This seems to be the week/season for launching city-wide games in New York - Michele and my game is launching soon, Andrea's game New York Snap Exchange, for PsyGeoConflux ...and on the corporate side, R/GA just put out the Nike-licious Operation 6453.
They're all imagining very different New Yorks -- my game invokes the history of street gangs, Snap Exchange riffs on (okay, very very loosely) the mercantile ethic of the New York Stock Exchange, and Operation 6453 uses the language and visuals of, um, urban guerrilla warfare* (check out the Flash intro, and you'll see what I mean).
New York is large enough to accommodate all of our games - and more. What's important here is the creation of new routes through the city streets - and through our imaginations. New routes can create new maps, and new maps can help us create new cities.
Now the city would move like a map you were drawing; now you would begin to live your life like a book you were writing. Called forth by a street or a building, an ensemble of gestures might imply that a different city had to be built or an old one overthrown. – Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces
*I just have to say that I find a "recon" themed game in the time of Fallujah and Abu Ghraib a little ... difficult.
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