There is a whole sub-category of video games in which the goal is to build and manage a city by accumulating resources and making decisions of various kinds. Historically, these video games – the most famous of which are those of the SimCity series – have often aimed at the greatest possible growth, almost always to be obtained with the maximum accumulation of resources and the construction of buildings and infrastructures of all kinds. For some years, however, it seems that even this type of video game has had to adapt to the times, given that many are presenting premises and game dynamics of a completely different type, in some ways more ethical.
These new dynamics are certainly partly due to the need to always present something new and as original as possible. But, as the English version of Wired wrote, they are also the result of a sort of “crisis of conscience of their developers”, who are in their own way dealing with the need to tell about new models of the city and, more generally, propose new forms of growth other than the constant construction of something new.
The textual ancestors of video games in which you have to manage and build a city arrived already in the sixties and it is from 1978 Santa Paravia and Fiumaccio, one of the first games of this type, set in Renaissance Italy. The first SimCity, which inaugurated a long and successful series, arrived in 1989.
But it is above all between the nineties and the 2000s that the games of construction and management of cities, islands, villages or communities have had a great diffusion. From the more technical ones to the more frivolous ones (for example those of the Tropico series, in which you play as a Caribbean dictator), from those with more or less contemporary cities to those with cities set in the past or even in the future (or in the Space, as in Surviving Mars), from those where you are a sort of mayor to those where you look more like a deity. Generally these games work with a player who, from his screen, looks down on the city whose fate depends on him, and often they are very similar, at least as regards the main objectives of growth and success.
According to Wired, in recent years, however, there has been “a new wave of games that have reinvented the genre and moved away from the build-produce-grow formula sanctioned more than thirty years ago by the first SimCity.
One of the most obvious examples of this new trend – which may also exist because in the meantime the technology available to those who create them has obviously improved – is Terra Nil, a video game (not yet released) that was presented as a construction game at on the contrary, in which instead of building a city, a land that is by now arid must be revived. In another, Frostpunk (which is already known to have a sequel), the aim is to survive in an icy world, managing the scarce resources available.
– Read also: Twenty years of The Sims
Wired also cites Airborne Kingdom – a game that was initially conceived as a hotel management simulator but which then took a completely different path and became “a video game about a flying metropolis that tries to bring together a shattered global community” – and Ixion, a game scheduled for 2022, which will revolve around “a circular space city built by a company that in some ways resembles SpaceX, to save humanity from an exhausted planet”.
Then there is the even more extreme case, due to its originality and its symbolic meanings, of The Wandering Village, which is part of a sub-genre of games (often small and independent) in which the cities to be managed are cities that they move in space, and which according to Wired are “nomadic fantasies that combine awareness of what the future could be with the utopian or satirical visions of twentieth-century architects and futurists”.
In The Wandering Village – which has yet to come out – players will have to manage a “human” settlement based on the back of a giant creature, known as Onbu, which moves freely in a world contaminated by mysterious toxic spores. For the settlement to develop and thrive, however, players need to make it develop a symbiotic relationship with the creature, because if the creature dies, the inhabitants of the settlement die too.
