IBM CityOne Is A Real-Life Urban Planning Game

Tweet

For those of you who complain that SimCity is not realistic enough, you can try IBM’s CityOne “serious” urban simulation game that will be unveiled on 4 May at the IMPACT 2010 conference in Las Vegas.

On Monday, IBM announced that CityOne will be similar to SimCity but the problems are real faced by real cities today. So don’t expect UFO attacks or being able to resurrect statues.

IBM has labeled CityOne as a “serious game”. Trust me, it’s certainly “serious” from what I gather after watching the trailer. The 60-second clip seems like an advert for The Apprentice rather than for a fun game.

IBM hopes that the game will allow players to “discover how to make their cities and their industries smarter.” It aims to target urban planners, students, academics and those who are curious on the more serious side of urban planning.

Some of the issues the game looks into include overcrowding, inefficient resources, stagnant business growth and other environmental and logistical problems.

CityOne will be officially unveiled tomorrow at the IMPACT 2010 conference. The game will be available online for free this fall. Not much details are given about the game play but IBM mentions that:

One mission involves a city where water usage has increased at twice the rate of population growth, supplies are becoming strained (and possibly polluted); the municipality is losing as much as 40 percent of its water supply through leaky infrastructure; and energy costs are steadily increasing. To complete this mission, the player would be challenged to institute a Water Management System that would include accurate real time data to make decisions on delivering the highest water quality in the most economical way.

It would be interesting to see if a player would stumble across a real-life solution whilst playing CityOne. Will you be playing CityOne this fall?