John Hodgman on the ‘Joy of Zoning’ in ‘SimCity’ 2013

One morning a month, Park Slope dad and erudite funnyman John Hodgman pours himself a cup of coffee and sits at his computer to do what he says is his favorite activity on earth: building a highly efficient alternate universe through the video game SimCity 2013.

His virtual kingdoms — with names such as New New Englandland and Pleasure Gnome — are built live for an audience that shares his passion for planning. Named in honor of Bob Ross’s public-television painting show, The Joy of Zoning is similarly whispery in tone, and Hodgman is a gentle guide to basic infrastructure. “Where were our poop dots flowing? Let’s take a look,” he says, leading viewers into a completely sincere lesson in where to build a sewage-treatment plant. (“A great time to zone with breakfast,” a viewer comments.)

Some of Hodgman’s gameplay is aesthetic. “I just want to make this a little bit more elegant,” he says while demolishing the upper levels of a high-rise casino to allow sims to see past it to a cathedral. But Hodgman is mostly playing by the game’s rules — building roads, mines, hospitals, schools, and housing to boost the population and its taxable income. (That “elegant” casino is “earning 40 simoleons a day,” he says.)

Before his next stream on Thursday, we asked Hodgman about his hobby, why he no longer builds libraries, and how virtual urban planning has become his personal “exercise in distress tolerance.”

Our conversation has been condensed for length and clarity.

I don’t think of you as a Twitch streamer. How did this start? 

As an only child, I have always enjoyed having complete control of my personal world, so imposing my design upon a whole city was very seductive to me. SimCity 2013 promised a more or less open landscape to organize and perfect. But the initial release was infamously buggy, and virtual men and women in hard hats were always yelling at me about my failures. The phrase, “medium-wealth workers needed” still haunts my nightmares.

Like so many things in my only-child life, if I couldn’t be perfect at it, I threw it away. I got sucked back in only a few years ago when I saw randomly that it was available again for download. But now my relationship to the game — and to perfection — is different.

How so? 

One day, I realized SimCity is a little like The Joy of Painting. Bob Ross would always laugh off his errors, turn a bad seagull into a cloud, whatever. He inspired me to try again, this time remembering, Those are not real people yelling at you. As with anxiety, you can acknowledge those intrusive voices and move on. Mistakes are not fatal.

I began to see SimCity as a morning exercise in distress tolerance. And I figured I could do what Ross did, but instead of painting happy little trees, I could murmur quietly as I zoned residential, commercial, and industrial districts in SimCity. Thus, The Joy of Zoning was born.

Were you already livestreaming your games? 

When our son was in middle school, he was wrapped up in Dan the Diamond Minecart. My first reaction was clichéd curmudgeon: “Video gaming isn’t sedentary enough, now you watch someone play the game for you?” But soon I saw that livestreams are like podcasts: a way to keep company in lonely times, a chance to hang out with your imaginary friends.

So I’ve been livestreaming in support of the spring pledge drive that funds my podcast, Judge John Hodgman, and our network. Now I can get a pretty good city going in about 90 minutes. And once my zoning, energy, water, sewage, trash, education, parks-and-rec, public-transportation, and specialized-industry tabs are green across the board, the thrill is gone.

Is this getting too easy? Is there even a challenge for you anymore? 

The real pleasure for me now is playing for and with other people. One time I learned someone in the chat had actually worked on the game. I got him to join the livestream and we zoomed in and walked down one of the avenues together looking at his cars and buildings. It was magical. But then I had to boot him. My job is to build a fake city here.

Part of the fun for me in watching you play is hearing a New York intellectual talking about cashing in on oil, developing casinos, and building jails. 

I gave up on trying to foster utopian artist communities on curving roads along beautiful seashores. Sims don’t care about shoreline real estate. They want increasingly expensive goods and services, and they want to get there fast on big roads that meet at right angles. Now, I am a monster. I’m extremely adept at laying out oil fields, holding space I might have wasted on libraries and reserving them instead for gas refineries.

SimCity is very much organized around resource extraction, wealth disparity, and police funding in ways that hit different now than they might have in 2013. But it’s just the rules of this particular game. You have to build up a bank of sims and simoleons (population and money) to subsidize the upscale tourist and college towns you build next door … where all the affluent sims enjoy the labor of their proletarian neighbors but never visit or think of them. It’s all very realistic, sadly.

Are you actually learning about urban planning? 

Over time, I learned the low-wealth zones especially need fire departments, the medium-wealth zones really need hospitals to thrive, and the high-wealth sims … well, they don’t really need a massive police station with a dozen cruisers and helicopters, but they get really mad when they don’t have one. That’s something to think about.

And one thing SimCity understands that NYC doesn’t is you need affordable housing. You need to have low-, medium-, and high-wealth residential zones for a city to be functional and healthy.

I’m not afraid to shake things up. But it turns out that moving fast and breaking things really only results in a lot of broken things very quickly. I wonder if that is applicable at all to the real world. Who knows.

Hodgman posts recorded sessions on the Judge John Hodgman YouTube channel, where you can find the livestream on Thursday, June 26, from 9 a.m. to noon ET. The Joy of Zoning is also on Twitch, X, Instagram, and Facebook.