 You feel the weight of the desert heat sweeping through the dusty air as you make your way to the holy city of Jerusalem. Civilization at its finest lays nestled of a cliff's edge, backening you with all the sights and sounds of humanity's ingenuity. This is the holy city, a place where rulers and religions of every persuasion have fought over, and by all appearances, continue to do so. You make your way through the city's gates, and the bustling sound of a day yet in motion caresses your ears. Merchants and soldiers and beggars and civilians of every walk of life, going about the mundane act of living. Seeking a better vantage point to witness the city takes you atop some of humanity's greatest constructions, houses of worship that reach to the sky, marvels of architecture that ring across time. Every sensory perception is heightened as you try to capture the experience for future reference. You are living in a memory of your own recollection. But this is true in the literal sense in Assassin's Creed. One, in that the story is a science fiction tale that places our protagonist, Desmond Miles, in a machine called the Animus, to transport him into his ancestors' memories. Second, of course, is the fact that Jerusalem is obviously not real. At least the Jerusalem we explore. It is made of ones and zeros and not people and objects. Also, the Jerusalem of today is also not the Jerusalem of the Crusades, the developers of conjurer rendition of an ancient city from the memories of people who have lived across time. And so as much as Jerusalem feels real, as much as the winding streets, the vibrant markets, and the masomizing architecture of mosques and churches and synagogues alike, feels authentic. They are not. We are playing interpretations as much as we are playing history. We create cities out of code, but also figments of our imagination. They are invisible cities. Invisible cities by Italo Calvino tries to talk about things by not talking about them. Its structure and form invites a contemplative reflection on the nature of language, both in how it distorts and how it elucidates. We are always capturing figments of our mind with the words we use. The book is framed as a conversation between Marco Polo and Kubla Khan, as the Khan is eager to hear of cities far removed from the comforts of his throne. Marco Polo indulges him by not indulging him, expressing the impossible act of reconstruction through the very way he communicates. In the lives of empress, there is a moment which follows pride in the boundless extension of the territories we have conquered and the melancholy and relief of knowing we shall soon give up any thought of knowing and understanding them. It is the desperate moment when we discover that this empire, which has seemed to us to some of our wanderers, is an endless, formless rain that corruptions gangrene has spread too far to be healed by our scepter. Only in Marco Polo's account was Kubla Khan able to discern through the walls and towers destined to crumble. The traces of a pattern so subtle, it could escape the termites gnawing. Cities like dreams are made of desires and fears. Even if the threat of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their properties deceitful, and everything conceals something else. The book is structured in a way to invite us to understand cities the way Kubla Khan is forced to, through the words of another. But this is true of anyone for cities of the past. Chapters in the book are named after properties of cities that are both formal, but also elusive. There are cities in meaning, cities in memory, even thin cities, trading cities and cities in the sky. To speak too much about the majesty of the book is to express an ethos antithetical to the book itself. We cannot speak of things directly, only by analogy, metaphor, by the playful manipulation of experience and recollection. It is as much poetry as it is prose, fiction as it is non-fiction, truth as it is a lie. There are properties common to all cities that transcend cities themselves, but the words of Marco Polo somehow captured this. The descriptions of cities Marco Polo unveiled had this virtue, you could wander through them in thought, become lost, and enjoy the cool air. When we create digital versions of cities of the past, we are making the intangible explicit, we are giving voice to the memories that have been lost in time. Some might call this meticulous reconstruction, others might say it is desecration of the highest order, but either way, it is and continues to happen. Marco Polo states, Every time I describe a city, I am saying something about Venice, but when asked why he doesn't speak of it directly, he says, Memories images, once they are fixed in words, are erased. Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice, all at once, if I speak of it. The next chapter speaks of Venice by Nutt. He talks of Esmeralda, a city of water and trading cities, and Phyllis, a city of canals, and cities and eyes, but not of Venice itself, he is afraid of losing it. But in Assassin's Creed 2, Venice is rendered in all its glory, explicit, sun-baked and reveling in the music of the Renaissance. The city was as iconic then as it is now, exemplifying everything transcendent about human scientific and artistic achievement. As gondolas traipse through the narrow canals, and sounds of citizens bathed in the spirit of creativity engulf you, something seems to be missing. If you spend the rest of your days there, soon the city fades before your eyes. All the rest of the city is invisible, Phyllis is a space in which routes are drawn between points suspended in the void. There is a strange thing about your first encounter with Venice, a mission assaults you