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That's a common approach to using gameplay for rhetorical purposes; the fact that you can code causal processes as you want is one of the main ways you can get videogames to push a point.

As a more overt example, in the game Bacteria Salad [1], created after one of the E.coli scares, profits trade off directly against food safety: bigger farms are more profitable but also spread contamination more quickly. This may or may not be an accurate explanation of the causal mechanism (at the very least it's an oversimplification), but it's the causal mechanism the game's author has chosen to implement in an attempt to make a point. The author of that particular game also wrote a book about the use of games to make points like that [2], which this piracy mode seems like a good example of.

[1] http://www.persuasivegames.com/games/game.aspx?game=arcadewi...

[2] http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0262514885/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...

⬐ hosh

If so, then what about conflict and violence in video games?

I'm speaking less about the use of games as a rhetorical device and more about creating and reinforcing deeply held assumptions and worldviews.

I used to strongly object to rhetoric about how video game violence induces violent behavior in people; I thought that was bullshit coming from people who were scared of video games or did not understand them. It's been years now, and I have deeper (relatively speaking) understanding of the nature of conflict and violence. There are relatively few RPGs or shooters that give you the option of completing the game without killing vast numbers of monsters. And I haven't seen any where you can do things like, actively spend experience points or sacrifice your powerups to resolve conflict. People want to feel more powerful by beating up bigger and bigger monsters.

There are other interesting deep beliefs such as the notion of fairness. People get very, very upset when the game seem to cheat. People have gotten upset at games like Corrypt, when things don't seem to work the way they think it should.

⬐ gyom

It's a good point to raise because we are used to accepting violence (it was in movies and television that existed before modern video games).

I remember listening to a video online where the person explained how the american army had problems with the use of torture on TV because it always worked on TV when Jack Bauer needs it. New officers came in with these preconceived notions about torture because they had "learned" from TV that it worked (without saying it was moral or not).

⬐ vidarh

Sim City is another good example of this. Even as a child when I first played the original, I remember reacting to the tax model in the game and how it affects net migration, as it was nothing like what I knew from Norway (and indeed, it bears little resemblance to how things works in most of Europe). A newspaper in Norway recently had to social economists play the most recent Sim City game to review the economic model, and their response was pretty much that they saw it as what in Norway would be considered a far right populist fantasy based on a range of economic assumptions that pretty much only the furthest right party in our parliament believes in.

So to successfully play the game, you will need to accept a range of economic theories far outside the European mainstream, that to a certain extent is directly contradicted by real-life experience. I found that unsettling even at an age when I didn't know much of the politics, given that the manual even of the original presented it as a simulation and went into great detail about the techniques they'd applied to make the simulation more realistic...

⬐ mjn

That's pretty interesting; I knew there was some criticism of SimCity's simplified tax model in the U.S. some years ago (a simple inverse relationship between tax rates and business growth), but the Norwegian analysis sounds quite interesting. Any idea where I might dig up a reference to the article?

I think in SimCity's case it was probably not intentional, at least originally. The first version of the game seems to have just been Will Wright coding up some ad-hoc city-simulation rules to make a fun sandbox game, not him trying to make a point about urban planning or economics on purpose. But nonetheless these interesting assumptions end up in there.

⬐ AnthonyMouse

>I knew there was some criticism of SimCity's simplified tax model in the U.S. some years ago (a simple inverse relationship between tax rates and business growth)

Isn't that pretty much accurate? I'm not aware of any serious theory postulating that raising taxes will have any non-negative effect on economic growth in and of itself.

Where it breaks down is once you account for what the tax dollars buy. If government takes $5000 from you but provides $6000-equivalent worth of health services (which it may be able to do through economies of scale or reduced transaction costs or solving a collective action problem etc.) then you have a net gain of $1000 rather than a net loss of $5000.

Imagine bifurcating the result: In one scenario, your country is the beneficiary of the efforts of a large international charity, you get $6000/citizen worth of health services without collecting any tax dollars from your population. Second, your country collects $5000 in taxes from each citizen and then sets the money on fire, or gifts the money to an international banking cartel in exchange for nothing whatsoever. Does anyone care to argue that the second could somehow be preferable to the first?

Which brings it back to the conservative position, which is that governments through incompetence or corruption will tend to convert $5000 of tax revenue to something less than $5000 worth of services to the population, resulting in a net loss to the economy and the country's people.

