, which did pass [1].
Davis voters reject Measure V, spiking plans to build Village Farms housing [2].
Just a couple of examples where growth that most cities would approve without thought became a city wide civic issue that the community actually voted on.
[1] https://localwiki.org/davis/Target/History [2] https://www.abridged.org/news/davis-measure-v-election-updat...
Personally I feel we need more of this. Turns out that unchecked growth isn't all its cracked up to be.
Growth should be checked by (reasonable) zoning, not by constant one-off meetings that make the de facto rules stricter than the on-paper ones.
Laws and code should be transparent.
It should be an option. You pay higher prices. But the community gets more control. And for a smaller city, that’s a fair choice to make. For a metropolis, it’s not.
What cities have unchecked growth in the last fifty years?
Yes. Agreed. I liked the civic engagement. With the Target thing though, opponents were just a bit hypocritical. Davis residents were already going to a Target: they were driving to Woodland or Vacaville for their serious shopping.
That assumes there even is unchecked growth, and that’s very much not true. I think you missed the point of the game.
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This misses the HN guidelines by a wide margin. Please review and consider a more constructive critique.
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Regarding the comments about the jargon file...
Something definitely changed around the dot com crash. The channels I slummed around in of EFNet went from excited hacker archetypes to the same people doing jobs I was am in retrospect surprised about [0]
[0] - Im general, emulator devs working for bigger corporations. But most specifically one that wound up doing stuff around customs intrediction tech, major shift from their pre emulation work.
Money destroys everything it touches eventually.
Line at the end of the in-game "rulebook":
> Every rule, vote count and case in this game is drawn from the public record. Sources are in docs/research/ in the project folder. Neighborhood politics scores and the economics are simplified for play.
Nice, I'm happy to hear that, Claude. This kind of silly game is supposed to help you understand a complex issue in a fun way. But this is missing the plot entirely. Why is this so overwhelmingly complex? Why would I spend time learning this ugly, convoluted and verbose UI? Who is this for??
EDIT: I'll link to an example of what I think this game should have been: https://research.wmz.ninja/projects/phd/index.html
A game made with intent, that is easy to pick up, respects its player's time, and makes its point effectively.
This runs into the reality that the game maker knows who his target audience is, but you don't. If he wants to make a spreadsheet simulator or something targeted at people who like complex interfaces he can do that. I point at ASCII-UI Dwarf Fortress, one of the great games of this century, as evidence that a game does not need to be accessible to be true art.
It is frustrating to be excluded when a game developer builds a game that looks interesting but targets a niche you don't fit in.
Also those https://research.wmz.ninja/projects/phd/index.html style games are a bit vapid. At any moment a person has more than a handful of choices and the simplification abstracts away the important ones, like ranking what ideas are important or changing strategies for idea generation in this one.
Except Dwarf Fortress is an actual game, and I've sunk a lot of hours in it. Same with the city builders TFA is trying to mimick.
> Also those https://research.wmz.ninja/projects/phd/index.html style games are a bit vapid.
I agree, but please try to engage with what I'm saying. Both the PhD game and TFA are made with the goal of teaching an issue to a broader audience. Do you think TFA is an effective tool of communication? Don't you think its messaging could have been better conveyed had it been designed with more intent, less focused on piling on feature after feature for a game that isn't designed to be replayed more than once?
Both TFA and the PhD game should be considered "educational", people won't come back to those again and again because of how fun they are. They're designed to appear in HN feed, be played once, learn maybe a thing or two in an amusing way, and never be opened again. Do you understand now why I find this complexity so counter-productive? It's fine for a game to be complex, if it's designed for players that will sink hundreds of hours into them. It's not fine for a silly project to demand the same learning effort from its players.
> This runs into the reality that the game maker knows who his target audience is, but you don't.
Have you considered that TFA was vibe-coded, and maybe the "game maker" hasn't put much thought into who his target audience could be, like, at all, and just asked Claude to make a game about NIMBYism?
> the PhD game and TFA are made with the goal of teaching
The PhD game came across as a blog post masquerading as a game. The city-building one was fun even if you ignore the lessons it's teaching. (You don't have to read the news articles. They're cleverly written, however, and so sort of fun to.)
