SimCity BuildIt is a city-building simulation and strategy game. This mobile game is the latest version of the SimCity franchise. The game challeges users to build their own city that gets more and more complicated. Playes need keep citizens happy and, therefore, need to reduce pollution and build parks for example.
Environmental motifs are woven directly into the core loop through a system of pollution radii and sustainability-themed ‘tiers’. The game forces players to choose between cheap but dirty infrastructure and expensive, green alternatives, creating a tangible trade-off between short-term growth and long-term city health.
The most explicit example is the Green Valley, an unlockable region specifically themed around sustainability. Players can build ‘green factories’ and ‘eco shops’ to produce regional items like recycled fabrics, reusable bags, or climate-friedly shoes. Unlike standard industrial zones, these buildings emphasize principles of circular economy. The ‘organic food’ service and ‘weeping willow’ forests provide massive population boosts, rewarding players for maintaining a lush, low-pollution environment.
The game furthermore involves a progression system where early-game choices are environmentally damaging but affordable, while late-game choices are clean but costly. Players start with cheap coal power plants (12×12 pollution radius) and must save up for wind power, solar, or fusion (which cause no pollution but have significantly higher cost per unit of power). Early on, players use the small garbage dump, which has a 10×10 pollution radius, and later upgrade to a recycling center or omega recycling center, which completely removes the pollution impact. If a residential building were to fallf within a “pollution radius,” citizen happiness plummets, potentially leading to abandoned buildings and decreasing tax revenue. This forces players to either ‘ghettoize’ industry in a corner of the map or invest in expensive green technologies to integrate utilities closer to the city center. It also intrinsically promotes a rather techno-optimist perspective on pollution mitigation, framing it primarily as a technical challenge and one that must be made economically viable.
The “happiness” feedback loop further includes aspects of environmental literacy through citizen happiness as a central metric. Placing parks and other landscape elements like ponds or forests provides a ‘population boost’ of approx. 5%–20%. While sending a positive signal, this design choice also frames ‘citizen satisfaction’ in a rather utilitarian manner, as it leads to attracting more Sims and increasing the tax base. Accordingly, high-value upgrades like skyscrapers can only be built in areas with high land value, which is driven by proximity to green spaces and the absence of pollution; while plausible on a basic level, this system ignores the ecological impacts of large-scale construction projects like skyscrapers and popularizes ideas like green growth, which e.g. Hajer and Oomen1 interpret as ‘scripts’ designed by economic interest groups to influence and possible even impede effective climate policies.
Finally, the game has featured limited-time “eco-events” like design challenges and Mayor’s Pass seasons with environmental themes. For example, the “Green City” design challenge required players to meet specific bonus goals such as covering all residentials covered by parks or building a minimum of 3 landscape buildings. These events help frame urban greening not as a luxury but as a fundamental requirement for city optimization, despite the aforementioned simplication and techno-optimist subtext.
- See Hajer, Maarten A., and Jeroen Oomen. 2025. Captured Futures: Rethinking the Drama of Environmental Politics. Oxford Scholarship Online Political Science. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/9780198955382.001.0001. ↩︎