David Thomas, Justin Hollander

David:
Urban plan­ning as a cur­ricu­lum
city sys­tems, regional sys­tems
wanted to teach young archi­tects to learn to build using games
tend to think of urban plan­ning as a design prob­lem — if this then that
but cities don’t work that way
con­flict hap­pens in games, sim­i­lar to how con­flict hap­pens in cities

look­ing for ways to empower the pow­er­less, to pro­vide access to peo­ple who have none
social jus­tice com­po­nent
eth­i­cally and morally try as hard as you can to look to the peo­ple who don’t have power and make deci­sions that affect them first (that’s how they train urban planners)

“oh, you teach Sim­C­ity” but it’s the worst game ever for teach­ing urban plan­ning
games are about the themes for how con­flicts are resolved in the real world
“let’s use some games”

Justin:
For­est Hills Neigh­bor­hood in Boston
they built a ver­sion of FH in Sec­ond Life where they can inter­act and experiment

David:
urban plan­ning is the public’s inter­est in pri­vate prop­erty
what’s miss­ing in Sim­C­ity? there’s no pri­vate prop­erty — nobody com­plains when you tear some­thing down
it’s a weird model for how cities are designed
“the best you get out of Sim­C­ity is Stal­in­ism” — David Thomas
teach them that’s not how cities work, but what games can you use next?
“dice wars” — what if the shapes are neigh­bor­hoods? shift­ing bound­aries that are con­tested and con­stantly mov­ing
there’s some­thing com­pet­i­tive about cities

TransAmer­ica — most nego­ti­a­tion in cities is like this, in the open, even though there are secret motives that you won’t know about until it’s too late; might ben­e­fit you or hurt you
play the game for a lit­tle while and then talk about it

Car­cas­sonne — it’s like chess; every­thing is out and every­one can see what is hap­pen­ing; con­stant nego­ti­a­tion to build the map, and the map for every game is dif­fer­ent; this is how cities work — they’re all try­ing to max­i­mize the map for themselves

nobody designed the neigh­bor­hood we’re in, designed how high the build­ings are, etc.
envi­ron­men­tal maps of the con­flict that occurred to create

Fluxx — get the stu­dents play­ing tac­ti­cally because the rules are always chang­ing; a mov­ing tar­get where the goals and rules keep chang­ing and you have influ­ence over the rules, like when groups come together in cities to wield power to rewrite rules
even rules them­selves and their sys­tems are very fluid

Justin:
peo­ple in the area couldn’t actu­ally get in to access Sec­ond Life (challenge)

David:
do games triv­i­al­ize the sub­ject mat­ter?
it’s hard to get a com­mu­nity to care about issues until you can show them the effects

needs games he can teach in 5 min­utes and that can be played in a short time
is now think­ing about design­ing a plan­ning card game to help fill this gap, cur­rently shoe­horn­ing content

next year, plans to imple­ment the “value of play” work­shop into the class
tries to bring plan­ning to life for students