> Both the PhD game and TFA are made with the goal of teaching an issue to a broader audience.
I mean, are? It looks like it might be trying to create a San Francisco housing simulator. Simulators aren't necessarily tools of education. That's why I picked DF as a comparison - it is a Moria siumulator, but it isn't supposed to educate its players on the nature of Tolkien. It is more about exploring a complex environment.
And the PhD game doesn't look like it is going to teach anyone anything. It reads to me like some guy blowing off steam without having much of substance to say. Which is also fine, it just isn't much of an educational journey.
You're implicitly assuming that you have determined the target audience and goal of the game. And while you might be accurate, you might also be inaccurate. There is a decent chance that the target audience is people who look at this and think "ooh, cool". It is great fun to criticise games but claiming that a game is in the wrong genre altogether is just a bit much for me today. If you don't like this genre that is cool, but the game maker might just be doing his own thing and having fun.
> Have you considered that TFA was vibe-coded, and maybe the "game maker" hasn't put much thought into who his target audience could be, like, at all, and just asked Claude to make a game about NIMBYism?
His target audience could be himself, in which case he's probably got a deep understanding of who they are and whether they enjoy the game.
> Why is this so overwhelmingly complex? Why would I spend time learning this ugly, convoluted and verbose UI?
My guess is that's the point - now you understand how San Francisco property developers feel.
> Who is this for??
Like most vibe coded projects, it is for the person who created it. And usually only them.
These people should, instead of posting the game, just post a video of them playing through the game, as most people have no interest in playing other’s slop but may just be curious to watch someone play and provide comedic value.
...I enjoyed playing it. It's silly. But it's in a similar category as "Papers, Please." It's not like it's stressful, there is just a bunch of random diabolus ex nihilo crap flying at you, which isn't particularly unusual in a game.
It's a throwaway joke about NIMBYism, not a triple-A blockbuster production.
You've completely missed what my comment was trying to convey. If it's throwaway, why is it so damn complex to play? I've seen AAA games with less features.
It's easier to make a complex UI than a simple one!
For equal feature sets, sure. But what I'm saying, and what you also missed, is that this game should have never been this complex in the first place. This complexity is doing a huge disservice to the message it's trying to convey.
It’s not complex. You’re just getting old?
I honestly don’t see what you’re going on about. If this was made five years ago we would have standing ovations. It’s the AI, right? I think it is great. It was fun to play. Your phd game example is boring as hell.
I actually was surprised I liked this convoluted bureaucracy. Reality is fighting you all the way, love it. Normal games are too straightforward. That said I assume it was just a toy project.
> what I'm saying, and what you also missed, is that this game should have never been this complex in the first place
I respectfully disagree. I played it twice. Once, I lost. That cued me into looking at a few more datapoints the second time around, when I made it through.
I never wound up looking at everything. I didn’t need to. That said, I could probably improve my score if I did.
You can play most games to completion while ignoring the complexity. If you want to dive deeper, however, that complexity is fun. I certainly appreciated uncovering little details around how the various metrics played together, and how, in turn, that affected how I should play.
I don’t think any of these people arguing with you are trying to understand or learn.
Convey it better then
But is the UI harder to use than building housing in San Francisco?
You seem to have completely missed the point.
I think that may be exactly the point.
No, I do not think fighting the UI is part of the point this game is trying to make. I'll give a good example of what such a game should be: https://research.wmz.ninja/projects/phd/index.html
There's no reason a "housing crisis" game couldn't have been done like that, with simple choices and immediate reactions. A game that respects the player's time, is easy to pick up and makes the point effectively.
Any simplification hides real problems and takes away from the point. Even your desire for simple choices and immediate reactions elides the fact that not every policy decision has visible short term effects. Some are only visibly beneficial or harmful in the long run, and may not end up that way depending on other decisions.
Do the simplifications in the PhD game (https://research.wmz.ninja/projects/phd/index.html) take away from the point that finishing a PhD is pretty freaking hard? I think not!
That game is more of an idle / clicker game, and while I quite enjoyed the one from a few months ago about being a SWE in SF, the shtick wears thin quickly especially if you’re not in the niche that identifies with all the in-jokes.
link to the SWE one?
