They Call This The City

There is no one way to see a city. In fact, the multidimensional and complex nature of cities has made the idea of the City an eternally fascinating subject of art, science and engineering alike. A city definitionally contains literal and metaphorical multitudes, a hyperobject that, as it happens, also makes for a hell of a game if approached playfully. This is the aim of They Call This The City, a GMless, character-free game for one or more players about fooling around with graphs.

Inspired by games like Caro Asercion's I'm sorry did you say street magic? and Carter Richmond's Anomaly, the infographic techniques of Secret Base and the groundbreaking presentation of Fishteen Minutes, They Call This The City offers a data-centered framework for humbling yourself before the vast complexities of urbanization, one data point at a time. It allows you to generate data both startlingly relevant and phenomenally useless about the city's dimensions, layout, resources and peculiarities, and make pronouncements about the future in store for it based on the evidence you've gathered.

Can a city truly be captured in the discerning eye of statistics embodied within a graph? Not really. But graphs and the modes of inquiry they encourage tell stories in their own right, stories that in their data-driven subjectivity make abundantly clear the many contradictions inherent in our idea of cities. It is in this spirit that I hope you enjoy this game, and make many insane graphs to document your experience.

An interactive Google Sheets implementation is available for those who don't want to draw graphs themselves and would prefer a cleaner, more businesslike look to their work.