An urban-design video game in the tradition of SimCity, Cities: Skylines has developed a devoted following.

I’m not the first man to believe that he might fix London. It’s unlikely that, in 1666, the baker Thomas Farriner started the Great Fire because he was fed up with the preposterous rent of the city’s shoebox apartments, the disembowelment of its cultural institutions, or its plague of franchise eateries and foreign oligarchs. Nevertheless, London had to be rebuilt (by Wren, Hawksmoor, and the rest) on the ashes of Farriner’s mistake (an unattended oven), just as, when I loaded up my first game of Cities: Skylines, released in March by the Finnish developer Colossal Order, I planned to rebuild the city on the embers of my resentment.

I followed the example of London’s prehistoric settlers, choosing a handsome plot of flat land that was bisected by a flourish of river. I laid my first road, a luxurious stretch of tarmac, with a Roman’s rectilinearity. (Happily, the game had already informed me that Neo-London would have left-side traffic, as God intended.) The virtual weeks flitted past and the city began to take shape, no longer the haunt of a few birds, shrews, and conifers but a proper metropolis, with discrete residential, commercial, and industrial districts. I built schools and fire stations and reinstated the London Eye. I lowered taxes, hoping to attract new residents, and borrowed from the banks in order to fund amenities to keep those residents happy. I became a benevolent mayor, loved by the people, until I defaulted on a loan and was forced to take back the free smoke detectors, ban all pets, hike up taxes, and demolish a local hospital. Running London, it turns out, can be a bit of a drag. (This realization won’t be news to many people. There is a vast community of Cities: Skylines players who regularly share their urban-planning woes in online forums. “What would be the best way of connecting the highway to my city?” one Reddit user asks, alongside a screen shot of tangled-spaghetti roads. Another thread is titled, familiarly, “Metro Line Issues.”)

Cities: Skylines is not, of course, unique. Since 1989, when the luminary game designer Will Wright released the first SimCity, the world’s memory cards and hard drives have grown heavy with virtual concrete and illusory rebar. Even after this year, when Maxis, the developer of the SimCity sequels, went down in a blaze of server lag, players’ appetite for the imaginary city has remained undiminished. Although Cities: Skylines builds on the template of Wright’s concept, it adds numerous features of its own, including a realistic traffic system that accommodates genuine transportation-planning strategies. The game has also, according to its designer, Karoliina Korppoo, benefitted from timing; game streaming, whereby a player broadcasts her activity online and comments on it, has become wildly popular. “Skylines is an excellent game to stream,” Korppoo said. “It’s slow-paced, allowing time to explain your plans while creating weird and wonderful things. This was not something we planned—it just happened naturally.”

The unexpected success of Cities: Skylines has funded a major update, due in September, which adds a day-and-night cycle, along with taxis, prisons, and bicycle lanes. The game has also been supported by a vibrant modding community, whose members have supplemented the work of the eight-person development team by releasing upgrades of their own for others to download freely. One will automatically bulldoze any burned-down or uninhabited buildings in your city. Another allows you to add a sewage-treatment plant, to reduce pollution. Another introduces solar panels. Some entrepreneurial players, including one ex-member of the SimCity team, Bryan Shannon, have begun to design and release downloadable famous buildings, such as Ukraine’s Annunciation Cathedral and the Reichstag. For Shannon, whose most popular building has been downloaded more than a hundred thousand times, the appeal of the city-building game is enduring. “Will Wright said that we all have a rule book inside of our head for how a city should be made, should function and look,” he said. “You’re also generating stories and experiences that you want to share. If you solve a complex problem that you accidentally created yourself, you feel like a genius for a brief moment.”

Cities: Skylines appears to have influenced a new wave of similar titles. Eco is a forthcoming game in which players must work together to build and protect a city from impending disaster, even electing a government that allows them to propose and vote on legislation. (The developer claims that they will be able to use scientific data gathered from the ecosystem to make their political arguments.) Eco’s designer, John Krajewski, puts the appeal of the city builder down to the way in which it helps us conceive of our environment. “There’s the pleasure of understanding a huge system by poking and prodding at it, by building it and destroying it, taking it apart and putting it back together,” he said. “But it’s also a representation of the world in which we live; these games are a way for players to make sense of that.” Nathan Uyttendaele, a mathematician from Brussels and the maker of DotCity, a minimalist game that is still in development, agreed. “I play because I get to create a small universe where I decide what happens and where I understand what’s going on,” he said. “As strange as it may sound, I always build cities in my darkest moments. DotCity itself is just a raw expression of my fear and wonder of the future. Everything seems to go faster and faster, and it’s unclear where it’s all leading us.”

In Italo Calvino’s novel “Invisible Cities,” Marco Polo describes to the thirteenth-century Mongol emperor Kublai Khan a series of metropolises that he claims to have visited while travelling. Whether imagined, exaggerated, or authentic, the explorer’s vivid stories allow Kublai to tour his exotic kingdom without the need to disembark from his raft of cushions and muddy his silken slippers. Uyttendaele’s sentiment echoes that of Calvino’s Polo, who says, “Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.” What, then, is the key to the enduring popularity of the city builder, that tool by which the municipalities of the imagination are made tangible? Perhaps, simply, the longing for reassurance that the world around us can be seen, can be known, can be understood, and, finally, like Kublai’s empire, tamed.