What so happens to be true as a factual matter is that a) governments can strike the balance in either direction depending on how well they're managed, but b) that the larger a government is, the more likely it is to allocate resources inefficiently, because as size increases economies of scale reach diminishing returns while the attention of legislators and their ability to perform due diligence is spread ever thinner over an expanding scope of government projects, leaving more opportunities for mistakes and corruption.

I always thought it would be an interesting experiment to eliminate 90% of federal spending but not lower federal taxes whatsoever, just give the money to the states whose residents paid the taxes, with no strings attached (i.e. the feds serving only to enforce uniform taxation and inhibit jurisdiction shopping), and letting the states individually decide how to spend the money. You can imagine a significant reduction in corruption: California residents would no longer be paying a pro rata share of the cost of boondoggles in Massachusetts (or vice versa), and Massachusetts residents may decide they don't want them either if they have to pay the entire cost out of their own pockets.

⬐ mjn

There may be some kind of relationship, but it's almost certainly not a linear one. I don't think I could summarize the research on the subject (there is a lot, and it's not my area), but it seems to strongly depend on the business, stickiness of various quantities, the specific tax rates, and other factors.

Part of the problem is that economies are basically nonlinear dynamical systems, and nonlinear systems tend to have lots of strange feedback loops and attractors, where varying some inputs rarely has a simple (or often, even predictable) effect on system dynamics. An analogy might be fluid flow: high-level generalizations you might make about fluid flow are typically right only in specific flow regimes, and wrong in others (due to effects such as switching between laminar and turbulent flow). For example, if you can assume flow is always laminar, then increasing the pressure-drop across a length of pipe increases the flow rate. But increasing the pressure-drop can also induce turbulence, which may decrease the flow rate. I think most macroeconomic generalizations that assume things like "lower taxes are better for business" ignore system-dynamic effects like regime-switching.

The main point, though, is that SimCity just posits a very simple relationship, rather than attempting to build a realistic model of the economy grounded in scientifically valid empirical data. This can have some propagandistic effects of basically defining a certain causal relationship as true, which may or may not be true in reality, but happens in the game's virtual world as defined. In practice, SimCity probably just did that for ease of coding and playing. An incredibly complex city simulation where your actions had unpredictable, very indirect effects, and random chance or exogenous factors or just hard-to-explain stuff overrode your policy decisions on a regular basis, might not be very fun to play, compared to an ultra-simplified world with predictable rules. But it's interesting to think of rhetorical effects as well.

⬐ AnthonyMouse

That sounds like a complicated way of explaining the broken window fallacy. "Maybe the economy will be better off if the glazier has the money because he will spend it better than the butcher whose window was broken." In specific circumstances that can really be true, but in general there is no reason to expect it to be, and unless you somehow know that it is, breaking the window is more likely to cause a net loss than a net gain.

I think the "economies are complicated" explanation is the wrong one for the point you're trying to make. If you can't predict what's going to happen, and taxes usually (but not always) result in lower growth, you're usually going to lose by raising taxes. And when taxes are broad-based, this is very likely to be the case indeed. Take "usually" and average it over enough repeated iterations and you get something that looks a whole lot like "always."

The place you can win just by raising taxes is where you set out to tax something that it would be economically beneficial to destroy through economic disadvantage. For example, one of the problems with sustainable energy has always been that they could achieve cost parity with fossil fuels, but only by gaining economies of scale that they couldn't do without first achieving cost parity, so you have the chicken and egg problem. If you tax fossil fuels at a sufficient rate then that in and of itself solves the chicken and egg problem, which allows sustainable energy to increase economies of scale and become even less expensive, in the long term even less expensive than untaxed fossil fuels (especially when accounting for externalities). I assume this is what you're referring to as regime-switching. But you don't, as a general rule, get that sort of thing by imposing broad-based taxes or specifically taxing anything that you wouldn't like to discourage the consumption of, you get it by correctly predicting the outcome of a targeted tax and intentionally destroying something undesirable through taxation. (Which I don't think Sim City allowed you to do.)

⬐ jacoblyles

IMO a lot of "European" economics consists of focusing all attention on the very unusual special circumstances in which it is wise to conduct the left-leaning politics that envious populists prefer and ignoring reality.

