The finalists at the Independent Games Festival student awards were recently announced and one of the titles caught my eye. City Rain - Building Sustainability is an interdisciplinary project developed at Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP) in Brazil. Emerging from the collaboration of computer science, design, and radio/television students, the project applies the blue sky urbanism of SimCity towards explicitly environment-focused ends.

In addition the altruistic goal of promoting sustainable development and ecology, the game also boasts a playful interface. Martin Wisniowski is on point in noting the influence of Tetris on the City Rain UI as there is something quite strange about watching buildings and infrastructural elements descend from the sky. Is it too easy to call this out as an example of top-down design thinking? Furthermore, is the act of rotating proposed buildings in midair to create an optimal fit with existing urban fabric even more obsessed with modularity than the "plug and play" approach to erecting structures in most god games?

At the end of the demo video above the narrator implores (with a chuckle) "the city has become so violent that even the cops are afraid to go out a night" - clearly the offending neighbourhoods need to have a few community centres and police stations dropped on them. With my facetiousness I'm hoping to highlight the Modernist subtext that is always present in city building games. In their best moments urban simulations represent cities as ecosystems and in their worst, merely as scale models.

To step aside from my crankiness, the optimism that drives City Rain is commendable - I think the game could be a valuable educational tool for young students. You can download the game at the project website and also donate to support further development. Now excuse me while I go cruise Liberty City while listening to The Beat to banish that sucrose-y City Rain soundtrack from my memory.

As someone who absolutely detests Canadian winters I have a special appreciation for the following undertaking. This Much Depression is a signage and publication project by Sung Lee Design that is dedicated to raising awareness about Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) in Vancouver, British Columbia. While Vancouver is spared the snowfall that most of Canada experiences it does receive about 1.25 meters of precipitation a year and this almost exclusively comes in the form of rain. Most of this occurs during a drizzly season that spans October through March, approximately half the year. The cloud cover associated with that perma-rainfall reduces exposure to natural light and, in turn, influences the emotional well-being of the inhabitants of Vancouver. The Wikipedia link above describes some of the symptoms of SAD as "oversleeping, limited energy, an altered diet and possible depression" - a tangible shift in quality of life directly linked to environmental conditions.

What most interests me about This Much Depression is the two strategies for ambient display pictured above. On the left, a plexiglass container is placed in a public space and captures and directly quantifies rainfall. On the right, a colour gradient decal through which to read the sky and immediately assess its current state in relation to an ideal. I find this image particularly compelling, it takes an ambiguous quality of life metric and tattoos it on a transparent, public surface. This intervention forces viewers to acknowledge their emotional health and perhaps even inspires a brief moment of self-reflection. Each of these strategies creates a viewing machine with which to read the environment as well as life in the city of Vancouver.

Take a look at the project documentation for more photographs of This Much Depression as the book is quite elegant. Perhaps Tourism British Columbia will hire Sung Lee Design for an upcoming campaign. [via Notcot]