Before Public Affairs, there was Cities: Skylines.
I spent hours building cities and then doing something that may matter more: watching them move. Traffic flowed through roads I had drawn. Neighborhoods developed. Transit lines filled. Commercial centers emerged. A city became legible as thousands of small interactions produced by a few large design decisions.
The game changed how I looked at real places.
Cities often present themselves as facts. A highway is simply there. A neighborhood has the density it has. A bus route either exists or does not. Cities: Skylines makes the decision underneath the fact visible. Roads, zoning, transit, services, taxes, and public space produce behavior. The built environment is not neutral and it is not inevitable.
That realization helped lead me toward city planning and Public Affairs as a pathway to that. I became interested not only in what had been built but in the capacity to build differently. The beauty was not a perfect skyline. It was human coordination made visible: people creating systems large enough to support lives they would never personally know.
The game also satisfied the part of me that builds elaborate internal worlds. As a child, imagination created distant lands and fantasy histories. Here, imagination became infrastructure. The question was no longer only what a place looked like. It was whether the place worked.
Star Trek offers a future shaped by improved institutions. Cities: Skylines lets me experiment with the smaller decisions that might produce one.
The world is not only what is.
It is also what can be built.