FAANG Simulator: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48836778
If the thesis of the game is that there's too much paperwork and regulatory burden, a simpler game would have to just tell the player "there's too much paperwork". This game--whether you liked it or not--is a lot more effective by showing you. You are the (simplified) bureaucrat, not a choose-your-own-adventure player being told that the bureaucracy is dense.
I really do think that complexity and UI obtuseness was implemented as commentary, not as a mistake.
Eh, your example is a different kind of game. Not into linear choose-your-own-adventure games myself. I think the UI of this one accurately models the many moving parts and forces in the process it's simulating, and I didn't have a problem picking it up though I skipped the tutorial. It has a sense of humor (read the speaker comments at meetings, and the news articles), and hits you with the real world outcome each development is based on. Made an impact on me.
"I didn't understand this, so I had an AI make this so that you couldn't understand it too"
> Why would I spend time learning this ugly, convoluted and verbose UI? Who is this for??
Tell me you never played the old TUI dwarf fortress without telling me.
Well, you should seek a better tell because I've played ASCII Dwarf Fortress quite a bit. Re-read my comments, I only have an issue with TFA's complexity, in the context of it being a throwaway educational game. It shouldn't require as much involvement from the player as it currently does. And certainly, it shouldn't even occur to people to compare it to Dwarf Fortress, which happened twice already.
You know, if an old city with a natural boundary doesn’t think you should build a bunch of profitable crap in it, maybe you could take the hint and stop acting like you’re bringing Jesus to them. San Francisco’s seen the conquistadors. In fact, many of the streets in the Sunset are named after them.
> maybe you could take the hint
Locked supply. Affordable housing. Growing standards of living (or population). Pick two.
If you lock supply and want taxes and wages to grow, you're choosing unaffordable housing. That's San Francisco's current policy choice. Over decades, it filters the poor to San Francisco's "outer boroughs" or onto its streets.
For what it's worth, my friends who lived in San Francisco "took the hint" and moved out when they chose to have kids. They didn't sell their place, however, since the above policy mix together with California's property-tax system strongly disincentivizes that.
Ah, blue city progressivism: "Welcome to my country! Now get the fuck out of my city."
Also, note that these cities always happily welcome more offices and businesses. They just don't want to build the housing for those workers to actually live in.
That's of course an option too.
I haven't played OP's game but hopefully it accurately models the plummetting quality of life and rampant homelessness created by doing what you describe in the real world.
Or you could look at the massive number of homeless people and take the hint yourself
Reminds me of this: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1259638112688304129
I have absolutely no idea what that means related to my comment, but I’m really enjoying seeing my opinions getting roasted for being out of touch.
Basically a CA politician told Musk to go fuck himself, he replied "message received" then shortly thereafter moved billions of dollars of tax revenue, jobs, development etc. out of their jurisdiction by moving his base of operations to Texas. All very viral / in the news.
You can tell people not to build in your city, just don't expect them to continue investing there if you fuck them over.
Yeah, how DARE people under 40 want somewhere to live!
I remember before COVID I was debating with a friend of mine whether or not private property is justifiable and it's ironic that the discussion was made obsolete by nobody being able to afford private property anymore
The justification of private property is that we don't have a proven and workable alternative at a civilizational scale.
Singapore is a pretty good example of an alternative.
Should states be under corporate ownership or what do you mean?
https://blog.landeconomics.org/p/singapore-economic-prosperi...
Someone still builds housing in Singapore. Can't live in it if you dont build it.
You misunderstood their point. Singapore has mostly public housing, instead of private.
let me guess, homeowner in SF?
I’m a single family homeowner in SF and as YIMBY as they come. And contrary to my goals of development even if it deflates home prices, development lags and home prices are getting more out of control.
I mean, stopping housing construction hasn’t stopped the new money from pushing out the old soul. Given the US enshrines the free movement of people in the Constitution, it’s make room or have someone outbid you for yours.
Yes, lets turn everywhere into the shitty place we grew up in.
It is possible to grow in a pleasant way without mallification, seems like a lot of projecting. And it’s not like the current approach is preventing that; insanity is trying the same thing over and over and expecting different results.