Gaming the Real World

Wow!

I know I haven't been here before,

but I kind of get the feeling that I have.

I've seen this place before.

Wow.

It's mind blowing.

We're taking something in a video game

and using that to create things in real life.

We're actually changing the world.

Remember back to when you were little

and you used to like to build things?

Everyone knows video games

are played for fun,

but could they also be used

to change the world around us?

- Urbanization is one of the biggest challenges

facing the world,

but it's also a great opportunity.

- This is the story of how a group of people are trying

to use video games to fix our cities.

Games can be used for purposes that are

far beyond what their design was intended for.

And the story of how the virtual world

of games is being brought into reality

to transform the societies we live in.

You can take an actual societal problem

and try to tackle it through the medium of games.

The connection between a game

and reality is getting closer and closer.

Hello, London.

For the first time in history,

more people live in cities

than in the rural world.

By 2050, over one third of people

on Earth will live in barrios,

favelas, shanty towns and slums.

Getting community members,

particularly young people,

engaged in planning and talking about their cities

is thought to be the best way

of creating sustainable urban environments.

But in many societies,

this has proved easier said than done.

Our story starts back in 2011,

in Sweden, with an 11-year-old gamer.

What it was was Minecraft,

a game created in 2009

by a guy called Markus Persson,

also known as Notch.

The game gives players

the freedom to build whatever they want

out of basic building blocks.

Now run by the Swedish company Mojang,

it's become the world's most popular PC game,

with a huge world wide community

of millions of players.

But could using a game to help people

change their own neighborhoods really work?

For hardcore gamers

and childhood friends David and Emil,

the project came out of the blue.

The whole thing started out

when I was on a train to Stockholm

and I was browsing Twitter as usual

and I found this tweet from the CEO of Mojang

who said they had an interesting project using

Minecraft as a tool in city planning.

That's how we, both of us,

were involved in this project.

Neither I or Emil have any

formal game development education

or anything surrounding gaming at all.

We're just gamers who've been involved

in a really interesting project.

Five, four

Three, two, one.

Game over.

Trial projects were organized

in suburbs around Stockholm

to see if the idea could work.

We had three pilot projects

Fisksätra, Drottninghög and Hovsjö.

Me and Emil built the city,

the buildings exactly like they look today,

the streets exactly like it looks today,

in the Minecraft model.

And we had a workshop where people that live

in these areas together with the community,

changes these models as they want it to be in the future.

Minecraft is like digital Lego.

You can't simulate things,

you can only visualize things.

So, it's easy to learn, easy to understand,

and it's not too complicated

for the participants or

for the people involved with planning the city.

The project's success

opened people's eyes to the potential

of using games to attract youth to urban issues.

The UN quickly saw

the potential of the idea

and a partnership with Mojang,

the company behind Minecraft,

was formed.

Youths are very seldom involved

in the processes of planning

and talking about their cities.

We came to know about some trial

projects that had been done in Sweden

and those trial projects

had been very successful.

So, we thought that maybe that can

be brought to other parts of the world.

Vu Bui and Lydia Winters

headed the team from Mojang.

The city has been growing

at such an incredible rate

that the public spaces

started to kind of fall to the wayside,

which is what usually happens

when urban development just kind of goes insane.

And so, now the people in the communities

are realizing no we need to have these public spaces.

It's incredibly important to our everyday life.

I recognize this place.

I've only seen it in the game,

but it's actually so close to what it looks like,

except the work has been done already.

So, before it had these sort of smaller pillars.

And then they changed it so that it was more safe.

So that when there's festivals and things,

they don't have to worry about anyone falling

into the pond.

Without that community participation,

you lose that ownership,

that sense of this belongs to me,

I helped make this.

And to see people using the space

and seeing that it has affected their lives

and made it better

was really an amazing moment.

- It always surprises me that you can actually get

the feel of a place by being in Minecraft,

even though there's not nearly as much detail.

In the game, when they redesigned it

and kind of made it look like this,

it actually looks very similar to this

now in real life.

Minecraft was helping

change people's lives in the real world.

Lydia's own life has also

been transformed by Minecraft.

- It's hard for me to put into words what's

happened in the past four years for me.

I was this scared girl who didn't really know

what she wanted to do.

I hated traveling.

I let my anxiety take over

so many aspects of my life.

And so I had gotten my degree in teaching

and decided I didn't want to do that.

I started dabbling in photography.

I was trying anything and everything

and I got really into creating videos.

Hi, I'm Minecraft Chick and this is

my very first daily Minecraft video show.

Some friends of mine recommended

the game Minecraft.

I said I'm not a gamer,

I've never played games before.

They were like that will be even better.

Okay, so this is me starting.

I don't even know how I walk.

That's sad.

My channel became quite popular.

People thought it was funny because

I was just being silly and kind of commenting on

not having any idea what I was doing.

Uh-oh.

I was killed.

As awful I was at playing this today,

I have to be better tomorrow, right?

And in summer of 2011,

I reached out to Mojang and just said hey,

I heard that you're coming to the US.

If you need any help with anything,

please let me know,

I'd be happy to help,

expecting kind of an email back like,

sure, you can hand out flyers or get coffees.

And I was totally fine with that.

But it ended up that they needed someone

to help host a booth that they were having at E3.

Hi, I'm Minecraft Chick

and today I'm going to tell you why

I'm having the best day ever!

It's been very awesome!

No, really, this is great!

Notch.

This is amazingly awesome.