Sustainability in City-Building Games

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Cox Morgan Zagal José P.
2022 DiGRA ’22 – Proceedings of the 2022 DiGRA International Conference: Bringing Worlds Together

Sustainability is a topic of concern in the design of modern cities. In the interest of evaluating how popular media may reflect this value, we modified an indicator-based framework designed for evaluating the sustainability of real-world cities to fit virtual cities. We then applied this modified framework to seven video games in the city-building genre and examined how each category of indicators (water, land use, energy, clean air, social wellbeing, population density, and trade) was represented in each game. We found that social wellbeing played the most significant role in the long-term success of a city: cities with poor wellbeing struggled to maintain or increase population. Additionally, we found that games with pre-industrial settings generally rewarded sustainable practices while the industrial and post-industrial games did the opposite. Post-industrial games also significantly prioritized city growth over sustainability. Thus, the setting was a significant predictor for modelling sustainability.