Cities in Motion is a game about public transport, and so I wanted to write about public transport. I wanted to write about why (better) public transport is important for social equality and important for transitioning into a future where we use less, rely less on, oil, by which I mean a future of reduced private car use and ownership. I wanted to fit in my positive experience of now living in a city with (relatively) decent public transport and how that affects the feeling and makeup and structure of a place compared to a city I came from, a city where the public transport is (relatively) patchy, where cars more overtly dominate the planning decisions and the politics and the social fabric and entire lives, really. I wanted to tie these things into how Cities in Motion represents public transport as artificial and overly malleable but ultimately interesting systems, and how the movement and optimisation of movement of people across a space modelled in some way on these real, existing spaces, could be usefully figured to think about the underlying structures of cities and individual resource consumption and infrastructure and ideology.
These were ideas for the piece I was going to write, a piece which never happened, a not-happening which lead to another awkward silence between playing the last of my ten hours with Cities in Motion [sometime in February] and finally following up on many weeks worth of the same note in my to-do list, a reminder to write the damn piece so I could move on and write something else, a note which itself was then ignored and eventually forgotten until today when, deep in the midst of procrastination, I returned to the document.
The first reason, backed up by the dates suggested above, is that in March the novel coronavirus made a real splash over here in Australia, as it seems to have done pretty much everywhere, being, well, y’know, a pandemic. The dampening effect on this piece in particular was twofold: this made it hard to write generally - an apparent contradiction because there was suddenly seemingly so much more time to write in, thanks to the sudden removal of almost all reasons to leave the house, but time which, thanks to the surging background anxiety of finding ourselves in a pandemic and everything that came with that, couldn't actually be used for much more than panic-refreshing twitter and staring glumly at a netflix home screen. The second reason was specific to the project: how to write a game-review-cum-personal-essay about public transport at the very time when public transport everywhere was becoming an enclosed nightmare of disease? An imagined conduit of DEFINITELY GETTING SICK OH GOD. I suddenly found that, for the first time since I was a teen still overcoming residual fears of trains and strangers instilled by repeated warnings from my parents throughout childhood, I didn’t want to get PT at all, anymore, ever – that I was going to choose to walk and bike and drive places wherever possible, probably for the next long while, and that I counted my blessings and privilege that I could continue to live my life while ceasing to take the tram or bus.
But this surprising if paradigm-shifting situation was arguably still just a distraction from my real problem, which is that the more I played Cities in Motion, the less sure I became that I wanted to keep playing Cities in Motion, or that I was really enjoying Cities in Motion at all, or that this game about public transport systems really aligned with my hope to discuss public transport systems as an interesting and necessary social good, rather than it was interested in presenting them as a nostalgic relic. The game works like this: you’re put over a muted-colour map of various European cities in various times past (imagine a run-of-the-mill city builder except all the buildings and roads and people are already in place for you), beginning inauspiciously with Berlin in the 1920s. You're asked to connect up the tendrils of the city with buses and trams and, eventually, train lines, generally in the sense that an invisible population haunts the map and all of them are keen to get somewhere, and specifically in that to finish the level you need to complete a string of objectives which ask you to connect certain landmarks together using certain transport systems. My problem, the first several times I tried it, was that I only thought about the specifically asked objectives, not realising that all of these were loss-leaders, and so repeatedly I kept going bankrupt and having to restart the mission, wondering what was wrong with the way I'd laid out the lines, why everyone in Berlin hated me, why my trams were full no matter how many I put down, why the lines were all unprofitable if every carriage on it seemed constantly at capacity, and why the traffic was always banked up. It took a bunch of googling and reading different threads and multiple walkthroughs to realise that the scenario’s specific objectives, presented in the form of requests from Berlin's mayor, were always going to lose money, and that the way to make money was not to prioritise these but instead set up a bunch of more profitable lines of your own accord.
In short, it's one of those games that hides most of its important information and doesn't care to nudge you, so to speak, back on track. One might begrudgingly argue well, that's what it'd be like, planning public transport; you don't really know where people want to go and have to dig through complex population demographic statistical information in order to plan accordingly. But it’s just…wilfully obtuse? And not fun? It puts its eggs into the realism basket but even there comes up with some wonky results, the counterargument being that like all sim games it is just that – a game, a toy, a thing to play with and absorb a sense of broader systems at work, not actually learn what it is like to try and be a uh, in this case, public transport tycoon.
But then this obtuseness itself was distracting me from a more fundamental problem about how the game views the role of PT, or more specifically how success in Cities in Motion – as with most sim-like games, it should be said - is centred around being able to get back more money than you spend. You try and make easy profits on some busy lines in order to build and maintain other lines. But I don’t think public transport should be about turning a profit or making money; arguably, such an insistence is what historically killed (nay, continues to kill) public transport systems in many places around the world, with flow on effects always including widening inequality and increased reliance on car ownership. And that’s kind of the rub here – your goal isn’t to make the city more accessible for everyone, or to connect disparate areas up in the most efficient way possible, but to make enough money to complete a few select objectives, even though that probably means building a transport system to cater to just a few of your virtual citizens.
It’s an unfair comparison to make, maybe, but I can’t help but hold it up against Mini Metro, the one public transporty game that I’ve ever really loved. Sure, the practicalities slash “realities” of having to fund transport lines and place them within a city that already exists in concrete and limiting ways are entirely absent from that minimalist puzzler, which instead is based on the abstraction of transport system maps over the vaguest ideas of cities existing only in relation to their scant topographical waterfeatures. Still, Mini Metro never asks you to make money - all it wants is for you to get the people where they want to go. As soon as someone appears on the map, it’s your job to connect them up with PT, and if you can’t do it in time, you’ve failed. Leave nobody behind, it suggests. This is more the kind of transport game design I can get behind, have gotten behind. As for Cities in Motion’s insistence that we must become the devil in order to beat the devil, to that I say phooey.
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