with the task of chasing someone. The details of this are unclear to me now, nor do I care to know. We ignore everything but that which the designer wants us to. It is a thrilling chase, it adds urgency, narrative weight, but the city has been lost. But is this not how we experience any city? Commuting from home to work and back again, the sights and sounds of the city are drowned out, noises disturbing us on our pathway to success. Perhaps the tourist is the only one who really experiences the city, but this has turned Venice into a commodity. We have instrumentalized Venice just as we have in the game. How do we reorganize our experience of cities around the city itself? In Ghost in the Shell, there is this haunting montage of Tokyo that plays, sitting with its elements for precious seconds of the script. Our perception is guided by the design interface, to notice perhaps that which we don't notice. When the carnival comes in Venice, people don masks, concealing their identities to revel in anonymity, but this just for grounds how we experience people in cities. Anything in abundance becomes trivial, the joys of connections seen in small towns is lost in the wake of masses of people. In some sense people alive are treated as if they are dead, we can't conceptualize the gravity of dense urban environments. You reach a moment in life when among the people you have known, the dead outnumber the living, and the mind refuses to accept more faces, more expressions. Uncharted too as a scene in a Tibetan village, move around at your leisure, greet the locals attending to their livestock, play around with the children. There is a moment of fraternity where we are given no obligations, no objectives to complete, we can watch the world go by. The city has scaled up the density of populations, but it has somehow scaled down the intimacy of human connection. But perhaps we are experiencing cities at the wrong level of resolution. Marco Polo states, the form of things can be discerned better at a distance. Assassin's Creed 2 invites us to explore the city in ways few others could, as an acrobatic urban explorer, parkouring through revered objects of the past. We are not just given the option to, but are compelled to climb the tallest sculptures and buildings we can see, to take in the city from a vantage point that reduces people to an abstraction, but highlights the city itself. My personal goal with the release of any Assassin's Creed game is to seek out these vantage points, to take in cities from the past at a distance. We can witness the bedrock of revolution from the gothic architecture of one of France's churches. We can see the boundless expanses of ancient Egypt amidst wonders of the world. Cities might have become jungle gyms for our entertainment, but experiencing them in this way never loses its novelty. But we can go even higher, as we do in Microsoft Flight Simulator. Cities of the present are being simulated and rendered with the aid of satellite images, marrying technology with our perception of reality. Approaching New York at dangerously low altitudes, lets you take in the beauty of its concrete expanses. The rendition is so real, so explicit, it seems like you are actually there. However, many people experience New York before they actually visit New York. We see it in media before we experience it for real. New York from Flight Simulator feels like New York even though I have never really been there, even though I have never experienced it in this way. Cities have symbolism. They are shining cities on a hill, or something else entirely. In Grand Theft Auto 4's Liberty City, we get a fictional version of New York that feels more real somehow. As a city viewed through the eyes of an immigrant in search of the American dream, the city creates envy, longing, and the hope for a better future. It is alienating as much as it is a beacon of prosperity. Los Angeles, conversely, is called a city of angels, where people who dream of fame and fortune make a pilgrimage to, as if a holy city of its own. This aspect of the city has remained constant despite its physical properties being the same. GTA V's version is an eerily similar air to LA Noire's, despite being separated by dozens of years. Its pristine edifice reveals deception, decay, and vanity when looked at too closely. Perhaps we are ruining the city, or perhaps we are seeing it for what it is. In Biersha Ha, the inhabitants conceive of a version of their city in the sky, and theirs as a terrestrial copy. There is an ideal, then, a literal city in the sky. Other cities have cities for the dead, for those who have died or have not lived a life worth living. Elevation is symbolism, heights and depths communicate meaning. Sometimes the fictional can be more real than the real. Atlantis lives in our cultural memory, just as the lost city of Shambhala does. In Biershaa Infinite, we are invited into Colombia, a city in the sky that is a distillation of Americana in all its patriotic glory. Angelic voices beckon us towards our baptism in this city amidst the heavens. American exceptionalism has turned into architecture and sculpture. The intimacies of human interaction can be seen as a barbershop quartet serenade you with their acapella blues. This pristine facade hides unseemly things, though. Things are never as they seem. And the same is true of Rapture, a city underneath the sea that Angel Ryan constructed to escape the tyranny of government oversight. It has fallen apart, though. Its inhabitants consuming one another in more ways than just metaphorical. At least you are not Nathan Drake, though, who somehow manages to be the best and worst archaeologist of all time. He discovers lost cities like Shambhala and Aram of