I remember seeing lessons from an economics class in Germany where the first lessons include conflict between capitalists and labor and the negative effects of income inequality. In America, we start with basic supply and demand models.

⬐ mjn

My point is more that SimCity doesn't attempt to model a complex dynamical system at all. It just defines certain aggregate relationships as true. That approach can be fun for a game, but also encodes ideological assumptions— not facts, but simplified models.

If you try to build a dynamical system as the model, things get weird very fast. Even in simple ones you can build as toys, there is a lot of system-internal behavior: there are feedback loops, oscillations, attractors. Minor changes can have significant counterintuitive effects, if they dampen or excite various resonances in the system (which we're assuming here is a stand-in for "economics of a city"). That kind of Sim City I'd be very interested in. :)

But would it be a fun game? Quite possibly not: players really tend not to find complex and chaotic simulations very fun, when the knobs affect the outcome in ways that are too indirect. Chris Crawford found that in a few of the games he made: a lot of players found Balance of the Planet, which tried to model all sorts of complex ecological effects, frustrating at best.

⬐ KVFinn

>If you try to build a dynamical system as the model, things get weird very fast. Even in simple ones you can build as toys, there is a lot of system-internal behavior: there are feedback loops, oscillations, attractors.

They kinda sorta tried this in SimCity 5 and it's at least partially responsible for how broken the simulation is at this point. They ended up having to hack in a bunch of things to keep it stable and it is still producing some bizarre results a couple of months after release.

>But would it be a fun game? Quite possibly not: players really tend not to find complex and chaotic simulations very fun, when the knobs affect the outcome in ways that are too indirect.

It's pretty fun games like Dwarf Fortress. You can essentially trace the downfall of an entire Dwarf Civilization to pet cat dying and setting off a ridiculous chain of events. I think it helps that the expectation coming into that game is, "Losing is fun." so players roll with it.

⬐ jdechko

Yes, but in SimCity you play the part of the government. So if you only collect $5000 in taxes, but provide $6000 in services, you lose. Ideally, government should be break-even, where services rendered = taxes collected, at least on the small-scale microeconomics of SimCity.

Even still, the above doesn't work out because you are responsible for providing city infrastructure as well, which costs money up front. If you don't collect tax revenues, you can't afford to build new infrastructure without going into debt.

You know, forget everything I said. It's a simulation game with only lose ties to real-world economics. It doesn't have to make sense.

⬐ pandaman

>Does anyone care to argue that the second could somehow be preferable to the first?

Mind that this's not my own PoV but from what I've been taught in school in the USSR and read in the modern liberal media the general idea is that it depends.

If you just take 5K from every man, woman and child then it's not good. However if this is just the average number and you take more from the "rich" and less from the "poor" then the communists argue that you reduced the wealth disparity and the value of this could easily be over 6K per person.

⬐ lolcraft

Frankly, it's clear you have very much a microeconomics-based of the macroeconomy, all accounting identities and no feedback.

To begin with, there has been made the case that progressive taxation does, mostly, not mean a significant negative behavioral response in production. That is, taxes can in practice be increased a lot until the rich start fantasizing about going Galt. [D&S] estimate the optimal tax rate, for maximum social welfare, for the richest to be at 70%. It's now about, what, 20%? Citizen Romney paid 14%, and the Great Capitalist still behaves like a little bitch, whining about his being oppressed and all.

You also don't seem to take into account elasticity, the decreasing utility of money, or any notion of optimizing social utility. If I'm Bill Gates, I could not give enough of a shit that you taxed from me $5k dollars, or even $500k. But, use that to pay for nine or ten heart surgeries, and suddenly social utility is increased by, I would guesstimate, 100x (total lifetime earnings of those ten people, starting after surgery). Even if 20% of that is embezzled.

Also, there's not really any empirical support for a inverse relation between business taxes and economic growth. It's just one data point, granted, but we could take as an example Bush's years. Massive tax cuts, but very poor growth.

[D&S] http://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.25.4.165

⬐ jvrossb

The relationship gets even more complex because, along with going Galt, simply moving can be a viable option. If moving to Bruxelles from Paris is really easy, the impact of higher taxes in France vs Belgium may be felt very differently than if a) it were more difficult to move or b) there are no places to move to with lower taxes.

