Game Information
| Title | The City |
| Presenter(s) | Greg Austic |
| Session | Play the Past: Where Meaningful Play and Digital Humanities Meet to Talk |
| Time | Thursday, October 18, 11:00a-12:00p |
| Location | Gold A |
| Format | Game Exhibition |
| Description | The City is a table-top game of coopertition with a variety of unique mechanics and components. The players' goal is to build a community by moving 12 characters into a new city. To accomplish this goal, players have to develop land, build houses, and deliver electricity to them - using real power lines, LEDs, and supercapacitors for storage. Interesting components of The City are:
1) Shared and limited resources of food and wood result in a series of prisoner's dilemma type interactions between the players. This causes players to develop cooperative (or competitive) mores in each game. Different players will dramatically shift the direction and tone of the game. 2) Players develop intuition about simple electronics by cranking a hand crank generator to light up LEDs on the board (distribute power to a power grid). They associate how long the LEDs are on with how much cranking was performed, how many supercapacitors were installed, and the voltage and current in the circuit (measured by an attached arduino). 3) The game ending conditions are not simply win/lose. Either everyone loses, or one person wins (ties are acceptable, so people can also tie). As a result, there is constant tension between cooperating enough to not lose, but competing enough to win. 4) The entire game is open source and the development of the game is available at http://austiclabs.com/wordpress/games/the-city/. Anyone will be able to download and make the game themselves with illustrations and parts lists provided on the site. |