Cities in games have always been more than backdrops. They encode assumptions about how people move, where power concentrates, what gets built, and what gets torn down. They are systems that speak — about economics, about politics, about what a society values enough to simulate.
This conversation brings together two thinkers who have spent their careers at the intersection of urbanism and interactive design. Chaim Gingold, author of Building SimCity and collaborator with Will Wright on Spore, has traced how simulation games don't just represent cities—they model them as arguments about how the world works. Konstantinos Dimopoulos has built a discipline, game urbanism, around the idea that a city in a game must earn its believability the same way a real city earns its character: through coherence, history, and the texture of daily life.
Together they'll examine what cities want from the games that contain them, and what games want from the cities they build. What gets lost when urban complexity is abstracted into mechanics? What gets revealed? And as game engines increasingly shape how a generation understands space, density, and civic life, what responsibility does that carry?
Konstantinos Dimopoulos was born in Athens, Greece, where he studied to become a rural and surveying engineer (with a focus on infrastructure and urbanism) at the NTUA. He then earned my MSc on urban and regional planning at the NTUA School of Architecture. In 2010, He received my PhD in urban planning and geography. Since 2002, he has worked as an engineer, researcher, and lecturer, while publishing papers and contributing to scientific publications.
Chaim Gingold is a designer and theorist whose work has been featured in Wired, CNN, and the New York Times. He worked closely with Will Wright on Spore and designed the Spore Creature Creator.
Jamin Warren founded Killscreen as well as Gameplayarts, an organization dedicated to the education and practice of game-based arts and culture. He has produced events such as the Versions conference for VR arts and creativity, in partnership with NEW INC. Warren also programmed the first Tribeca Games Festival, the groundbreaking Arcade at the Museum of Modern Art, and the Kill Screen Festival, which Mashable called "the TED of videogames." Additionally, he has served as an advisor for the Museum of Modern Art's design department, acted as cluster chair for the Gaming category for the Webbys, and hosted Game/Show for PBS Digital Studios.