This interview with SimCity designer Stone Librande has stuck with me. While doing research for the game, Librande was faced with quantifying our land use decisions.

When I started measuring out our local grocery store, which I don’t think of as being that big, I was blown away by how much more space was parking lot rather than actual store. That was kind of a problem, because we were originally just going to model real cities, but we quickly realized there were way too many parking lots in the real world and that our game was going to be really boring if it was proportional in terms of parking lots.

Stone Librande, SimCity designer