City-Building Video Games for Planners

Writing for Bloomberg CityLab, Allison Nicole Smith shares a list of the top video games for “wannabe urban planners,” but we suspect that you don’t have to be a wannabe to see the appeal of these games. The games are described in more detail at the source article.

1. Final Fantasy IX
2. Catizens
3. The Wandering Village
4. Disney Dreamlight Village
5. Two Point Campus
6. Floodland
7. Magna Graecia
8. Sim Nimby
9. City Bus Manager

Smith’s description of Final Fantasy IX is shockingly applicable to one of the biggest challenges facing contemporary planners:

Like many other online role-playing games, Final Fantasy XIV has suffered a housing shortage since a rebooted version of the original game came out in 2014. That’s because limited availability of in-game housing units meant only the richest and most well-connected players were able to secure property. That changed this past April, when the game’s developers released a long-awaited patch aimed at fixing the housing crisis. The fix was simple: Build more housing and restrict how many properties homeowners could posses. In this way, the real world is perhaps running behind virtual ones when it comes to affordable housing. 

The parallels between the real world housing market and the supply of fantasy worlds are really starting to pile up—a debate about capacity at Disneyland raised similar comparisons earlier this year.