Tri Risma Rismaharini, the beloved mayor of Surabaya affectionately known as Bu Risma, earned the love and support of her citizens by making her city a vastly better place to live over the last five years. Among her accomplishments, she has vastly improved the quality of government services, created new green spaces, streamlined bureaucracy and she’s even known for getting out of her car to manage traffic herself if need be.
To many observers, it seems like Bu Risma (who has been ranked one of the world’s greatest leaders by Forbes) has an innate sense of what it takes to create a properly functioning city. But it turns out, she got quite a bit of her city management know-how by playing a video game.
While speaking about the importance of young people working in creative industries at last weekend’s PopCon Asia event in Jakarta, Bu Risma won the hearts of adoring geeks throughout Indonesia by explaining her love for the legendary computer game SimCity.
“As old as I am, I still like to play games, you know, but games that stimulate my emotions and stimulate the mind, games like SimCity,” Bu Risma told the PopCon audience on Saturday, as quoted by Detik.
Risma explained that playing the incredibly detailed city simulator (which requires players to balance everything from budget concerns and property zoning to power supplies and environmental damage) helped her think about city planning in a holistic way, carefully considering the full impact of each decision she made.
“Yes, I learned a lot from SimCity, it forced me to think comprehensively. For example if the city is not developed in an appropriate way, the citizens will protest in the game. You can’t build an airport if you don’t have enough people living in the city. You want to buy this or that but there’s not enough money to support it,” she explained.
“In SimCity, I have to organize the city in a comprehensive manner, I have to think about all sectors.”.
Frankly, we think it would be an excellent idea if every Indonesian politician and government official had to play hundreds of hours of SimCity and prove they could build sustainable, properly managed virtual cities before they were allowed to muck about with real ones. (But of course the cheat codes would have to be disabled, government officials here already use too many cheat codes in real life.)
