The Museum of Modern Art’s inclusion of fourteen video games in their new “Applied Design” exhibition is a worthy, forward-thinking gesture, but as an exhibit it doesn’t quite work. To make any sense at all, games need to be not just played but played seriously, with a sweaty, childish abandon totally unlike the cool passivity of an art viewer. Tucked into a corner of MOMA’s sleek architecture and design gallery, the games seem bedraggled, and (during my visit at least, and with the crucial exception of a few children) were played only tentatively. Some of them—hardy classics like Pac-Man and Tetris, and the minimalist Canabalt, which uses just a single button—remain vibrant even in these inhospitable surroundings. Others less so: the French science-fiction side-scroller Another World (originally known in the U.S. as Out of This World) is one of the most elegant games ever made, but played here it seems drab.

And some games weren’t allowed in at all. These games—most notably the immensely popular SimCity, as well as its lunatic homemade successor Dwarf Fortress—were deemed “too complex or too time consuming,” and are represented only by noninteractive video displays. This is about as satisfying as looking at pictures of food, but it is also in a perverse sort of way a real tribute: these games are still too big, too stubbornly new and strange and mysterious, to fit into a museum just yet. They can’t be sampled; you must surrender to them.

Designed by Will Wright, who had made only a single previous game, and first released in 1989, SimCity casts the player as a slightly supernatural city planner, laying out roads and power plants and building zones in a simple, brightly colored interface with a distinct resemblance to MS Paint. You choose tax rates and ordinances from a series of menus, and try to balance traffic and property values and pollution and dozens of other factors on the way to creating a successful city—with the definition of “successful” rather up in the air. It has no “end,” no plot, no set goal: you play until you are bored, or until your city seems to you to be perfect or maimed beyond repair. Along with its increasingly pretty and complex sequels (the 1994 SimCity 2000 is the one chosen for “Applied Design,” and a new version of the game has just been released), it sold over eighteen million copies, and was, as John Seabrook wrote in his 2006 New Yorker Profile of Wright, “arguably the single most influential work of urban-design theory ever created.”

SimCity also demonstrated a new way to conceive of video games. Most games provide players a linear narrative, and a series of what are essentially tests—of reflexes, logic, resource management, or brute perseverance—that the player must pass in order to proceed along the game’s narrative. What Wright offered was a set of tools, and a world in which to use them. Instead of tests and rewards, it gives us something deeper and more meaningful: options, and consequences.

The course of a game of SimCity is a vast, proliferating expanse of decisions and results. How many hospitals does a residential area need? Why is no one moving into the new development? Is a coal power plant worth the pollution? What if there were more parks to balance it out? (And is that really how pollution works?) What will calm these rioters—more police, or lower taxes?

The successful player of the game of consequences is not an action hero, bursting through obstacles and defeating enemies, but a heroic manager, the kind of hero David Foster Wallace found (or really, that Wallace’s “Infinite Jest” avatar Hal Incandenza found) in Captain Frank Furillo of the TV show “Hill Street Blues”: “a hero of re-action…. He is a bureaucrat, and his heroism is bureaucratic, with a genius for navigating cluttered fields…. A ‘post’-modern hero, a virtuoso of triage and compromise and administration.” SimCity, candy-colored and user-friendly, beloved by children and installed in elementary schools, was in this way actually one of the least fantastical video games ever made. It turns out that many eight-year-olds would choose Robert Moses over James Bond sometimes.

The great lesson of SimCity, the fact the game was built to display, is the delight of city life, of urbanity in general. Even failing cities are beautiful in SimCity. Their streets are straight and well kempt, their deserted building zones are clean and peaceful and full of possibility. The colors are bright but not garish: the water blue, the land a flat green, the roads a soothing gray. The view the player has of them is from exactly the right height: close enough to see the bustle of the cars and trucks, the charmingly repetitive irregularity of the buildings, but too distant to see crime, pollution, frustration, or failure as anything more than slightly disheartening abstractions. It looks a bit like an animated tourist map, complete with color-coding, oversized landmarks, and a peculiarly American inattention to parking. The public mood can plummet, but there is never any depiction of the human suffering endemic to even successful urban areas. Pollution is tracked, but it has no long-term consequences.

Even when you are starting the settlement of the area entirely from scratch, what you are founding is always, and can only really be, a city, even when it has the population of a village. The vast fields and relative isolation and independence of rural life are essentially impossible to create in any sustainable way, and there is never any sense of a natural world displaced by the arrival of the metropolis. And though something reminiscent of suburbia can arise, it is an oddly antiquated, citified version of it, without the isolated residential enclaves and diffuse, distant commercial centers that often characterize it these days. It’s a vision of the city as existing somehow independent of its inhabitants: a city of buildings, not people; a city serenely, joyously inhuman.

More fundamental than this, though, is the very particular worldview that animates all the SimCity games. The world Wright gives his players is one defined by a constant flickering interplay between progress and equilibrium, a gentle utopia of possibility. Decay is never a real threat. His cities never die, and if left to their own devices they pretty much go on as they were. The closest thing to failure is a genial sort of rut, an inability to make the city grow and progress the way you’d like; excepting perhaps the aftermath of a nuclear power plant melting down, there’s never an irreversible collapse. Without extreme, juvenile levels of incompetence, you can’t fail to make or maintain a city, you merely fail to make that city great. It’s a commonplace that many urban planners found their vocation in childhood games of SimCity—and this at least rings true, for the game is nothing if not inspirational. Its world is infinitely soothing, its consistent message one of safety, surmountable challenge, hope, and stability.

The appeal of such fictional peace does have its limits, as it turns out. One can begin to suspect that all thriving cities look pretty much the same, that even the most successful equilibrium is simply boring. The popularity of “disasters”—the calamities, ranging from fires and airplane crashes to, in the more baroque later versions, locust swarms and U.F.O. attacks, that the player can purposely inflict on his city, or allow to occur randomly—bespeaks this creeping boredom. But it points as well to a desire to demonstrate the strength and elasticity of the world’s stability. These disasters are designed to be manageable. There is a never an unfixable problem, never a ruin that can’t be cleared and rebuilt. It is an almost comically American vision, a pure product of the Reagan dream: zero history, infinite future.