One of my favorite games of all time is Cities Skylines. In this game, your goal is to build a city by managing infrastructure such as piping, electricity, roads, public transport and zoning in order to support a growing populace. Here there are a tonne of game mechanics such as managing water consumption and waste processing, overcoming traffic bottlenecks, managing education levels, natural disaster prevention, noise reduction and trade. One of the more interesting mechanics I will focus on is the amount of skilled and unskilled labor your city has. For example if you want to have your agricultural district boom, you first must have a surplus of uneducated workers otherwise educated workers will be significantly unhappy being forced to work on farmland. Likewise if you only have office/white collar districts and an uneducated populace you will have no labor supply for your city. Consequently your city will start hemorrhaging money for the upkeep of office space and construction. Education levels are managed by controlling the number of schools, highschools and universities that are built within a residential district. Therefore education mechanics in Cities Skylines ultimately manifests in a dynamic where a player must loosely manage the size of educated and uneducated populations and mirror this in terms of the amount of blue collar and white collar industry. This dynamic results in an aesthetic that is challenging. This is because you will not encounter this problem until your city becomes quite large and industries become diversified. Overcoming this challenge brought great satisfaction and enjoyment for me. The slow increase of challenges as population levels rise manage this aesthetic extremely well and is one of the reasons why so many players get hooked onto this game!
