On 16 November 2009, police found the distended body of a 60-year-old man in the Chicago river. It was Michael Scott, president of the Chicago Board of Education. A single, close-range gunshot to the left temple suggested foul play.

That is, until a month later, when the police department revealed that pioneering data analytics had been used to sift through a haystack of video footage from the city’s CCTV cameras. The all-seeing eyes had tracked Scott’s blue Cadillac to its terminus on the river's east bank. He was alone: it was suicide.

This harrowing story unsettled Illinois five years ago, and became an inspiration for the video game Watch Dogs, released last week. Set in near-future Chicago, it follows hacker hero Aiden Pearce as he tries to stay alive in a city where a single mainframe – the Central Operating System (CtOS) – controls the urban electronic infrastructure. “We extrapolated a bit from what was happening in 2009,” says Watch Dogs creative director Jonathan Morin. “But there was a feeling that, because of the city’s history, Chicago was the kind of place where the authorities might actually install something like CtOS.”



Watch Dogs, which sold 4m copies in its first week, is just the latest game to thrust the player into a detailed, pulsating and populous artificial metropolis. Ubisoft's previous bestsellers, the Assassin's Creed series, modelled the cities of Renaissance Italy; Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto has given us pimped-out versions of New York (Liberty City), LA (Los Santos) and Miami (Vice City). But as these virtual cityscapes become ever more closely synced with their real counterparts, does the street run the other way, too? Can video games teach us about our cities, and how we might want them to play out?

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Willis Tower, Chicago, pictured in Watch Dogs

Bottling metropolis mojo in video games has become a painstaking artisanal labour, one that is conducted by the 21st-century equivalent of Renaissance fresco workshops. Ubisoft, for example, had more than 1,000 people working on Watch Dogs. Morin says they chose Chicago because of its reputation as a “city of crisis”: the rebuilding after the Great Fire of 1871; the overhaul of the police force after Al Capone; the riots of 1919 and 1968 that caused the city to re-examine race relations. “They are proud to stand back up after big problems,” Morin says. “And they always seem to do it through innovation in terms of how the city is run. They always end up taking very ballsy moves, which is why we thought CtOS was plausible there.”

Chicago’s office of emergency management and communications has indeed pioneered an integrated operations centre, which unifies public and private security feeds into one of the world’s largest surveillance networks – an estimated 24,000 cameras. (Ubisoft’s Montreal headquarters is just a few kilometres from Genetec, whose software helps monitor the Chicago footage.) But Ubisoft didn’t get any access to that network. So how exactly do you go about modelling an urban ecosystem?



If there is one man who knows what an imposing task it is, it’s Will Wright, creator of 1989’s seminal SimCity. “Cities are amazingly complex systems,” Wright told me from his home in Oakland, California. “Millions of autonomous agents – the people – making millions of decisions: where to live, where to work, where to eat lunch. Those millions of decisions are the city.”



The Watch Dogs team tried to get a handle on those millions of decisions by applying an old-fashioned technique: the field trip. They made repeated visits to take photos of different neighbourhoods and landmarks, such as the Willis tower; they recorded ambient audio and observed people’s behaviour. They wanted the unauthorised tour: beyond police escorts into sketchier areas, they didn’t enlist much official cooperation. Scouting out the city’s deprived Englewood district, they fell victim to a case of mistaken identity. “We were in a big red van, so as soon as we got out, people starting yelling, ‘FBI! FBI!’ and running away,” says level-design director Sebastien Galarneau. The team have also brought the virtual and real together, with a site that shows how much data is available right now on real cities, such as London, Paris and Berlin.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest 'People started yelling FBI! FBI!' ... Englewood, Chicago was one of the neighbourhoods the Watch Dogs team visited to model. Photograph: Getty

Everyone who has developed an "open-city" game undertakes the same trawl for authenticity. Shenmue was the genre's first modern 3D incarnation, modelling the streets of Hong Kong in 1999, while last year’s Grand Theft Auto V is generally agreed to be the high-water mark: Rockstar distilled 250,000 photographs and countless hours of video into Los Santos, their version of Los Angeles and its hinterland. It isn't always easy, says Watch Dogs' Galarneau. "It was a stressful experience going into the back alleys taking pictures of abandoned homes, weird railings ... the dark places of the city."

