Tuesday, December 22, 2009

A capital city named 'capital'?

From Samit Basu's piece on Kazakhtan. Check out Astana.


"There’s a genre of computer game called the city-building game; the SimCity and Caesar series are good examples. Your task, as the player, is to take an area of land and develop it—roads, housing, banks, markets. You build places for people to live in, and wait for settlers to drift in from the corners of the screen. Once they’re in, your task is to keep them happy.

There is no city in the world that reminds me of this type of game as strongly as Astana (meaning capital), the new capital of Kazakhstan."