The decisions that look simple at the start of a board game can become the problems you spend the rest of it trying to solve. Nick Shrag, a video game programmer and board-game designer, built People Live Here around two players sharing responsibility for the same town. One manages local government finances and development, while the other represents the community and the way people move through what gets built. Players have to work togetheras roads expand, highway subsidies shape development, and earlier decisions keep narrowing the options available later. Shrag is interested in games that do more than entertain as they can help people understand how real systems behave once those choices start piling
Hello and welcome to Bottom-Up Shorts. I'm Norm at Strong Towns, and I love connecting with our members who are doing fascinating things in their communities to help people catch wind of Strong Towns' vision and really grapple with some of the lasting consequences of what we've done to our places, but also to say, hey, we can, as I will often say, make things a little less worse or, in other instances, actually help us understand that people live here and that we can together recover from the American suburban experiment.
That is precisely the work that Nick Shrag has set for himself as well. Nick is a resident of Chicago, and he has created a fascinating board game that he's in the midst of developing called "People Live Here," subtitled "Recovering from the American Suburban Experiment." It's a game that can be played with two players, and it has some fascinating mechanics to it.
I was like, Nick, not only do I want you to come on Bottom-Up Shorts this week, but I also want you to do a playtest with us in the Strong Towns Commons. If you're a Strong Towns member, you can actually participate in that playtest on Friday. Go and check out the event listing. We'll have the time posted there. I believe it's going to be 2 o'clock Central Time, and Nick is going to be joining us, explaining the game, and helping us understand just a little bit more about that. Nick, welcome to Bottom-Up Shorts.
Thank you.
So you are doing many things, and we'll get a little bit more of your bio. But tell us first, what's the game, and what's the story here?
Yeah. So the game is, like you said, a two-player cooperative game where both players can sit down and try to win the game together. One player is playing as the local government, managing the city's finances as well as developing the town over a long period of time.
The other player is the community, and they're moving people around the town, trying to get where they need to go on a daily basis, as well as trying to work with the local government to convince them to change how the town is being run and built.
That's so cool! You've got a quote in some of your cover art from Chuck about the American pattern of development creating the illusion of wealth, and you've found some really interesting ways to capture that, especially with freeways and some of the ways in which the presence of roads in your community creates these lasting obligations that are hard to undo. Do you want to share more about that core mechanic and how that's been woven into the game?
Yeah, I've really tried to capture a lot of the core Strong Towns tenets in there. The way the mechanic for the local government to expand the town works is they draw a tile. It has six blocks on it, a bunch of streets, and you put it down. There's this built-in assumption in the game, as there is in the real world, that to grow, you just build more streets and roads, and you're kind of locked into that.
There's also, as you mentioned, the highways. There's a federal government subsidy in the game for highways that requires the local government to build highways every turn they play, which becomes a challenge of how we fit this into this town. Is it going somewhere useful? Sometimes players figure out how to make it go somewhere useful, but often it's just a highway meandering around town doing nothing good.
I'd be curious, then, what was the inspiration? Had you developed a game before, or were you just like, look, I think I have an idea for a game, and now I want to go through this process? I'll tell you, I have crafts and hobbies that I enjoy, but I'd never thought to turn it into a board game. Is this something you have practice in, and how did you get involved in it?
Yeah, so my professional experience is as a programmer in the video game industry, and so I'm kind of immersed in that game-making world. At this point, over a decade ago, I started getting into board game design as a hobby, and lately it's become a little bit more of a professional pursuit.
For me, games are a way to learn about the world. Games are very heavy in systems. A lot of games are made just for people to have fun. The games that I'm really interested in are games that also, while having fun, engage people with real-world systems and models and help you understand how the actual world works.
Yeah, and you want this to be cooperative, and I feel like that just rings true. But what are the essentials of cooperative gaming that people who are somewhat new to board games might have missed? You have to work together. I assume that means you're still trying to win, but what are the winning conditions, and what does it mean to work together in this type of work?
Yeah, so that's something that's been a challenge for me in this game, figuring out what that victory condition is, because modeling and running a city is an infinite game. I believe we've talked about that on Strong Towns before, and obviously you can't play a board game infinitely. What is an end condition to a board game that makes sense?
