About

The Documentary

A billion dollar games industry has pushed the once humble computer game to the very forefront of technological innovation. Games are no longer just used for entertainment, but as instruments of change in our communities, urban landscapes and cities.

Today public spaces and entire cities are being designed, planned … and played through the medium of games. The result of this ‘civic gameification’ is that city architecture and urban planning is being democratized. Cities have become the ground zero for digital innovation and the debate about how our cities evolve has suddenly gone viral.

This feature-length documentary, a work-in-progress aiming for mid 2016 release, will follow the journey of three people navigating the space where urban planning and gaming meet and we will explore the ideas, philosophies and arguments of industry stalwarts, game developers, politicians, techno-utopianists, urban planners, and online gamers as they collide in a burgeoning debate that could ultimately dictate who decides how our cities will look in 20 years time.

Our Journey So Far

We have been working, planning and researching for over a year and have already shot several interviews with key contributors including Pontus Westerberg, the Transparency and digital projects officer at UN-Habitat, and Susanna Pollack, President of Games for Change. And we are well into filming two of our feature stories with Lydia Winters, Mojang’s director of Fun and Jose Sanchez, developer of the indie game 'Block'hood'.

Lydia Winters was once an unemployed teacher from Florida who spent her days playing online games in her bedroom. 4 years later she is the Director of Fun at Mojang - the company that created Minecraft - in Stockholm, Sweden. At Mojang she works on a project called Block-by-Block, in which Mojang and the UN Habitat are using the game Minecraft to involve citizens in public space design - worldwide. Lydia personifies the new frontier of urban planning and public space.

Living in downtown L.A, Jose Sanchez is using his background as an architect to help him design a game that he hopes will have a real world impact on sustainable development for cities like L.A. He is in the final stages of developing his game Block'hood which has been called 'Minecraft for real life' and believes his game can change how people think about sustainability and urban planning.

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