alt Hacker NewsHistorical inaccuracies aside, when making a game it is essential to frequently stop and ask, “does this make the game more fun?”
A lot of realism mechanics make gameplay dreadful, boring, tedious, or frustrating. A simulation is one thing, but a game is another.
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Reminds me of an old joke from The Onion
https://theonion.com/ultra-realistic-modern-warfare-game-fea...
Precisely; the reason for omitting many realistic elements is because they would be boring. If I wanted to play through all the steps of plowing a field, planting the grain, irrigating the field, dealing with weeds, harvesting the grain, and hauling it to a market to sell I would play Farming Simulator. If I'm playing a city builder, I'm perfectly okay with those steps being reduced to "plant crops, wait for crops to grow, harvest crops", and to have workers auto-assigned to those tasks while I'm laying out roads and palisades.
Also, having my village randomly wiped out from time to time by events beyond my control (plague, wars, etc.) would be realistic, but no fun at all in a game.
Never let realism get in the way of game play :)
Incidentally, when I last played Banished there was a loophole in its simulation and you could just build a few modules consisting of like 3 or 4 basic buildings and that solved all your survival problems with no need for later intervention.
Gamers gonna optimize.
Same for why sim city didn’t have parking
The article does address this directly at the end, for what it’s worth.
I had a discussion with my son son about recent (2015-2019) Need For Speed games I worked on. He asked why we didn't include keeping track of fuel and actually stopping to use the gas station like in real life (in game you just drive through and it repairs your car). And why don't repairs require you to leave the car for a few days and cost tons of money?
I told him it would be annoying rather than fun and negatively impact the pacing. It wouldn't work well in our specific games.
Actually, during development there are always so many interesting ideas which don't pan out because they wouldn't actually be fun. Some even get built then scrapped because it didn't work as well as one would think. That's the kind of thing you'll often see internet forums bring up framed like "why didn't the devs think of this?!"