Real-world map data is helping make better games about farms and transportation
I'm feeling a strange sense of pressure as I set up my first bus route in City Bus Manager. I want to get things right for the public transportation users of this city, probably because it's the city I actually live in. City Bus Manager uses OpenStreetMap (OSM) data to populate its maps, so I can see all the familiar streets and points of interest laid out in front of me. These are my neighbors, who, like me, want an efficient transit service. I want to be able to provide it to them — even if only in a simulation.
City Bus Manager is part of a small group of management sims that are using OSM's community-generated database to make the whole world their game setting. Other examples include Global Farmer, NIMBY Rails, and Logistical: Earth. In these games, players can build farms, railways, or delivery networks all over the globe, using data about real fields, settlements, and infrastructure to inform their decisions.
When the idea of using OSM was first raised at PeDePe, the studio behind City Bus Manager, 'we had no idea if it would be technically feasible,' says Niklas Polster, the studio's co-founder. But once established, the license gave them access to an entire world of streets, buildings, and even real bus stops. And these do more than just form the game's world. They're also used for gameplay elements like simulating passenger behavior. 'Schools generate traffic in the mornings on weekdays, while nightlife areas such as bars and clubs tend to attract more passengers in the evenings on weekends,' ' Polster says.
Typically, Polster says, people are drawn to playing City Bus Manager in their local areas. (This seems to be confirmed by looking at YouTube playthroughs of the game, where creators often begin by saying they're going to dive into their own city or town.) That personal connection appears almost hardwired into people, says Thorsten Feldmann, CEO of Global Farmer developer Thera Bytes. When they showcased the game at Gamescom in 2024, 'every single booth visitor' wanted to input their own postal code and look at their own house.
There's a specific fantasy about being able to transform a space you know so well, Feldmann says. In addition to your own home or town, the marketing for Global Farmer suggests using famous tourist locations, such as Buckingham Palace, as the beginning of your new agricultural life. '[Players creating their] own stories around those places can be even more impactful than in purely fictional environments,' Feldmann says.
There is something inherently fun about being in control of a place you see every day or one that is deeply iconic. In particular, tearing down a perfectly manicured gated garden from which the British royal family takes £510 million per year and turning it into land to grow food for a country where 4.5 million children live in poverty might not be a one-to-one political solution, but it is emotionally compelling.
'We've heard stories of players who became interested in public transport as a career thanks to the game.'
The quality — or lack thereof — of public transportation is another key political topic where I live. The local buses are currently in the process of being nationalized again after what South Yorkshire Mayor Oliver Coppard calls a 'failed experiment' in privatization. Maybe that's why, even though these might just be pixels on a screen, I want to do it right. That's a feeling many players seem to experience. 'Our Discord community is full of players who are passionate about public transport,' Polster says. 'We've heard stories of players who became interested in public transport as a career thanks to the game.'
Of course, game developers using OSM data are still making games, rather than exact simulations. The real world is not always a well-balanced game design space. 'In smaller towns and villages, routes can be unprofitable with realistic numbers,' Polster says. City Bus Manager compensates for this by giving players more financial support, which is a straightforward and useful bit of game design. But when it comes to treating the games as direct representations of the world, it elides some complexity. For example, according to Polster, some players have reached out to their local transportation agencies with data they've gathered from playing in their local areas — despite the fact that the game is not actually designed as a faithful recreation of the real world, even if its map is.
Another challenge is that OSM data isn't always fully reliable. Polster explains that there can be errors or missing data that break very specific areas in the game, requiring PeDePe to manually find the issues and fix them. But OSM is also a volunteer-run program, meaning players can correct the data at the source. 'Many of our players contribute directly to OpenStreetMap,' if they find errors in their local area, Polster says, which improves the dataset for everybody, no matter what they're using it for.
Density of data is also a particular issue for the Global Farmer developers, who found that OSM has a lot more information about roads than field systems. There are plenty of areas where individual field boundaries aren't mapped, making 'total grey areas where gameplay actually couldn't happen.' The developers compensated for this by making a map editor, where players can copy satellite images from other sources to correct the data, but it means that those who don't want to build their own maps are limited to the places where OSM has detailed data or where other players have shared their creations.
Management sims have often reached for a sense of realism, and OSM data is a useful tool in that toolbox. It also allows players to control environments they know well and can connect with. But it is not a perfect recreation of the world, and even if it was, that isn't always what games need. According to Feldmann, navigating these factors 'can be very frustrating.'
But, just like players, developers are drawn to the idea of blurring the lines between places they know and places they simulate. 'It is also super rewarding whenever you manage to find a solution and get great results that are connected to the real world,' Feldmann says.
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