Cities Of Gold

Meet the geographer on a mission to bring urban renewal into virtual spaces.

What makes a great videogame city? It’s a question developers and players obsess over, and one that geographer, urban planner and game designer Konstantinos Dimopoulos has positioned himself to answer as a consultant ‘game urbanist’, an expert in the form and function of cities who wants to help virtual ones feel like real places.

Think of the Shanghai in Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days, which despite being the setting for a corridor shooter manages to conjure a sense of a rapidly growing metropolis, taking place in backstreets, building sites and informal markets. “If you think about it, they don’t show you much of it, but they imply tonnes,” says Dimopoulos, who is based in Athens and is currently working remotely on Frogwares’ forthcoming The Sinking City, a game set in a open, Love craft-inspired world. “Obviously, basing it on a real city, things are easier, but having the mastery and understanding to pick what to show, that they did brilliantly.” Or think GTAIV’s Liberty City. “There is something used in cartography called simplification, and it decides how much detail enters the map depending on the map’s scale,” he tells us. “Instead of drawing five buildings, you draw two, and the GTA team did this for New York, simplifying everything in a very cartographic way to a point where they could manage the work it demanded.”