⬐ raverbashing

Exactly

There's a point where packing and leaving is easier. And the richest the people, the easier this is.

Governments have to realize that, at a certain point, they are in competition with other countries. Multinational companies and rich people come to mind.

The rich can pay their way through most of the immigration burdens that prohibit the average joe from moving (yes, even to the US)

⬐ mjn

One thing that's interesting is that this realization can itself push multiple ways. Denmark has for the most part concluded that the country is, in effect, a little company in competition with the rest of the world. But it's not only (or even primarily) competing for rich people. Rich people in themselves are just some finite wealth. More importantly, Denmark is competing for market share in various markets, such as services and high-end manufacturing. In some of those markets, just like in tech, a higher-cost, upmarket strategy may be superior to a lower-cost, compete-on-price strategy. So it may be worth goign with higher taxes and a highly educated workforce. I wrote a bit about that elsewhere on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5548497

⬐ AnthonyMouse

>So it may be worth goign with higher taxes and a highly educated workforce.

The missing piece is that you don't always have to choose. If the low tax rate attracts businesses (or even just causes corporations to arrange to report all their profits in your jurisdiction) you may end up with quite a lot of revenue even at the lower rate.

The key to that game is convincing all the other countries not to play. If you have low taxes and no one else does, you win. If you and all the other countries have low taxes, all the countries lose and the corporations win.

The U.S. strategy is kind of interesting: The corporate taxes are nominally really quite high, but the largest corporations (i.e. the ones best able to leave or rearrange holdings) don't actually pay them.

⬐ jtbigwoo

Only certain types of rich people can pick up and move like that, though. Moving to a new country or even a new city means leaving behind the business connections and infrastructure they've built over the course of years and years. You'd have to be one of the idle rich or work in an industry that is location-independent and knowledge-based. That doesn't describe most rich people.

You're absolutely right about the ability of the rich to buy their way to the front of the immigration line, I just don't see it happening in significant numbers.

⬐ dllthomas

Sometimes the money can move instead of the people.

⬐ fennecfoxen

Sometimes even if the money doesn't move away directly, some entirely unrelated money ends up somewhere else building factories, and then somewhere-else starts competing with you and taking away large slices of your business.

⬐ dllthomas

Sure, but that has less to do with tax rates.

⬐ fennecfoxen

Depends on how much the tax rates raise the price of labor or impair profitability (and limiting future investment on account of a lack of return).

⬐ dllthomas

I'm not saying tax rates have no impact; obviously they can. But taxes levied to addressed collective action problems, where people are actually seeing a return on the taxes paid for things they'd have to fund otherwise, should in fact make labor cheaper. This is also usually dwarfed by things like exchange rates, wages (possibly including minimum wage laws), cost of living, and labor laws - most of which also have interconnections. It's no longer a simple equation in the way that "Hm, my money will be taxed less in that pile than this one" is.

⬐ csense

The rich may not physically move their bodies, but what about moving business operations to tax-friendly locations? Especially if you only do it on paper?

What about the flight of manufacturing from the US, c. 1980-2000?

⬐ stfu

Since you are already turning this into a partisan politics meme spouting bash fest, I just wanted to point out that Obama paid last year a 18.4 percent tax rate [1].

[1] http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/04/13/us-obama-taxes-idU...

⬐ Evbn

Obama didn't say his tax rate was too high, so that isn't relevant.

⬐ Evbn

Plus ~5% for the income deducting effect of donating 25% of income to a charitable nonprofit not under their control.

⬐ mjn

Seems like yet another data point in favor of the viewpoint that taxes on the rich in the U.S. are far too low. That goes for Obama, too!

⬐ Houshalter

Doesn't mean it isn't too high. The US didn't have any income tax for most of it's history. It started a hundred years ago at only 7% on the richest.

⬐ AnthonyMouse

>That is, taxes can in practice be increased a lot until the rich start fantasizing about going Galt.

