Jim Rossignol (video game journalist, blogger, and occasional BLDGBLOG contributor, among other things) recently announced the start-up of an independent game development studio, Big Robot, as well as the first two games that studio is developing. I’m particularly excited by the second he’s described, which is currently (though likely not finally) titled “Walking City”. (That is, Rossignol confirmed, indeed a reference to Archigram. So you can see where I start to get excited.)
“I wanted to do something about the value of the future, and the value of cities, both of which seem, of late, to have been somewhat reduced in their placement on the stock market of our imagination. Creating a game that was about reclaiming a city came to mind, and this developed into something which will be both an interesting exercise in anti-dystopian playfulness, and an offbeat take on familiar ideas about strategy games. The Walking City is about starting with things in ruins. This is no blank slate, as you might expect with SimCity, but instead a catastrophe of cynicism and neglect. It’s about helping the people that remain in a collapsed civilization to pull themselves out of the hole. It’s also going to be a game about /influencing/ the people in the city, rather than simply telling them what to do, and it’s working on the idea that if you clean up and fix one thing in an environment than that will have a knock on effect for everything and everyone else in its area of effect.”
Obviously, the project is just beginning, but the thing that has me so excited about it is that it seems to me to be a game that is being explicitly produced to do what I have suggested games are capable of doing: producing critiques of cities. (Or, more accurately, of ideas about cities.)