But developers must also strike a balance between fidelity and fun. For instance, Ubisoft tampered with Chicago’s grid layout, to encourage a more stimulating (ie carnage-filled) driving experience. Sleeping Dogs (2012) crammed Kowloon and many of Hong Kong’s other districts on to the main island, which is considerably less populated in real-life. “Some of the alleys are very tight,” says lead designer Mike Skupa. “The organic nature of the city is just incredible – it keeps on getting built on top of itself.”

The Assassin’s Creed franchise, a Ubisoft titan that towers over the field alongside Grand Theft Auto, has mocked up 14 cities across four different time periods. For Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, set in 1499, Ubisoft figured players wouldn’t stand for a virtual Rome bereft of the dome of St Peter’s, on which work only began in 1506. So they finagled it in – the only significant deviation from scrupulous historical accuracy (with respect to the architecture, at least) that made an archaeologist out of lead designer Patrick Plourde. “We had to break the whole present-day city down. We had a historian who would say: that’s baroque – no good. That’s medieval – you can use it. Early Renaissance – good. Late Renaissance – no good.”



Facebook Twitter Pinterest 'The organic nature of the city is just incredible' ... Kowloon was merged with the main Hong Kong island for the 2012 game Sleeping Dogs. Photograph: Paul Hilton/EPA

In this increasingly crowded field, each virtual city has its own style: Assassin’s Creed uses a “social-stealth” system that relies on sophisticated crowd dynamics; Sleeping Dogs emphasises pedestrianism; Watch Dogs, surveillance. By encompassing all these different facets of city living, open-world game development is approaching a form of urban planning – albeit a fantasy version, in which the designer has near-godlike agency. They're not quite free of budgetary restrictions, perhaps, but they're unencumbered by local politics, and can cut and paste neighbourhoods, orchestrate traffic flows and command the weather.

SimCity, of course, handed this panoply of powers to the player. Will Wright, was inspired, among many things, by the work of JW Forrester – whose 1969 book Urban Dynamics [PDF], a collaboration with a former Boston mayor, pioneered a computer model for a simulating city environments. By breaking down social and economic forces into 118 equations, it encouraged people to stop thinking passively of urban problems as sculpted by external forces, like rural-to-urban migration, and start envisioning a more dynamic, adjustable ecosystem. With SimCity, planners got their first taste of play; and thousands of players later became planners.

Wright now thinks we may be on the verge of another breakthrough. “I’ve always like the metaphor of the city as a body – the roads are the circulatory system, the nervous system is communication," he says. "In some sense we are now overlaying a whole new nervous system on our cities, with new information flows and feedback. For the first time, through social networks, we have real metrics about the things that happen thanks to the millions of individual agents in the city.” With the digital and the physical finally speaking the same language, there's surely never been a better time for games to reshape our cities.



***



Wright lives in the hills of Oakland. He digs the ocean view, but says it’s one of the “most dysfunctional” Bay Area cities. He admires neighbouring Emeryville: “They’ve taken a totally different approach to zoning and governance, and they’ve been extremely successful. It’s a very small area, but that’s where a lot of the new development in shopping areas and office space has gone.”

Lined up side-by-side, the Bay Area cities are a perfect illustration of the unpredictability of actual cities. As he puts it: “When you throw humans in the mix, things become very, very counterintuitive.” But though cities have a way of outgrowing any model, video games are starting to provide tools to keep ahead.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest 'When you throw humans in the mix, things become counter-intuitive' ... Will Wright, creator of the seminal SimCity. Photograph: Ryan Anson/Getty

Second Life and Minecraft have been used to visualise built environments, such as the Blockholm project, a state-funded recreation of the Swedish capital using the Minecraft engine. Based on official land data, the simulation allowed players to propose future buildings; the best 10 were publicly exhibited and put up for planning consideration. Meanwhile Block by Block, an initiative by the UN human settlement programme UN Habitat, used Minecraft to involve residents in shaping community spaces around the world, like redesigning football fields in Nairobi’s Kibera slum. For more finessed-looking 3D world-building, there are commercial programs like CityEngine, which was used to remake a section of Marseille for a significant redevelopment project and to create a futuristic cityscape for a Ministry of Sound commercial. For civic organisations, however, such programs remain expensive (if not quite in the $265m league of Grand Theft Auto V).

