What Color is Boardwalk?
Close your eyes, visualize Monopoly and you'll get
it right. Almost everyone who has played the game more than three times
can do this.
Now here's a new scenario. We'll play
cosmopolis,
a game of World Cities, with a child or teenager during
the next few years. Then fast forward 25 years or so into the 21st Century
and ask: What color is Shanghai? Or Calcutta? And, Where are they? They'll
know the answer just like you probably know the color of Boardwalk.
Not exactly useless information to have with you in a world likely to be
even more complicated, connected and interactive than yours today.
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New York to Nairobi:
they're
all featured in
cosmopolis! |
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Of course, none of your fellow Monopoly
players ever said, "Now it's very important for you to memorize what color
Boardwalk is." You learned it simply by playing the game and having fun.
Same thing goes for
cosmopolis
players 30 years from now.
cosmopolis
was developed by CSC-Pacific of Reno, Nevada, a
company encouraging the design, development, distribution (and playing) of
global geography games.
cosmopolis has
been under active development since 1993, however, the genesis of the idea
occurred more than 20 years earlier when its inventor walked past the Pan
American Airlines ticket agency in midtown Manhattan. Looking through the
windows he noticed the agency's wallpaper map of the world. It was a map
with only natural features (rivers, oceans, mountains etc.) and,
cities served by Pan Am. "What an unusual map," he thought: the
cultural and physical realities but no political
boundaries. |
We hope people who play
cosmopolis
will come to think of themselves as members of a world-wide
community of globally minded people sharing an interest in global affairs
with a common concern for the world and its people. In the future, this
web site will serve as a forum for game players sharing ideas- especially
ideas for new games. After all, how many games can you play with a deck of
cards, some tokens and a map of world cities? LOTS!
Children who play
cosmopolis
will undoubtedly answer the question "What color is London (or
Alexandria or Bombay)- and where is it?" with confidence. And if
this happens 20 years after they played their last game of
cosmopolis,
well, we don't think that's such a bad idea either. |
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