The Human Footprint on the Environment

Urban Climate Architect

In the work "Urban Climate Architect", the player must design a city in blocks, where each block can be a multitude of things -- an office building, a factory, a forest, an apartment, etc. In the "Agency" chapter of Hamlet on the Holodeck, Murray writes, "Some games, like chess, can have relatively few or infrequent actions but a high degree of agency, since the actions are highly autonomous, selected from a large range of possible choices, and wholly determine the course of the game"(Murray 127). The player will quickly realize that "Urban Climate Architect" is one of these games, as though there is an overarching objective, the player has the freedom to design the city however they want without the game actually stopping them even if the choices contradict said objective. 

As mentioned, the player is not confined to any kind of progression or objective other than 'fill up the squares however you like' -- although there are warnings about things like employment or CO2 levels, nothing stops the player from making choices like filling the whole board with factories. This absolute agency allows the player to test their own genuine perceptions (of, for example, what a good ratio of green space to apartment space is in a city) and then have those perceptions quite literally "evaluated", allowing them to dynamically learn based on their initial perceptions. 

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