City builders like Sim City and simulation games like Transport Tycoon Deluxe seem like more sleepy experiences, but they also provide a potent power fantasy: the ability to build infrastructure according to the resources available in the smartest, most efficient way possible. Madden gives every player the chance to feel like a professional athlete and general manager. Doom allows players to destroy legions of demons with a click of a mouse. Popular video games almost always provide the player with a power fantasy. "What moves me," Carrasco said, "is solving problems and making very high, technically sophisticated solutions for something." But the roads, streets and buildings are still there, as are forests, parks, rivers, and everything else. Ultimately, he had to make some compromises like reducing the map's resolution, eliminating street names, and smoothing building contours. Whereas Google Maps and other types of real-world mapping software typically download small chunks at a time that are relevant to the user, Carrasco wanted the entire global map to be part of the game's software package and not reliant on an internet connection. He approached it as a computer engineering problem. One can, literally, build a train through someone's backyard.Ĭarrasco says the game is not some political statement, and that he made it to satisfy his own programming curiosity and ambition. So what does that mean? Click."-there's something deeply, profoundly satisfying about booting up a video game called NIMBY Rails that allows me to build transit systems with impunity. He learned the term mostly from architecture forums and conversations with friends about American politics.Īlthough Carrasco says he came up with the name as "clickbait"-because "NIMBYs don't like trains. In our heads, that world is, of course, much better.Ĭarrasco has lived his entire life in Barcelona-a city, it should be noted, with a very good transportation system-and does not have much direct experience with actual NIMBYs, although he said some have cropped up regarding the construction of a long-delayed train station in the city (the fact that the project was already underway before the apparent NIMBYs made themselves heard demonstrates just how little Barcelona has to deal with the phenomenon). Every urbanist has had at least one quiet, peaceful moment imagining a world without NIMBYs. Well-organized and often influential NIMBY groups can weaponize environmental impact laws and other legal maneuvers to slow or block public transit projects, a perverse outcome given public transportation is better for the environment than everyone driving their own cars. NIMBYs are among the many reasons public transportation expansion is slow and difficult in many parts of the world, but especially in the United States. While NIMBY Rails has many of the real-world variables public transportation systems have to navigate, one thing the game does not currently have is its namesake. After the Youtuber Drawyah built HS2, Britain’s planned high-speed rail line from London to Birmingham, on NIMBY Rails, he commented on the video “I hope you didn't find this video all too boring.” It incorporates real-world time zones so if you want to build, say, a train line from New York to Los Angeles it is not good enough to merely have the train stop in Cleveland, it must not stop in Cleveland in the middle of the night like Amtrak currently does.Īll of this amounts to a game so detail-oriented that watching someone play it is a bit like witnessing forms being filled out (presumably, like most video games, playing it is more fun). The game has a somewhat crude transit demand model that Carrasco developed, with a customer satisfaction rating score per station that users cannot see but need to intuit by tweaking variables. There's a multiplayer mode so friends can build together. Users build stations, set ticket prices, train speed based in part on the curvature of the tracks, schedules, and countless other variables. It allows users to build a transit system anywhere in the world, or even across the world if so desired, on a version of Open Street Maps, an open source version of Google Maps. That game, cheekily called NIMBY Rails-NIMBY being an acronym for "Not In My Back Yard," a term for people opposed to transportation or housing development in their area-is possibly the most complicated transit-development game ever devised.
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