More than anything else, however, city-building games serve as an object lesson in how not to use games to design our future cities. Mirroring the top-down principles currently regulating the built environment, the only type of city that these games allow you to create is a modernist, technocratic, grid-based, North American city. These city-building games function according to modern approaches to urban planning and design: totalising, single-handed and heavily reliant on zoning as an urbanistic tool. The question of the limits of growth is perpetually delayed and the natural environment is represented as nothing but a commodity, a pre-partitioned blank slate ready to be taken over - failedarchitecture.com