Games like SimCity just embody the assumptions that are designed into them, and there's no reason to think the designer was any more prescient than anyone else.

After all, if they could predict the future, why did they design a game rather than get rich in the stock market?

▲

beanshadow 16 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The user probably isn't suggesting the designers of SimCity are prescient; it's just that the assumptions that are designed into these games are clear reflections of the social perspective at the time. Assumptions like these tend to have inertia through time, and the user is likely just pointing out their surprise at the change.

▲

bhouston 16 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I am not saying that SimCity predicts the future, rather I had assumptions growing up in that period, probably similar to everyone else at the time, that Nuclear and Fusion were the future of energy. It is cool to see that shift so soundly to solar in just two decades.

▲

pfdietz 16 hours ago | parent [-]

It's useful to go back and figure out why you believed that. Treat it as debugging your thinking. Others were saying, even back then, that nuclear and fusion had predictable economic problems.

▲

bhouston 15 hours ago | parent [-]

SimCity 2000 with Fusion plants was released in 1993. To predict that solar would do this back then is asking a lot - this graph doesn't even start in 1993:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/installed-solar-pv-capaci...

▲

pfdietz 15 hours ago | parent [-]

Fusion was predicted to be an economic nonstarter at least a decade before that.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20782346

(Needless to say, I don't have a high opinion of current fusion start ups.)

And fission already had the financial fiasco of the first nuclear build out in the US.

Solar could have been predicted to get really cheap, if one had heroically projected its experience curve into the future. A lot of people chickened out doing that, even Greenpeace.

▲

bhouston 15 hours ago | parent [-]

This is a ridiculous demand to make of an early teen in the pre-internet era. You know how hard it was to get information on arbitrary subjects back then like this?

	▲	pfdietz 15 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That's fair, but it's also fair to ask the now middle aged person to understand their youthful errors, and to reflect on what other errors they made and might still be making.

▲

sheikhnbake 16 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

They predicted they had a better chance of getting rich off the game as opposed to the stock market