Video Games

GTA V Trailer Satirizes LA Planning And Construction

The new edition of the Grand Theft Auto series will parody LA, including its idiosyncratic planning landscape, which will feature avaricious developers, activist NIMBYs, and a oceanside dwelling starchitect.

4 November 2011 - 2:00pm

Curbed LA

Friday Funny: Unlocking the "City Planner" Achievement

Apparently in the horror first-person shooter videogame F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin for XBox, you can win a special "City Planner" achievement by -- blowing stuff up.

4 February 2011 - 2:00pm

YouTube

Building the Virtual City

Beatville is a new "open source, multi-player environment for real cities", which purports to be a useful tool for democratizing urban planning. Does it live up to the hype? Urban Omnibus checks it out.

28 January 2011 - 11:00am

Urban Omnibus

The Music of Planning

A website called "Isle of Tune" lets you build streets SimCity-style, with a twist- the houses and streetlights become musical elements in the sequence that you make.

20 December 2010 - 9:00am

TechCrunch

SimCity Goes Way Wonkier

A new video game has been released that has players trying to solve urban issues and make cities work better. Next American City columnist Christian Madera reviews.

12 October 2010 - 10:00am

Next American City

I'm Not A City Planner, But I Play One in Video Games

Today IBM is releasing a new video game called CityOne that reportedly is like SimCity but with more serious environmental and economic issues at stake. And yes, the gamer plays the role of a city planner.

4 May 2010 - 7:00am

Fast Company

New Orleans Overtaken By Zombies

Using a real city as the setting for a video game can be kinda touchy -- especially if it's a less-than-complimentary reimagining of the city as a zombie wasteland. Post-Katrina New Orleans gets the dystopian video game treatment.

8 December 2009 - 9:00am

Good

Nate Berg

The Urban Recruitment Center

Sat, 01/24/2009 - 17:59

The military has recently opened a new type of recruitment office known as "The Army Experience Center" in a Philadelphia shopping mall. It's like an arcade, where video games and other interactive technologies provide visitors a glimpse of what it might be like to be in the military. It's a new approach, one that capitalizes on the modern teenager's affection for video games to attract them to the military life. You could call it persuasive, cajoling, or even a thinly-veiled attempt to con kids with flashy games, but, as it provides exactly what its target audience wants, the bottom line is that it's very effective. Why couldn't a city do the same thing?

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