It’s about 10pm and I’m at the Cathedral stop in town, with absolutely no hope of getting a tram. The electronic display bluntly informs me that, because of planned engineering works, the entire system has ground to a halt.
Someone get Oliver Coppard on the phone, you might be thinking, this is clearly unacceptable. Except, fortunately for the South Yorkshire mayor, I’ve not been frustrated in my efforts to ride the real tram. I’ve been left stranded by its fully-functional virtual doppelganger, painstakingly recreated in the popular game Roblox.
Like the real tram, the Roblox Supertram relies on human drivers, meaning the system is eternally undergoing “engineering works” unless the volunteers that keep it moving are logged in for a shift. (From what I can glean online, the most recent shift was on 5 April.) Unlike the real tram, this transport network is entirely free to ride, although I’m told there are sometimes problems with people running onto the tracks or using inappropriate language. (The Supertram Roblox Executive Team issued a statement on the latter two years ago, assuring the public they have “strict moderation procedures in place”.)
But what would drive someone to recreate their local tram system in videogame form, or else give up their free time to virtually shuttle people from Halfway to Gleadless and back? What on earth, for that matter, would motivate the creator of another Roblox facsimile of this city — Sheffield, South Yorkshire RPC — to organise a virtual Armistice Day memorial? This second, mirror-world Sheffield boasts its own police service — who, so far this month, have shut down a major drug-trafficking ring and frustrated an attempted bank robbery — as well as a reliable source of news, Yorkshire News Roblox.
To my great disappointment, I’m unable to question the moderator of Sheffield, South Yorkshire RPC about his motivations; it seems he’s closed his DMs to avoid being harangued by the scores of people banned for violating a labyrinthine system of rules. (One states that any protests must be “kept to a realistic standard, meaning no major disruption and nothing that breaches peacetime”.) I comfort myself with the thought that, given Roblox is immensely popular with preteens, he is probably too young for me to interview without a parent’s consent.
Undeterred in my quest to understand this niche pastime, I reach out to a number of older creators who have painstakingly rebuilt our local environment in digital form. My question is simple: why?
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