IBM Launches CityOne–An Interactive Simulation Game

The Big Blue today announced the availability of CityOne, the world's first Smarter Planet interactive simulation designed to help business and civic leaders discover how to make their cities and industries smarter by solving real-world business, environmental, and logistical problems. Here are the few points from press release.

Examples of the game scenarios include:

• Water Crisis Management: A city is struggling with water usage increases twice as fast as the population, supplies are becoming strained and possibly polluted, and the municipality is losing almost half of its water through leaky pipes. On top of all that, energy costs continue to rise. To complete the mission, players must come up with a way to deliver the highest water quality at the lowest cost in real-time.
• Smarter Retail:  The player represents the owner of an electronics store that requires a redesign and expansion. In order to increase sales, players must streamline and increase the visibility of their supply chain process to better track items in real time and react to problems and delays.

Creating greater awareness and educating the public about protecting human health and the environment is an EPA priority, and serious games can be useful tools for users to learn about processes and systems reflective of the real world," said Andy Miller, PE, Chief, Atmospheric Protection Branch, EPA Research and Development. "By cooperating with IBM CityOne developers, EPA is helping users by allowing them to more thoroughly investigate environmental issues and better understand complex energy and water interactions presented in the game. EPA's collaboration in this project will help increase awareness and understanding of how different choices that are made in the various game scenarios affect environmental outcomes." 

IBM is not new to the serious games space. Over the years, IBM has released a number of games such as INNOV8, RoboCode and PowerUp that are used by schools, businesses, museums and conferences.  In fact, the INNOV8 series is now being used by 1000 universities and organizations worldwide and is offered for free to schools through IBM's Academic Initiative.

The whole press release by IBM is worth a read. Read it when you have time. Here is a game play video.