The conflict and challenge at the core of the game is a refreshing one for me as a medievalist. This village consists not of millions of people but, instead, tens, or-after many successful hours playing-perhaps a few hundred. It was quickly heralded by many game critics as a return-to-form for the city-building genre, where the player is simply asked to build a medieval village. Banished: Raise tiny medieval people, and watch them starve.īanished was released in February of 2014 by a one-man game studio. The successful Strongholdfranchise is a testament to this trend, where, in only the medieval context, the city-sim was replaced by the castle-sim.Īnd so it was no small interest that I recently began playing Banished. Medieval cities, it seems, were less interesting as whirring, dynamic urban centers, and more interesting as fortifications against plundering hordes. That is, until this guy showed up to ruin everything:īy contrast, city-Sims set in the Middle Ages typically restored the external conflict. The fundamental challenge was in creating a perfectly-balanced system, where each of the metaphorical gears would run in time with all the others. In short, by contrast with the vast majority of games then and now, there were no bad guys to shoot, no race cars to overtake, no bosses to defeat, no princesses to save. The remarkable thing about the gameplay of SimCity was its lack of external conflict. Other companies also took up the mantle, often asking their players to build cities in exciting historical locales: Pharaoh for ancient Egypt, Caesar for Rome, Tropico for the 20 th-century Caribbean, and the Anno series had titles set in 1701, 14. And Maxis went on to launch a number of sequels (though the shambolic failure of the most recent iteration has threatened to derail its future), as well as a number of other Sim-games ( SimEarth, SimLife, SimAnt, SimFarm). SimCity’s breakout success made its makers at Maxis a household name among many gamers. SimCity is the great-granddaddy of them all, of course, and many kids in my generation wasted plenty of recess hours hunched over a computer program which, somehow, managed to make urban planning and civic zoning fun. One of the most venerable genres of computer games is the city-building simulator.

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