Skylines provided him a way to make abstract urban planning problems concrete for his viewers. “But it can inspire people to want to learn more about urban issues and become more involved, and that's what I want to encourage with my Cities: Skylines series.” “The game probably can't give anyone a deeper understanding of urban planning issues itself, because its interpretation of them is very facile and gamified,” he says. Roczniak, who has a degree in civil engineering, decided he could do better. He came to the idea of using Cities: Skylines as an educational tool after watching some speedbuild videos, where players talk through the thought process behind a city’s construction. “Gonna add some sad benches, where you can sit and take your lunch deafened by the noise from cars on the suburban arterial road nearby, wondering through the din where your life went wrong,” he deadpans in one video. Roczniak, who has a gravelly, melancholy voice, infuses dense academic references – summarising the key tenets of Donald Shoup’s The High Cost of Free Parking, for instance – with bursts of amusing existential ennui. (One YouTuber comments that his top two ‘films with intermissions’ are 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Roczniak’s two part explication of public housing.) In a video series of breathtaking and slightly mad ambition, YouTuber donoteat01 – real name Justin Roczniak – uses the game to tell a panoramic history of the origins of American cities. Other streamers take Cities: Skylines far more seriously. Falling into the genre of city builder games, first popularised in 1989 by Will Wright’s Sim City, the objective of a typical game is open-ended and simple – players must construct a humming metropolis, from scratch, on a patch of rugged land. Its latest expansion, which lets players construct college campuses, was released in May. The game, released in 2015, is a steadily growing masterpiece. This redesign, as you will have no doubt quickly discerned, didn’t take place in the real world, but in a video game – Colossal Order’s Cities: Skylines. “If you’re the mayor of San Francisco, you might want to take these sort of things into account,” he said, as clumps of cars began to unjam and smooth out. The urban planner responsible realised that the bridge’s traffic, which formed a long, honking snake from its toll booths down into the heart of San Francisco, could be relieved with just a few adjustments to the width of lanes and the direction of traffic. If you missed it, you can watch it on YouTube.

The Golden Gate Bridge was redesigned last month.

Cities skylines more roads