While this is certainly clear for media like cartoons, action movies, Mortal Kombat, and Doom, SimCity was touted as an educational tool for children and an accurate model of reality throughout the early to mid 1990s. I was in elementary school at the time. Parenting magazines and journals as well as the broader media claimed as much. A friend of mine growing up who absolutely loved SimCity is a real life city planner now. I have fond memories of playing SimCity 2000 with my father.
If you really want to know when I realized that the real world doesn't work like SimCity, it was when I was in college and I started actually paying attention to the news and what was going on in the cities and towns I lived in.
If you really want to know when I realized that the real world doesn't work like SimCity, it was when I was in college and I started actually paying attention to the news and what was going on in the cities and towns I lived in.