Conclusion

SimCIty 4 does not directly emulate traditional notions of community and identity through the fictions it's simulation generates but community and identity are readily apparent in it's presentation and biases inherent in it's model. Furthermore a significant fan community has formed around the title, which continues to generate community-driven content to this day.

Unfortunately there are more limitations within SimCity, that make simulation of communities difficult. For example, sims only commute to and from work and social gatherings, be they religious or festive or otherwise are completely subsumed in the economic model of the game. The green park may offer recreational use in real life but like the nondescript House of Worship, these cultural and ritual functions in regards to the fiction established by SimCIty's algorithms are exhausted in the buildings static effect on the metric of surrounding landvalue. In the same manner tourism is abstracted away within the commercial demand meter, only to really be explicitly mentioned in the tooltip description for airports and some reward buildings, as far as I'm aware, inspite of tourism being a significant factor of local economies in many parts of the world. One consequence of this is that "Gentrification spreads like a contagion, though in the simulated world of the CBG [City Building Game], displacement is generally of no consequence." (Bereitschaft 56) The human cost of poverty and economic displacement simply disappear in the number crunching of the game's mechanics and with it the potential to critically reflect many issues excarbated by the neoliberal model on which SimCity operates.

And inspite of the game being explicitly situated in an American context, it does therefore has to leave out vital issues specific and relevant to the wider cultural understanding of the specific spaces SimCity depicts and iterates to keep the assumptions about it's economic model intact. Especially, and this cannot be stressed enough, how issues of poverty, income inequality and race relations correlate in the American cultural economy and urban landscape. However:

The incorporation of unique racial and ethnic
identities within simulated cities would certainly add to
their complexity and realism, though perhaps not necessarily
to their entertainment value. (Bereitschaft, 56)

In this context SimCity can still an absolutely valuable depiction of the American city as a physical entity whose activity does affect it's surroundings and in return itself, even if this process is reduced in physical and social complexity. It's feedback loops of pollution, health, education, crime and hapless citizens eternally travelling back and forth do paint the picture of breathing, living world, even if the assumptions about that world are flawed, incomplete and biased. SimCIty does demonstrate a vision of the world then, not as it really is, but rather of a fictitious facsimile of it as some people imagine it to be and in this regard SimCity may still be able be fun and informative if we remain aware of it's postulations and limitations.