The game doesn’t have a military component, but there’s an implicit violence to the fact that only your city has agency – a sense that you are playing out a fantasy of ‘benign’ intervention. The problem with Airborne Kingdom’s cosmopolitan wandering is that it can also be read as sanitised imperialism. “I think it’s shallow and clumsy in our game, but we had this idea that if you gather people from all over, you’re just going to become stronger,” Mumbach says. Airborne Kingdom offers a playable rebuttal: your city prospers only by incorporating technologies, architecture and people from the ground-dwelling communities it visits. It was created partly in response to Trump’s vilification of migrants, says developer Zach Mumbach. Released this spring, Airborne Kingdom is an earnest statement about the importance of cultural mingling at a time when tens of millions have already been uprooted by climate change-induced disasters. These games come in many shapes and sizes, but they all ask the same questions: how much of contemporary urban existence can be salvaged when cities can’t afford to sit still? And what idea of society arises in the process?
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But most curious of all are the games in which cities are mobile – nomad fantasies that blend awareness of a dawning age of climate refugeeism with the utopian or satirical visions of twentieth century architects and futurists.
![reflect studio car game reflect studio car game](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/a4/d6/aa/a4d6aac74ac27f24d3d5433de955b2e6.jpg)
#REFLECT STUDIO CAR GAME GENERATOR#
Others explore cynicism and despair: Frostpunk sees you pitching tents around a coal generator in the Arctic circle, while Industries of Titan is about raising huge factory-slums on a polluted moon. Some try to fix the damage: Terra Nil is a “reverse” builder in which you rewild wastelands. There has been a surge of games in the past decade that reinvent the genre, departing from the build-produce-expand formula laid down by 1989’s SimCity. One small consequence of all this is a crisis of conscience for the developers of city-building games – all struggling to imagine the city’s future while reckoning with mass urbanisation’s role in bringing on the climate crisis we now face. Inland settlements can look forward to fires, heatwaves and drought compounded by the “heat island” effect of vast expanses of concrete with minimal greenery. According to the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group, 570 cities will face catastrophic flooding due to sea-level rises over the next thirty years, with hundreds of millions of people at risk of displacement. As the climate crisis deepens, the city as we know it is becoming an endangered species.