Chris Haller, founder of Urban Interactive Studio, also experienced his “big a-ha moment” playing SimCity. His company now applies game mechanics, such as interactive visual elements and a scoring system, to public-engagement projects like surveys. “We often see this vicious circle in the typical town hall meeting,” he says. “People yell and start demanding certain things. And the planners go into defensive mode, because they think the ideas are pie-in-the-sky. It becomes very unproductive.”



'Big a-ha moment' ... SimCity inspired countless planners, and led Chris Haller to apply game mechanics to public projects like town hall meetings

His "gamified methodology" seeks to open up the planning process for all parties, by drawing more people out and giving equal weight to all voices, not just the loudest. Bannock county, Idaho used the studio’s BrightPages app to liven up four alternative scenarios for its transportation system; the participants opted for one that adapted existing infrastructure, to minimise additional public spending.

Eric Gordon, director of Emerson College's Engagement Lab in Boston, takes a more purist approach. He says gamification does a good job of getting people to talk about pre-defined goals, but true games have other advantages. “They’re not about making a process more efficient – a game is probably the least efficient method of doing anything. There are goals, but you have obstacles in your way that aren’t necessary. You agree to be part of that system, and you play towards your goals without taking the most efficient route. A game gives people a chance to imagine things in a different way, not just get there faster.”

In 2010, he devised Participatory Chinatown, a role-playing game in which Bostonians were invited to play one of 15 fictional residents, and complete missions like finding a job or a place to hang out. “People said they appreciated the perspective of this other person they got to play," he says. "They told the story of what was happening in a very different way – much more personalised.” But the method has its limitations: “They might play, say, an immigrant who couldn’t afford to buy a coffee at Starbucks every morning. But if they wanted a Starbucks on every corner in real life, that was still the case [after they finished the game]. Playing Grand Theft Auto doesn’t make me want to shoot people, so why would playing a pro-social video game make me more pro-social?”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest 'People appreciated the perspective of this other person they got to play' ... Participatory Chinatown, in which Bostonians were invited to play one of 15 fictional residents

Gordon hopes for a more subtle effect – to exploit the play-centric space of video games to challenge people’s moral frameworks, to get them to give answers they didn’t know they would, to obtain more nuanced findings for the planning process. He calls it “augmented deliberation”. His ideas had their biggest trial in 2012 during a three-week series of games, involving over 1,000 players, that fed recommendations about transport and zoning into Detroit’s Future City study, which maps out the next 50 years for the embattled metropolis.

Social experiments like this could just be the start, Gordon thinks: “Games are inevitably going to reshape what cityscapes look like.” He compares their potential impact to the development of New York’s Times Square in parallel with the early urban films of Thomas Edison: their primitive tracking shots fostered a new conception of the "moving" city that also found expression in the square’s illuminated advertising, known as “sky signs”. “People would stop and watch [the ads] for minutes at a time, and bask in the kinetic energy of that space,” says Gordon, “The idea of the ur-city, [ultimate city] became the city in movement. Times Square was considered the centre of New York, and New York the centre of world urbanism.”

