Cities XL: Next Generation City Simulation

Thursday, June 18th, 2009 | Planning, Technology, Trends

Growing up, my first computer game was SimCity (the original).  Ever since then, I’ve become fascinated with cities and, more importantly, the spaces between our real cities and the virtual communities we create online.  I eventually ended up in the field of urban planning (unfortunately, it is not appropriate to release monsters on your city) and devote much of my mental and professional energy to imagining new ways to engage people around sustainability and planning.

SimCity is not the only game franchise giving users the ability to play with the economics, land use, and policy of cities, but it was the pioneer.  Second Life and a host of other massively multiplayer games have created online communities whose economic activity could match that of small cities and allow users to build communities as well as online social status.  Now, a new city simulation game, Cities XL, is slated to come out in September of this year.  Having just entered their private beta, they released this excellent teaser showing gameplay:

Cities XL will not only bring compelling graphics and gaming to your desktop, but will connect your city to thousands of others on massively multi-player “planets.”  I’m most excited to see how people imagine and re-imagine cities; I think it can tell us some things about the values and ideals people have about livable and exciting communities.  Could these games someday become platforms for civic design and engagement?  Folks at MIT think so and so do I.  I’ll explore this idea more in future posts, but I think it’s only a matter of time before we have platforms powerful enough to push compelling real-time visuals out to the public for interactive comment and design.

We’ve come a long way from SimCity.  What are your thoughts on civic design and the future of engagement?

Tags: cities xl, civic engagement, games, simcity, simulation

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