3 Major Life Lessons I Learned From Playing SimCity BuildIt
Nope, defending your city from a giant monster is not one of them!
I can’t quite remember when I began playing SimCity. My older cousin used to bring a bunch of games to my house and play them on my computer, so naturally I’d watch him play. I believe this was the first time I laid my hands on SimCity.
From the get-go I was obsessed with the game and played it on and off for several years until adulting hit me and I completely chose other means of entertainment at the expense of gaming.
What is SimCity? It’s a series of open-ended city-building video games, first published by Maxis in 1989. It’s very popular and even used in education to stimulate the idea of urban planning for students of all ages.
What I loved about these games (and still do!) was creating cities, mostly only up to the point where I ran out of money and thought my city couldn’t be salvaged.
Fast forward almost two decades later, I began working at G2A.COM and realized I’m quite behind on games. To get myself back up to speed, I decided to play SimCity again.
Unfortunately, Macs are not game-friendly and no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t get it to work on the big screen. But, there’s always mobile gaming — so I opted for SimCity BuildIt.
Although it’s not the same as running the game on the desktop (sigh), it somewhat did the job. But now as an adult I see this game differently. When I was younger, all I cared about was building a large city that thrived and didn’t go bankrupt. Now, I care more about the economics, people’s satisfaction with the city and overall, a healthy balance between what I can afford as a mayor and what I need to let go of.
Here are three major lessons I learned from playing SimCity BuildIt:
1. Planning ahead is key
The moment I began playing, I thought I had a good plan in mind on how to position all of my buildings and city services. Although the game allows you to move buildings around, it’s oftentimes not a smart idea. Moving a residential building from one place to another may cause a decrease in population of that building, which translates to having less money from the City Hall at the end of the day.
The beginnings are not that difficult, but if you don’t plan ahead, you will probably find yourself in a pickle later on once your city expands. Budgeting is important as well. What if you need a new police or fire station but you have no money for it, because you spent it on buying schools?
This greatly compares to what happens in adult life. You can’t always predict what will happen. Having a plan B is always a good thing, but so is being aware that certain problems can arise in the future.
2. Oh, I want this. But do I NEED it?
There are endless possibilities on how to spend your simoleons in SimCity. You can make a nice river with a romantic bridge over it, you can buy a statue of some character no one cares about or you can even make a beautiful design with roads, which is impractical anyway. Just because something is visually pleasing does not mean it’s practical for your city.
Same goes for situations in life. You can be a fancy Joe, drive a brand new Mercedes while stomping on the gas pedal in your latest Balenciaga’s. All while still living in your momma’s basement and living paycheck to paycheck, spending money on luxury items you don’t really need. Or you can be a savvy Joe, who bought a ten year old beat up Honda, but is already almost done saving up for a huge down payment on his own apartment. SimCity is largely about priorities, and so is life.
3. Learn how to be patient…or just pay for it
Once your city is up and running you’ll realize certain things will take time. Making steel is just 60 seconds, but it takes 7 hours to produce electrical components. The more you advance within the game, the more materials you will need to make other things.
For example, in order to make beef (which takes 2 hours and 15 minutes) you will need three animal feeds, each taking 6 hours to make. Since factory production goes on simultaneously, to put that beef in your storage you will need 8 hours and 15 minutes total. To make a burger, you’ll need beef, a bread roll and a BBQ grill. All of these items take time, so giddy up with your patience…or pay.
If you don’t want to wait for these items, you can always pay for them with SimCash. Don’t be fooled, though: bonus chests rarely have SimCash. The game made it possible for you to buy SimCash with your own real money and spend it on the game.
If you don’t have patience and have a knack for spending moolah instead of practicing the “things take time” mantra, you may end up spending a lot. And these production things or buildings don’t come cheap.
In real life, money definitely helps. Don’t want to clean your house? Pay someone to help you out. Don’t want to wait for your shipment? Pay extra for express shipping. In SimCity BuildIt, you can’t just magically pay to unlock things that are unavailable to you — same goes for real life. But what you can do is pay for the things that will speed up the process.
Although SimCity BuiltIt (and pretty much any other game, in fact) is a wonderful way to get away from the real world, I believe there’s plenty of life lessons you can learn from a lot from it. Whether it is about budgeting your expenses, picking your priorities, learning patience and so much more, games are a great way to get to know your personality and see if what you do in games applies to what you do in your daily life.