He thinks that video games could now have a similar effect on how we think of cities, born out of countless Xbox rampages. Pursuits like parkour – physically moving through a city like an obstacle course – could be seen as analogues of untrammelled video game freedom, and better ones than clunky transpositions like Pac-Manhattan (though location-based games, such as the popular geo-tagging "wargame" Ingress, are undeniably getting more sophisticated). The whole idea of the "smart city", networked up to deliver all services conceivable, is a sublimation of the gamer’s bottomless inventory and notion of place as malleable to their every need. The global fantasy architecture of places like Dubai, Shanghai and even the new London skyline, elasticating the limits of spatial feasibility, seems to have been pulled direct from the digital realm.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest City as obstacle course ... a map of Chicago in Watch Dogs

All very exciting for any Google Glass cyborgs keen to lord it over the Tron boulevards of the future. But the danger is that the human element gets sidelined. On one level that just means forgetting that cities are, in fact, the people who live there: for example, the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute (UMTRI) and Xerox are building a 32-acre simulated city, with buildings, benches, intersections, street lights, traffic signals, signs, construction barriers and, as Fastcompany puts it, "every other complication of city life that a driver might encounter ... except wayward pedestrians". On a deeper level, Watch Dogs aims to flag up the perils of data centralisation, such as Rio de Janeiro’s 2016 Smart Cities pledge, which feeds off citizen-sourced data and occupies a perilous zone between civic empowerment and Orwellian control. “Centralising information so you can better dispatch civic resources is an inevitable need in the evolution of our society, but we need to be cautious about the consequences,” says Watch Dogs' Morin. “We all love our phones, put a lot of information on them. But we sometimes fail to step back and look at the big picture. That’s why we give the power of hacking to the player – all the temptation and desire to exploit the weaknesses around them.”

Gordon and Haller are similarly concerned that citizens win out in the great tech march forwards. The former says he is aware that co-opting video games into public engagement could be “used to pacify people into a haze of fun”. In his eyes, it’s vital that game-driven urban planning delivers tangible results for citizens, and doesn’t slip into the kind of trendy "participative" marketing more likely to serve business interests. You could question other gamified projects: London’s Oystercard game Chromaroma, which awards points for different journeys, could be useful for amassing travel data, but might equally be rattling the can to get more money for TfL. Is Ingress a canny way of co-opting people into urban mapping or, just a giant Google advert? “I want to see responsible use of games that deploys what they’re good at – creating a context of play that allows people to experiment safely with possibilities in the civic realm and ultimately empower them,” says Gordon.

On the other side of the looking glass, games developers have their own version of the problem. Their clockwork cities are ever more immaculate, but Morin admits they fall short on the people front: the sense of a city as a wondrous, unconducted symphony of individual minds. Games are struggling to move beyond the looped dialogue and behaviour scripts of the past; Watch Dogs hints at the idea of citizens having inner lives, but mostly to deliver the game’s satirical slugs about privacy.

Plourde dwells similarly on the strengths and limitations of the first, Crusades-set Assassin’s Creed. “It was the best one in terms of low-level immersion: being able to walk around and watch what people were doing. But it was not well-realised in terms of making the crowd an active element in the gameplay.” He says that the sequels were a constant struggle to maintain the illusion of a spontaneous city – ensuring that a player never rounded a corner to find no one there, or a Matrix-like glitch in the system.

Wright believes open-world developers are taking the wrong approach entirely. “You look at GTA, and this amazing world Rockstar have created, and it’s all hand-built," he says. "An evolutionary process didn’t lead to Los Santos: it was 300 artists studying pictures, building models. They’re just painting a portrait of a neighbourhood. It only gets you so far.” That way of thinking, he says, hinders developers from bridging the gap between static (if beautifully rendered) city backdrops and true, dynamic simulations. Rather, he envisions games that work like evolution: an open-ended, unpredictable system. The challenge is how to make such a thing compatible with the personalised drama, all those sagas of rogue gangsters, cops and assassins so crucial to drawing in the player.

We’ll carry on inching our way towards the ultimate sim city. Playing it, detached from the real world, could be the ultimate exercise in cynicism. Or perhaps our playful instincts really can be meaningfully unleashed on our streets. Wright has made a brilliant career in the gap between sim and reality, between the model and the mortar, but even he stresses that the impulse to sculpt cities has natural limits. “Utopia is always finite. The agenda changes all the time. I don’t think there ever will be a utopian city.” Digital or otherwise.



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