IBM CityOne: the Smarter Planet simulation game for city leaders

IBM announced CityOne on October 4, 2010, and called it the first interactive simulation of its Smarter Planet initiative. The audience was business and civic leaders, city planners and government agencies, who were given a way to develop and budget improvements for the challenges facing global cities. IBM described CityOne as a serious game based on reality: the obstacles and the solutions are genuine. The game sets them to work on problems that real cities face: too little water, no access to alternative energy, and banks and retail stores with outdated processes.

Players can explore more than 100 real-world scenarios. They cut traffic congestion, save water, streamline supply chains and tap alternative energy sources through a series of crisis scenarios. In every mission the player balances the city's financial, environmental and social interests. The targets are revenue and profit goals, higher customer satisfaction and a greener environment, all inside a limited budget.

Along the way, players learn how technologies such as business process management, service reuse, cloud computing and collaborative tools can make organizations in city systems more intelligent.

The game is credited to IBM's Phaedra Boinodiris. IBM's press release framed it as part of a mission to help cities become more intelligent. It cited estimates that about one million people move into cities every week, that city populations will double by 2050, and that cities use 75 percent of the world's energy, emit more than 80 percent of greenhouse gases and lose as much as 20 percent of their water supply to leaks in the infrastructure. IBM presented those figures as the reason leaders needed to understand how technology could help.

For business sectors the release added that retailers face global supply chains swollen with $1.2 trillion in excess merchandise and that bankers' trading systems handle more than 25 billion market data messages a day. The figures are IBM's own estimates from the release and were not independently checked.

IBM's 2010 release pointed readers to ibm.com/cityone. That address shows a page-not-found message in November 2026, with or without a trailing slash. No page from IBM was found that says CityOne has been retired or moved, and the game's present availability is unconfirmed.

A missing page shows only that the game is not offered at that address.