the Pillars, only to destroy them before he leaves. Perhaps there is a metaphor here of how rendering these cities in such high resolution forces them to crumble. Kublikon utters, If each city is like a game of chess, the day when I have learnt the rules I shall finally possess my empire, even if I shall never succeed in knowing lost cities. At times he thought he was on the verge of discovering a coherent harmonious system, but no model could stand up to chess. Cities have rules. In Jeffrey West's book, Scale, he illustrates how as cities get larger, they need less gas stations per capita, because there are economies of scale that arise in the expansion of cities. Interestingly, they illustrate very similar properties to actual living creatures. They are networks the same way any living creature is. But games like chess have rules as well, but when cities and games collide, we get interesting results. SimCity has rules. It has rules that dictate what the optimal way to configure a city is, how to tax its citizens, how to locate constructions. It creates a model of urban planning and video game form. These rules say something about its creators as much as it does about its cities. SimCity has an ideology. It endorses public transit. It believes in a progressive form of taxation. It revels in the joys of efficient urban planning. There are many forms of these rules we call games. Many players who construct their own cities, but they all seem to converge. The catalogue of forms is endless, until every shape is found its city. New cities will continue to be born. Grand Theft Auto has rules in its city as well. Murder and violence in Mayhem is punished with the swift hand of justice. Mafia 3 has different rules though, and hence says something different. You play a half-white, half-black veteran during the civil rights era, so police respond to you quicker, based on where you are. Shops might refuse you service for reasons that are built into the identity of the nation. It highlights the uneasy question. Can a city be presented independent of the perspective of the person who is experiencing it? Different people, it seems, have different rules. Every second, the unhappy city contains a happy city, unaware of its existence. There is a duality to most cities. We present only the best aspects of them to the public, to brochures. Paris is the Eiffel Tower and the Champs-Elysées. It is a city that signifies culture and art and sophistication. But Paris is also its slums, its segregation. It's the struggle many go through to make ends meet every day of their lives. Final Fantasy VII does this with both symbolism and segregation. People live both on top-off and below giant discs. Up top, it's a life of excess, decadence, and wealth. Down below, the haunting edifice of a steel sky crushes any hope for ascension, as much as it does the midday sun. People make the best of this though. There is still beauty in the chaos of being left aside, of being forgotten. This is not the fantasy of some science fiction story though. Cities all around the world suffer from this chasm, this split. The city of Rio de Janeiro is quite different atop the penthouse of a large building than it is when you are living fearful for your life amidst the favelas. It is the tale of two cities. But it's the very power of cities as symbols that makes chaos and inversion so terrifying. Dubai has become a beacon of the wealth of the Middle East, a place where people's wildest architectural fantasies come to life. So when Spekostoline creates an abandoned version of this, opulence turns to decadence and decay. Symbols of prosperity are now voyages into the heart of darkness. Buildings and cities signify things as well. In the Middle Ages, churches and houses of worship were the largest constructions. We saw this in Jerusalem and Damascus. Mosques and churches of unbelievable scale spoke to what we value as a culture, a calling to be more just and pious, to revel in the divinity of grander purpose. Today, what are our tallest buildings? Banks, corporations? Are these our highest aspirations? This is why the tallest building in Spekostoline takes us to our darkest demons. At times, all I need is a brief glimpse. I will put together piece by piece the perfect city made of fragments mixed with the rest. Jerusalem is still the site of contention today, as much as it was during the Crusades. As we traverse through it in Assassin's Creed, we get a sense that things can explode at any time, and so the game asks us to create peace through war, to assassinate bureaucrats and soldiers and businessmen who are enriching themselves at the expense of the city. Altair is faced with a moral conundrum, to listen to protocol or to divine his own will. It's the duality between Templar and Assassin, order and chaos. It's a tale as old as time. But we as the players don't have to do this. To be a part of the city is to become a part of its rules, and the same is true of games. Some submit to the rules of their cities. They adhere to convention. They abide by protocol. It is the way to escape suffering. Escape the Inferno city and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. Others choose to escape those rules though. They choose to live by their own code. Most in the real world can't do this, but in games we can. We can play with people's experience of cities and identity scale and perspective. We can highlight the mundane as well as the spectacular. We can turn fiction into reality and reality into fiction. Cities exist in time, space and in memory, but they also exist in the real world, with real people. Seek and learn to recognize who and what in the midst of the inferno are not inferno, and make them endure. Give them space.