Where I've landed is that the community needs to move all the people to their destinations in a single round, because often that can't happen. There's too much cost to move around the town, and they need to do it efficiently. There's a mechanic where you can either walk or drive in the game, and to win, you have to get everybody there. They have to arrive on foot. They can drive part of the way, but they need to park and finish walking the rest of the way there.
What stands out to me is the many different ways in which Strong Towns members are using all kinds of different creative art forms. Sarah Rose is using stickers of bugs that are a representation of vulnerable users within the community, so there's bug art. There are people making sidewalk mosaics and installing them in potholes to help beautify their community, but also send a message that says, "Hey, this place really matters."
We featured somebody doing a video game about a brutally realistic city simulator, and you're using the board game medium. We've had somebody actually smuggling Strong Towns concepts into a romance novel. They had applied for a staff writer position, and they were mentioning the fact that they also write romance novels under a pseudonym. There was a Strong Towns-themed one, and I was like, wow, it's everywhere! We've had a jazz artist creating songs about this.
The board game, I love that there's a really good opportunity to use it as a teaching tool, but it is art as well. When you look at your community, what are some of the things that both inspire you and have helped you add in that layer of realism that you think can be expressed in this?
Yeah, so I grew up in small-town Ohio, very rural, and then eventually worked my way over to Chicago. For most of my professional adult life, I've been living in a very urban area, and I think that experience of both ways of living has been insightful.
Often it's just, how do I get around on a daily basis? For me in Chicago, that has been everything but car. Car is always last on my list. I prefer to walk, I prefer to bike, take transit, and live in a neighborhood that has a lot of things I want to do close by so that I can walk and bike. I've tried to capture a lot of that in the board game in various ways.
In terms of being a programmer, one of the things that stands out to me in conversations I've had is that we have a lot of members who are employed at Google or other IT places or working in software programming. One of the refrains they've shared is that there is a limit, and a pretty severe limit, to a version of top-down planning that just says, all right, know the beginning and middle and take the whole program and run it through.
There's actually a recognition, even in the logic of just binary, that there's complexity and emergence. Something unexpected happens. We need to respond to that. We need to iterate on that. You're doing this, I assume, from your own professional life in the programming world now with a board game, but do you want to touch on the ways in which you see that emergence or iteration maybe being something that we need to write into our understanding of how local governments work, how cities work, and how they function?
The danger is always to be like, all right, let's just come up with a master plan and follow it. I am in the middle of a local election, and we have candidates that are like, "What we need is a better plan." I'm like, "We need another hole in our head," would be the equivalent of this. I'm not down on all types of planning. Obviously, you want to have a general sense, but it does feel to me like I have a deep kinship with programmers who are like, look, we don't even know where we're going half the time. We have a goal, we have outcomes we want to see, but the specifics of it feel like the software programming world really understands the sense of iteration and needing to work through a lot of things, even putting it into the hands of people in the wild before you say, now we're ready to ship. That was a bit of a meander, but what does that reflect for you?
Yeah. So definitely, especially working as a programmer in video games, where the product we're trying to ship is something that is fun for players. The definition of fun is very complex and difficult to understand. Are we making the right product when you're making a game? That's different than, are we making a tool like a spreadsheet that is useful for people?
I think, especially in games, it is very important to iterate, and you can't plan too far ahead. You kind of have your high-level vision. You know roughly what it looks like, but the details are where the complexity is, and you have to iterate your way through those details.
I see that iteration happening in the city. An area where I really see that a lot is bike infrastructure. Chicago will release a new bike lane plan every 10 years or something, and of course it never happens. The most effective thing I see is when people organize and get a bike lane built on a half-mile stretch of street, or a quarter-mile stretch of street, or just on their neighborhood street. Eventually there's more incentive to connect those little pieces. Over the 15 or 20 years that I've lived in Chicago, I've seen the bike infrastructure grow into something where it's much more usable, something where I feel safe riding around with my kids in the city.
Because we're going to time this to come out just before the playtest on Friday, what can people expect? What does that look like? Obviously, if we are all in our own respective homes or places of work or on the bus as we're dialing in, we won't be able to physically play with the pieces. Can you share a little bit about this playtesting opportunity?