The problem is not that they stop participating in the economy, the problem is that higher taxes induce more economically inefficient behavior solely for the purpose of tax avoidance. Corporations will engage in whatever contortions necessary and waste enormous resources and engage in otherwise-irrational activities with billions of dollars behind them solely for the purposes of reducing taxable income. If you can spend a billion dollars to save $1.2B in taxes then corporations will do it. So corporations hoard assets in offshore subsidiaries because repatriating it causes it to be taxed and issuing it as a dividend causes it to be taxed again, but doing neither allows the shareholders to take the profit as share price appreciation which can be tax deferred indefinitely and even then comes in at a lower rate. Result is that corporations like Apple end up as de facto mutual fund managers even though their business expertise has absolutely nothing to do with that. The amount of inefficiency caused by making poor (or just excessively conservative) investment decisions with billions of dollars per corporation is difficult to even imagine. Then there is the matter of jurisdiction shopping, so again, the problem is not that they stop engaging in economic activity, the problem is they move across borders, and each instance of that causes you to get 30% of nothing instead of 20% of something, meanwhile the businesses that stay are put at an economic disadvantage (or reduced economic advantage) against their foreign competitors.

>You also don't seem to take into account elasticity, the decreasing utility of money, or any notion of optimizing social utility.

That's because we're discussing business growth. And D&S have the opposite problem: They try to account for utility to the taxpayer (though they go on to assign that value to zero for high income earners), but they never account for the investment value of money. When a business owner pays more in taxes and in so doing has only enough earnings to reinvest into opening three new facilities instead of four, the owner may not have any change whatsoever in standard of living, but the employees who would have worked at the fourth facility might have a different opinion.

D&S also calculate the "optimal" tax rate as the one that generates the most revenue from high income earners, which ignores the essential question of whether the government can make more economically productive use of the money than the private sector. They punt on the question by assuming that because high earners have a lower marginal utility for the money than low income earners, shifting the tax burden at any given spending level toward high income earners will always result in a net gain in social utility, but that falls apart pretty quickly because the lowest income earners already have a negative effective tax rate. So that assumption devolves into the idea that redistribution of wealth has positive social utility and we should always take from someone who has more money and give to someone who has less money to take advantage of the social utility gain, i.e. naked Marxist rhetoric with no economic basis.

>If I'm Bill Gates, I could not give enough of a shit that you taxed from me $5k dollars, or even $500k. But, use that to pay for nine or ten heart surgeries, and suddenly social utility is increased by, I would guesstimate, 100x (total lifetime earnings of those ten people, starting after surgery).

This is a perfect example because of what Bill Gates actually does with his money. If you take $500k that could have gone to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Bill Gates may not give one damn about the money, but what about the people he was going to buy mosquito nets for? And what if the government spends the money building F35s that don't fly rather than on heart surgery?

>Also, there's not really any empirical support for a inverse relation between business taxes and economic growth. It's just one data point, granted, but we could take as an example Bush's years. Massive tax cuts, but very poor growth.

Why are you assuming the result of low tax rates would be seen immediately? A business doesn't always decide to build a new facility when taxes change, they just decide where to build the new facility based on what prevailing tax rates are. You might also want to look into Chamley and Judd (as discussed in D&S at 14), regarding the consequences of taxing investment earnings that would have been reinvested. The short version is, because investments collect interest with exponential growth, taxing would-be investment capital has an exponential cost to the economy if future earnings would always be similarly reinvested.

D&S go on to discount this because most families or individuals will eventually choose to consume their savings rather than continually reinvesting their earnings forever, but that doesn't really apply when the entity collecting the earnings is a publicly traded corporation, and even for individuals the original reasoning still holds to extent that earnings are reinvested.

⬐ rmc

Even in European countries that are much more laissez-faire than Norway has tax rates much higher than in SimCity. A friend here in Ireland¹ noticed that the income tax rate can only go up to 20% in the original, and at that rate, the population were very annoyed.

[1] Barack Obama refered to Ireland as a tax haven recently http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/obama-forced-to-retract...

⬐ winthrowe

I think that the reason that the taxation rates are capped like that is that they represent a regional differential. You'd be annoyed too if your taxes were ten percent higher than a neighbouring town for no discernible reason.

⬐ raverbashing

I think Sim City only is concerned with municipal rates.

Well, in Ireland if you don't earn "too much" (less than +/- 32k€ per year) your (governmental) tax rate is 20%

⬐ vidarh

I think that assumption is "tricky", in that Sim City lets you control a lot of things that would not come out of municipal budgets in most European countries, and this is part of what makes it unrealistic from a European perspective.

