IBM serious game development for urban planning

IBM recently announced the development of CityOne, a new serious game that can assist urban planning. CityOne is a free, Sims-style game where the player is tasked with guiding the city through a series of missions. These include industries such as energy, water, banking and retail.

For example, according to the IBM press release, one mission involves a city where water usage has increased at twice the rate of population growth with supplies becoming strained and polluted, the municipality losing as much as 40 percent of its water supply through leaky infrastructure and energy costs steadily increasing. For this mission to be completed, the player would have to institute a Water Management System that would include accurate real time data in order to make decisions on delivering the highest water quality in the most economical way.

I've blogged before about IBM's serious games foray (the INNOV8 project, check the post out here), for more information on their current effort visit http://www.ibm.com/cityone.