BLOCK’HOOD Early Stage Gameplay

The game presents to the player the opportunity to build diverse urban structures where each block has inputs and output. By placing blocks, the player creates a resource cycle allowing the outputs of some blocks, become the inputs for others. The game mixes ideas of traditional city design at the scale of a neighborhood, with sustainable and ecological practices, like food production or harvesting of energy. The player needs to be careful to check what resources blocks need as Blocks might decay or die in case of not receiving the right input. Example; a tree will dry up if there is no supply of water. In this sense, is in the hands of the player to create a utopian or dystopian community.
Block’hood is a game developed by an Architect/Game Developer as a research and educational platform, attempting to combine real world data with ecological city-building, expecting that the cities of tomorrow will not be designed by a genius architect but by an engaged and participatory community of players. Developing the game as a research platform from within University of Southern California School of Architecture, the game has been reconceptualized for over a year to be able to connect real world data with a community of players, allowing for the concept ‘from gaming to making’. The game in this way becomes an utopian idea of how players can truly transform the city we live in considering ideas of systems thinking, ecology and the search for abundance.