The limit is actually ludicrously high if you consider municipal taxes. E.g. Norway has a tax load of somewhere around 40% (which includes the effect of up to 25% VAT - the income tax rate for most people is substantially lower), but only 12% of tax revenue, or 5% of income, ends up back in municipal coffers. The rest is spent in regional or national budgets.

Of those 5%, maybe 3% actually is income taxes, and they're outside the control of the municipal government.

So if we are to see it as municipal taxes, the limit is ridiculously high, from this perspective. If we are to see it as income taxes, or total tax load, it is way too low.

But even the idea that the municipal government can control tax rate to that extent, and has that wide latitude in where the money gets spent is (fairly far) right wing from a European perspective.

⬐ wahsd

SimCity and many other similar games are often biased towards American ideals, techniques, and methods. They are, in essence, confirmation biased. A good example is the tax structure, i.e., taxes automatically mean drag on an economy. The problem with such assumptions is that they are supremacist in that they make a broad assumption that they are definitive in spite of all the evidence in the real world to the contrary and while ignoring factors that lead to the confirmation bias being affirmed through externalities that support what is defined and determined to be "success".

⬐ Evbn

Taxes are very rarely considered good. Spending projects are often good, and they balance out or exceed the pain of taxes (we hope)

⬐ mynameishere

Get out. The characters in Simcity put up with tax rates that no human ever would. The default is like 8 percent muni. And they'll put up with them even if you don't have a single school or police station.

⬐ None

None

⬐ vidarh

But being able given that level of control over tax rates at the municipal level, and that level of control of funding to municipal services, is far right fantasy land in European politics - setting tax rates is largely the domain of national governments, and a lot of what is under municipal control in Sim City is budgeted centrally in pretty much every European country, in part to enforce more equal provisioning of services.

Separate municipal tax rates is pretty much absent from the political discussion in much of Europe, because it largely doesn't exist - local budgets tends to be handed out as grants from central government. Decentralizing this is seen as dangerous because it would jeopardize the provisioning of services that are expected to be available equally to everyone. To the extent that municipal taxes exist, they tend to be very low and tied to specific limited services under local control.

When Thatcher introduced the Poll Tax in the UK, which is what eventually morphed into the current Council Tax - the UK's version of municipal tax rates - it was a shocking development that even contributed to rioting (though to be fair, in part because the way it was created also explicitly disenfranchised the homeless). But even today, a large part of UK council budgets comes from central government.

⬐ ijk

Ironically, when it first came out, SimCity was seen as very left-wing because of things like the dominance of public transportation in the model.

⬐ saraid216

It's worth recognizing that the American center is pretty far right of the international center. So a Norwegian right wing could very well be our left wing.

⬐ fetbaffe

But Norway is the last communist state, so it should not surprise anyone of that comparison.

⬐ troels

That's a ridiculous claim, but even if it were true, it would still not detract from the point. Quite the opposite, in fact.

⬐ michael_dorfman

It's a reference to a famous quote by Sweden's trade minister in 1999, who said "Norway is the last Soviet State"

⬐ troels

Thanks for the clarification.

⬐ onemorepassword

This may not so much be a matter of culture or ideology, but just a matter of game simplification.

⬐ benpbenp

I would be interested to hear more detail on this as well. Keeping in mind we are talking about taxation on the municipal level, doesn't it make sense that a tiny, not-so-special town will have difficulty getting away with higher taxes?

You say "it was nothing like what I knew from Norway." Does that mean in Norway you can have one crappy town charging 20% municipal taxes next to another crappy town charging only 10% municipal taxes, and this will have no effect on which town people want to live in?

I am not too familiar with the exact dynamics of the game, but I would think that as your SimCity becomes more awesome, higher taxes can be levied because people want to live there for other reasons. Is this not the case? I hope these social economists weren't just arguing, "taxes are high in Oslo, and there is no shortage of people who want to live there!"

⬐ vidarh

I should say that I haven't played Sim City versions since Sim City 3000 myself.

The main criticism was actually not the tax rate, as much as the model. In most of Europe, most tax money flows to the national governments, and large parts of the municipal spending then flows back out from the national government earmarked for specific areas, such as education.

In many cases municipal governments have no power to alter tax rates, or are bound to a very limited range.

