We just finished our mock-up of the Neighborhood of Tomorrow game.   The game tries to do something a little different than most location-based games.  Instead of encouraging urban mobility and networking, this game is about location and social cohesiveness.   It asks players to focus their attention on their geographical neighborhood.  This is a tall order when so many people in urban neighborhoods see their own block as mere transit to their living rooms.    The goal of NOT is to get people who share a geographic community to work together to devise their ideal neighborhood 5 years in the future.  They do this by posing and accepting challenges, reviewing current businesses and services and proposing new ones, and organizing their neighbors to get things done.   The game is about community engagement in that it requires people to collaborate and cooperate to achieve common goals.  And the goal of the game is to build stronger communities by providing a playful space capable of increasing weak ties within geographical neighborhoods.

Community Engagement Games are a subset of Location Based Games.  While they are “about” a location, game-play emphasizes local attention over mobility, and local knowledge over located information.  It is about collaborative knowledge production for a geographical community and not cooperative data collection for a geographic space.  These are big differences.  While each has its function, I believe that community engagement games are better equipped to address real urban problems, because they look inward and not outward.