CityOne: Sim City for the real world

Apparently IBM has a serious games department, and just the other day they released CityOne, a video game that plops you into the role of being a city planner, trying to solve the business and environmental problems that today’s modern cities are facing. The ultimate goal is to teach citizens how to better cope with complex modern problems by showing them the range of solutions that available today (and I presume offered as part of IBM’s consulting services), ranging from smart grids, to better IT, to smart environmental policy. Here’s the video intro, we haven’t had a chance to play with it since it still seems to be in private beta:

From the website: Think you know what it takes to make the energy systems that serve a city more efficient? Given the opportunity, could you make the city’s water cleaner and more plentiful, its banks more robust and customer-centric and its retail stores more innovative? Your mission is to level-Up your skills and discover how to make our Planet smarter, revolutionize industries and solve real-world business, environmental and logistical problems using IBM solutions. http://www-01.ibm.com/software/solutions/soa/innov8/cityone/index.html