Energyville, by The Economist and Chevron‘
The Economist Intelligence Unit have partnered with energy giant Chevron to produce a small but good online game: Energyville. It’s a fairly direct rip-off of SimCity, but for broadly educational purpose – discovering how difficult it might be to power up a city, scrolling forwards to 2030. It would be easy to be cynical about this kind of partnership, but the simulation has actually been done with some care and attention. Though the available parameters, and their impact, would benefit from a little more explanation, you do genuinely learn something about the varying energy sources available to a particular kind of city (a standard SimCity model, and therefore essentially a medium-sized US city). It’s interesting how the organising level is urban too, not national – I don’t think that’s just SimCity defining a kind of ‘default setting’ for these kind of simulations; rather a sense that the city is the most interesting and effective scale to work at.

(Via cityofsound.)