One of the great misrepresentations of reality in the video game industry is the railroad management game. Most deal solely with trains, some expand into other methods of transportation with automobiles, ships, and airplanes, but they all lack some significant historical features (which is acceptable in some of the more whimsical ones, but many purport to be realistic).
In a typical game, you start with a certain endowment of money (presumably an inheritance, since your parents or relatives or generous benefactor never show up to ask for a return on their investment), enough to get you started with at least your first railway line. Accurate, so far. You then either begin building more railway lines, managing prices and costs, or there might be the addition of having to pay for the rights to use a span of land to lay rails, or to pay to use someone else’s rails to get to your ultimate destination. Here’s where the truth gets bent.
It doesn’t matter when these games take place, you can not simply lay rails wherever you want in the real world. There is an incredible amount of politics involved.
If the land is owned by the government, you need to purchase it from them, potentially having to outbid competitors or convince congressmen to allow you to make the purchase. The land might be already occupied by squatters. In that case, you will need to pay some couriers to go in there and distribute eviction notices. If they don’t leave, round up a posse and enforce those evictions!
Your newly purchased land might also contain some angry Native Americans who claim that you are on their land. If do you have some of these indigenous people roaming around, raiding your supplies and killing your workers to protect their ancestral territory, you might need to get some lobbyists into congress to distribute bribes and get an army regiment dispatched to deal with your problem. You might even purchase some majority stakes in newspapers to really rile up the public’s anti-native sentiments, helping to secure the government’s decision. Or, if you’re a true liberal who just wants peace, maybe you’ll send some tributes of booze and silverware or ‘civilized’ clothing (oops, forgot to disinfect them first!) to the native chieftains in the hopes they will respect your expropriation of their lands.
Perhaps you’re purchasing land not from the government, but from citizens. You’ll need to negotiate prices and deals with mayors and councils to build your stations and bring modernity to their little one-street towns. You might have to divert your railway in a big arc around a stubborn homesteader, or to keep your line going perfectly straight for maximum speed and profit, you might hire some Pinkertons to find or plant some dirty rumors and blackmail him out of the way, or once again hire some mercenaries willing to do another sort of dirty work and burn down the obstacle.
In addition to purchasing lands and rights, in some games you can develop your own towns and industries. Build the frame of a town, spread tales of the profits to be made there in your newspapers, and watch as flocks of people arrive to live in your town — a town which you literally own. Did a disaster lead to a mine near your railroad being shut down? Buy it for cheap and get it running again, with or without spending more money to ensure the safety of the new miners.
Speaking of worker safety, let’s talk about who puts down your rails. If the game takes place before the abolition of slavery, do you use slaves if you’re building a railroad through a slave state? It would certainly maximize your profit. Will you import some cheap Chinese workers from California? Depending on the year, do you pay your workers the minimum wage, if one exists? Do you send lobbyists to D.C. to pressure politicians to keep the minimum wage as low as possible? Whatever the wages are, do you actually pay them when you say you will, or do you hold onto thems until the workers threaten to strike? If they strike, do you compromise by giving them part of what they asked for (shutting them up for a while), or do you once again hire mercenaries to come in and break the strike?
As the rails go further and further away from any form of civilization, do you spend lots of money to provide your workers with on-site work camps providing shelter and a supply train for food and water, do you run a train to ferry them back and forth each day, or do you save the most dough by hiring armed supervisors to ensure they make do with whatever scraps you give them? Do you have your laborers work 6 hours a day, or 12? Do you make them work longer than the legal maximum and keep them quiet with your supervisors?
Another thing these games don’t deal with in enough depth is things breaking or going terribly wrong. There is a maintenance fee for trains, stations, and rails, but we are made to assume that this fee keeps everything running perfectly. In real life, you can pay more or less for maintenance. You can have daily, weekly, monthly, annual, or even just whenever you feel like it maintenance schedules. If you don’t inspect and repair your train often enough, it might stop working in an inopportune place, or even explode. A train driver, even a well paid one, might suffer a sudden medical incident. A brand new driver might go too fast around the turn and derail. Rails might fail over time. Vengeful Native Americans may try to destroy your rails or trains. Overworked, underpaid laborers may purposefully sabotage what they are building.
Game developers shouldn’t just assume that everyone wants to treat their workers and customers well. If you want a realistic simulator, you need to be able to control wages for your workers. You need to be able to control prices for your customers. You need to be able to contact your biggest competitors and enter into secret agreements to raise prices in unison and cover it up with bogus excuses about rising costs in your media outlets. You need to interact with the environment and the government. To ignore all of the terrible things done by these capitalist train tycoons is to be complicit in the censorship of those events. The games you have right now only serve as capitalist propaganda, showing everyone who plays them how clean and tidy it was to run a transportation empire, when the reality was and remains exactly the opposite.
