In this extended short, City Beautiful takes on the old school classic SimCity from the perspective of a professional planner 20 years later. Along the way, City Beautiful provides pertinent observations of game play versus reality. — theurbanist.org

“if augmented reality really catches on, and an internet environment overlaid on our real world surroundings becomes common, what will be the rules around using that augmented space?" [...]

Could you sell, lease, or subdivide the digital rights to your own home, yard, or lobby? Could you extract a toll, tax, or commission from virtual usage? — bldgblog.com

Moscow City Hall has announced the launch of its own version of online game “Pokemon Go.” Russians will be asked to find and "catch" historical figures in the streets of the capital via an app called “Know Moscow.Photo.”

[...] people will be able to catch and take a selfie with [...] Yury Gagarin, Alexander Pushkin, Pyotr Chaikovsky, [founder of the first Russian university] Mikhail Lomonosov, Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Napoleon Bonaparte and the tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich,” [...] — The Moscow Times

Frank Lloyd Wright, level designer? That’s what artist William Chyr was thinking, from the moment he crossed the threshold at the Robie House...It was a rare IRL architectural excursion, as Chyr has been immersed in building the digital levels of Manifold Garden, his first-person 3D exploration game in which you defy gravity in order to walk up walls, fall through windows, and launch yourself from one side to the other of an infinite stepwell, [while] solving increasingly difficult puzzles. — Curbed

Although the game was simulating an environment from 1989, urban planners these days still run into problems trying to get officials to think about their city in the long run. Climate change and sea level rise is a very crystalline example of the way city officials get in their own way and set themselves up for larger obstacles later on [...]

Playing SimCity 2000 nowadays is a strange but wonderful way to realize what defines a city is not what it currently is, but what it could be. — inverse.com

[Cards Against Urbanity] works like this: One person plays a card that poses a question or fill-in-the-blank, like “The Mayor got in trouble for crowdsourcing ________”. Each other player plays a card that they think represents the “best” answer, like “The poor door,” “NIMBYs,” or “A stress ball shaped like Richard Florida.”

The first player chooses their favorite answer, many laughs are had, and at some point, if at least one player is sober enough to keep score, one is crowned the winner. — nextcity.org

Cities are everywhere. Billions of us live in them, and many of us think we could do a better job than the planners. But for the past 26 years dating back to the original SimCity, we've mostly been proving that idea false. [...]

And now, here, I'm going to take you on a whirlwind tour through the history of the city-building genre—from its antecedents to the hot new thing. — arstechnica.com

What would you do about the drought if you were Jerry Brown? A new 2-3 player board game by Bay Area-based graphic designer Alfred Twu allows you to play the politics of water in California.

Twu specializes in designing games that try and have fun with complex issues. Currently, he is developing one called “California Housing Crisis” that deals with San Francisco’s runaway housing costs, and he previously designed a fantasy map for a U.S. national high speed rail system that went viral. — blogs.kcrw.com

Different policy debates come into play throughout the game and the player is tasked with making choices that will affect the final rent – for instance build in high-cost neighborhoods, pay workers prevailing wages, expend public money to subsidize the building, or to give in and accept higher rents than desired. — chpcny.org

Welcome, Player 1! You can now play the classic arcade game PAC-MAN in Google Maps with streets as your maze. Avoid Blinky, Pinky, Inky, (and Clyde!) as you swerve the streets of some famous places around the world. But eat the pac-dots fast, because this game will only be around for a little while. — googlemaps.com

But the intricate fantasy environments imagined for games like GTA V may well prove more useful than they seem. Now the technologies and tools developed by this multibillion dollar entertainment industry are making changes in the real world.

John Isaacs, a lecturer in computing at the University of Abertay, is one of those exploring the possibilities of game engines. In 2011, he developed an urban mapping application for his PhD project. — theguardian.com

Florida State University College of Education's Fengfeng Ke, an assistant professor in the Educational Psychology and Learning Systems department, is creating a computer game called Earthquake Rebuild that encourages creativity in design and uses architecture to teach geometry and other math skills. Ke and her team of fellow educators have been awarded a $549,937 National Science Foundation grant to support the creation of this game-based learning platform. — news.fsu.edu

“Part of the research I did for that game is I went around to Alcatraz in San Francisco because I wanted to have a level where you break into a prison,” Chris Delay, one of Introversion’s co-founders said in an interview.

“I started working on how to simulate a prison and how it was going to work. It was then that it occurred to me that building a prison was quite good fun, and that it shouldn’t be, but it is.” — business.financialpost.com