Charm Cities
@CharmCities

Over 30 years, city-builder games have developed very sophisticated models of traffic flow. But where's the game that reflects the complexity of human societies? We're building it.

We aim to put together a vast community with broad-ranging experiences to develop a first-of-its-kind city builder game built around models of realistic socioeconomic forces. We can't possibly hope to encapsulate all of the complexities of human behavior in a video game — yet. But we believe it is possible to create simple yet powerful models, based on the newest social science and on the lived experience of a wide array of contributors, that will translate some of the real challenges faced by urban planners into an exciting and enjoyable gaming experience that will revolutionize the city-builder genre forever.

We aren't in this to get rich; though we hope that Charm Cities will eventually wind up a commercial project with revenues distributed equitably among contributors (including both coders and non-coders), our larger goal is to make the game into a phenomenon. We are developing this as a collaborative open-source project so that people of all walks of life can contribute and help make this experience more realistic than anything that could be produced at a commercial studio.