The complexities of designing at the scale of a city could take years to enumerate, but with Block'hood, a game where players design neighborhoods in various modes of complexity with over 80 pre-set blocks, it takes only minutes to start encountering these challenges first hand. Developed and designed by Jose Sanchez and Gentaro Makinoda, Block'hood's players are encouraged to think "ecologically," which is to say, designing an environment that not only sustains itself but can work interdependently with other neighborhood designs. If a design does not have enough resources, it can become victim to decay. 

The perpetually evolving game, which has its public launch March 10th, has five modes: "Sandbox," which allows players to build a resources-constrained neighborhood without any particular goal in mind, "Challenge" which limits the number of blocks and resources a player can use to construct a neighborhood, "Education" which focuses on real-world city problems, "Research" which incorporates real information while allowing players to use the game as a research tool, and the free-for-all "Modding" which essentially invites players to use their imagination. 

The multi-player function was the major inspiration for the original design of the game, conceived as a method to allow as many people as possible to participate in designing a city.