I was reading Rev2’s (belated) Blog Action Day feature and discovered it was about a game called ElectroCity where you are tasked with providing a city with necessary power and features such amusement parks and the amount and manner in which you do it determines how well you and your city do.

You are given with 150 turns to build the biggest, most-environmentally friendly town possible. You are then given a score out of one hundred and a grade (such as B+) as the game seems to be orientated towards New Zealand schools. For your score, factors such as popularity amongst your citizens, environment, energy management and money are counted.

You are initially given a town of 10,000 and $400 to use. With this $400, you can elect to build the likes of wind turbines or become the PRC and use coal power stations! You can also have initiatives in your town such as awareness, a blackout, getting all citizens to use energy-efficient lightbulbs or install solar panels… naturally these also cost money. You can raise extra money through tax (the rate of which you set) but if you set your tax too high, people will leave your town.

Mines and gas wells can also be built and the extracted fossil fuels can either be sold (to raise extra money) or used in power stations (the latter results in pollution which must be offsetted through building forests etc. as you must be somewhat conservative with the little land you have to build on).

The game is Flash based and reminds me somewhat of a ‘tycoon’ game and being a massive fan of OpenTTD and soforth it nearly immediately addicted me. The game’s sponsored by New Zealand’s Genesis Energy and prizes worth up to $10,000 were awarded to participating schools.

My current high score on the game is 87 (which is an A-… due to my town’s low population )… what’s yours?

Tags: electrocity, global warming, climate change, game, web 2.0, web2, web 2, web2.0, new zealand