Mirroring the top-down principles currently regulating the built environment, the only type of city that these games allow you to create is a modernist, technocratic, grid-based, North American city. More than anything else, however, city-building games serve as an object lesson in how not to use games to design our future cities. City-building games such as SimCity and City Skylines seemingly prompted the player to build ‘the city of your dreams’. The genre was established in 1989 with SimCity and, unlike most video games at the time, it relied on the player’s sense of creativity and desire for control over aggressivity and competitiveness. These games are referred to as “simulations”: in the case of city-building games, the player simulates the role of architect and ruler of a city, designing its growth and managing its fictional communities. City-building games, for instance, first emerged as a distinct genre in the early 1990s. That video games can play this role is arguably nothing new. As such, gamespace can be used as a testing ground to design our future cities, a place where utopian thoughts are elaborated and experimented, an artificial arena where there are no rules except those set by the programmer.

Video games, bringing together the worlds of computation, narrative and experiential space in one medium, are becoming a new model of architectural representation. Yet this wild fantasy of conceiving a whole new universe can be realised in the virtual gamespace.

Piranesi’s words sum up his monumental sense of grandiosity and bravado and, unfortunately, that of many much less visionary architects. “I believe that if I were commissioned to design a new universe I would be mad enough to undertake it.”

Virtual city building games