Minecraft For Real Life: This Video Game Wants To Help Redesign Actual Cities #makereducation
Fastcoexist published a piece on a new game called Block, which is inspired by Minecraft but with the goal of crowdsourcing city planning solutions.
More than 100 million people play Minecraft, building virtual worlds out of virtual blocks. What if some of them started to use the same skills to redesign actual cities?
A new video game in development at the University of Southern California’s School of Architecture is designed to make anyone a city planner. Using real city data, the game will start with Los Angeles but has the potential to be tailored to any city in the world.
“Gamescapes research seeks to democratize the design of the built environment through the use of video games,” says Jose Sanchez, assistant professor in architecture at USC, who is working on the project with Satoru Sugihara and Sergio Irigoyen.
In the game, called Block, players build neighborhoods from components like housing, businesses, and parks, continually rearranging the pieces to find the optimum arrangement that citizens would most want to use and that would have the least cost for the city.
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