Simulating Mobility Futures

WHY

We were asked to make future transportation tradeoffs tangible for a public audience — not as policy, but as lived daily experience.

WHAT IT IS

A narrative scenario engine presenting mobility choices across different density zones. Multiple personas move through different areas with different options and constraints. Cost versus time. Convenience versus carbon budgets. Independence versus infrastructure. One persona's choices impacting others. Had to work for players aged 10 to 90 while keeping them inside a plausible near-future.

DESIGN DECISION

We built difficulty through constraint count, not mechanics. Easy: one goal, 2-3 factors. Hard: multiple goals, time pressure, 5+ factors. The challenge was finding the balance of time pressure, complexity, and playability that would let people actually engage with future tradeoffs rather than just solve routing puzzles. Too complex and it feels like doing taxes. Too simple and there's no learning. We took what we'd learned from simulation design work on completely different themes and folded that in here. Using AI tools let us iterate through different complexity levels faster than we could on paper.

ONE OBSERVATION

The tension was between context and detail. Context is stage-setting — establishing the feeling of the scenario, why it matters. Detail is the actual decision variables: need, mobility mode, cost, resource use, time, environment. What the system could actually accommodate was a series of discrete choices around those factors. We kept wanting to add more context because it felt more immersive, but the structure could only carry so much before it stopped being playable.

Designed: 2024-2025