In many countries most tax revenue also comes from VAT, rather than income taxes, and highly progressive taxation is a large part of the discussion of income taxes. Just the idea of having a single setting for tax rate itself in the original was/is something you would occasionally find advocated from far right parties, but never the European mainstream.

You would also tend to see larger infrastructure projects funded by regional or national governments, rather than coming out of municipal tax revenue.

Of course a lot of this would complicate game mechanics, and so it might be considered "just" a simplification, but it creates a model that from a European perspective is bizarre.

⬐ notahacker

I haven't played the latest version of the game, but the easiest way to achieve a nice SC4 city with full of shiny buildings, cleantech and high approval ratings was to levy much higher percentage taxes on low incomes than high incomes (thereby driving all the poor out of your city). And without those pesky low income Sims your city would continue to do just fine. That's almost as much a of a far-right fantasy as solving suburban crime by placing police stations every six blocks.

⬐ Evbn

Do you get high population that way? Because that solution is highly effective for low population special taxing districts like Chevy Chase Maryland

⬐ srl

As far as I remember (SimCity 3000), you start out with taxes at like 7%, and you can get away with 9% when your city is small, but when you grow, you have to /lower/ taxes (down to 1-2%, eventually) to keep things stable. Which makes sense from a game design perspective (there are enough hard things when you're starting out, without having to deal with obscenely low taxes), but doesn't have much to do with real life.

⬐ jtbigwoo

I always thought that was funny, too. In real life, large cities can actually charge much higher taxes than smaller cities (think New York).

⬐ tolmasky

This just seems like a (lazy) way to make the game harder as you progress. Instead of bosses you have to do more with less. I don't think it necessarily reflects any sort of deep political/economic reasoning.

⬐ Evbn

And an easy way to prevent massive revenue from unbalancing the game.

Remember that simcity is a socialist fantasy world: all development is directly purchased by central government. In the real world, zoning doesn't cost money, and stadiums are sometimes owner financed.

⬐ vidarh

This is amusing, as not even any social democratic countries have systems where funding of development is so decentralized as it is in Sim City - usually a substantial amount of infrastructure development is done by central government, rather than the municipal government which you control in the game.

Even in the US, neither the state or federal government has so little impact at the municipal level.

⬐ Houshalter

Well there is some truth to that. There are economies of scale. Infrastructure becomes more expensive as you have to expand it, but it can also get cheaper per individual.

⬐ vidarh

The realistic way of handling this in Europe would be grants from national government. E.g. Norway sees massive grants go to smaller regions (and actually preferential income tax levels for the northernmost regions, to get more people to live there), as certain services are expected to be available even if the local tax base could not support it directly.

Subsidizing maintenance of regional settlement has been a key part of Norwegian government policies for many decades, and is a generally accepted principle by parties ranging from the various communist parties (none of which have been in government for a very long time) to the conservatives. The only exceptions you find to this is far right libertarians.

This is a similar situation to many other European countries.

It is seen as a key way to maintain the heritage of the country. We talk of "cultural landscape" - very little of Norway is actually untouched nature. Rather most other than parts of the mountain-regions, including forests, have been tended to for centuries, in various ways, whether logging, agriculture or herding animals.

That's actually what I find interesting about it. Propaganda film has been written about and practiced extensively, and we have a pretty good idea of various ways to make it, as well as analyses of how to use things like juxtaposition/framing/pacing/etc. for propagandistic effect. But propaganda games are a pretty weakly explored concept, and it's interesting to think of how to use game mechanics (rather than just in-game dialogue) for propagandistic purposes, especially since that overlaps pretty heavily with grayer-area things like "expression" and "persuasion" (propaganda is just sort of the limit case of persuasion with some poetic license).

I'm not sure this is the best game in the genre, but it's an interesting entry. Here's one satirizing airport security from a few years ago, which I think comes off as a bit more honest in that its clustering of events is also more frequent than would be the case IRL, but it clearly positions itself as satire that's exaggerating to make a point: http://www.shockwave.com/gamelanding/airportsecurity.jsp

This is a pretty decent book on the subject, fwiw, but I think the area of game-rhetoric, of which propaganda games are a nice highlighting case, is still pretty open (and to me at least, more interesting than stuff like gamification): http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0262514885/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...

Submitted separately, a 2009 blog post analyzing six ways to use game mechanics for rhetorical effect (which can of course mean propagandistic effect): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3070404