Absolutely. The board game design world has come up with some fantastic tools for doing virtual playtesting. I'm using one that runs right in your browser, so it's a simple interface where you can click and drag on things and use a few other shortcut keys to work with pieces that are very similar.
I'm using the exact same artwork in the physical board game as I am in the digital version. We'll be able to connect people online, jump right in on the browser, and I'll be able to teach the game and be around to help people run through it.
Well, my mind is thinking that at the National Gathering in Sacramento in June, if we're getting close to releasing the dates for that, don't quote me exactly on June, but I'd love to have several copies and create a room for people to be able to do this, because I think there is an interesting power in these types of tools. They teach us, they train us, and I keep coming back to the ways in which they also are so instructive for our cities.
Like I said, that 10-year master plan never survives contact with reality, and I think we've built in an assumption it never will. But there's another way in which video games and board games really create this intense urgency to say people need to take it for a spin. They need to try it out, and then a key part of that process is you're not turning yourself off from all of the feedback that comes in and the insights. Is there something somebody has passed on in your earlier stages where you were like, I never would have thought of that, and yet it's made some significant improvement to your game?
Yeah, I've playtested the game over 100 times at this point with people, and I think early on it was very simple, very basic. I hadn't even heard of Strong Towns when I started this game three years ago, and so it was just, move people around the town, different modes of transit. I think people were interested in the theme, but it wasn't until I found Strong Towns and understood the growth Ponzi scheme and trying to recover from this American suburban experiment that the hook became, people would be like, "What game are you making? Yes, let me play that."
When they sit down, they really get immersed in it. Some of my favorite moments are people saying, "Oh, these dang parking lots. They take up too much space," and they're talking about the game.
Yeah.
But yes, they do. Or they'll be frustrated with the highway, like, "Why do I have to build this stupid highway?" That's a good question.
Yeah, and that sense of the inexorable way in which a lot of these early-game decisions lock in the path we're going to have to follow for a considerable amount of time. In that 90-minute playtime, people are going to have to figure out, okay, what did I create for myself here? I love it.
I'm very excited to see us try this out on Friday. I definitely want to invite everyone to come join us in the Strong Towns Commons. There are instructions on how to join if you want to go and check that out, and then look for it in the event listings. That's something I am hopeful for. But more broadly, in everything that you're doing, Nick, what is it that gives you hope in this work?
I am very hopeful when I see people engaging with these difficult problems that Strong Towns is trying to address, that other organizations I'm involved in are trying to address, and they're getting stuff done. They're making things happen, and that makes me want to go out there and join them and participate in making our world, or making our towns, better places to live.
I love it. Nick Shrag in Chicago is creating "People Live Here." It's a board game that is cooperative, especially for two players, and that is something I am really looking forward to checking out on Friday. I'm also looking forward to the cutthroat competitive version of it that comes down the road, but maybe that's for another day and for a point when we reach the point where we realize, ah, we are in the midst of, as you said, an infinite game.
In that context, a lot of these core decisions that we make really have lasting consequences. We need, on average, more surplus than we use up in order to endure, to be sustained through a long period of time, and that is, to me, a core part of what our Strong Towns members are doing. Nick, I just applaud you. I'm so glad that you've woven these core themes into the game. Thank you for coming on Bottom-Up Shorts to explain it.
Yeah, thank you for having me.
All right, keep up the good work, and I'm excited to see us dive deeper into it. As always, if you're looking at your community, imagine what your community would resemble if players together were saying, "All right, how do we actually help ourselves really succeed in this?" When you do that, it may not look like pulling out pieces of a board game, but it may look like taking some principles or ideas from a game that you've played and realizing, "Huh, this is something about my own place that I've just come to realize."
Maybe there are too many parking lots. Maybe the highway funds aren't as sweet as they first seem. Maybe there are so many other layers to what we're doing in our quest to build strong towns where everyone can live a good life in a prospering place. All of those things truly matter, and I think sometimes art is a great tool to help us see that.
So with that, take care, and take care of your places. This episode was produced by Strong Towns, a nonprofit movement for building financially resilient communities. If what you heard today matters to you, deepen your connection by becoming a Strong Towns member at strongtowns.org/membership.