This Game Simulates the Absurdity of Designing Freeway Intersections

Being stuck in traffic sucks. But designing a horribly inefficiently road system and watching as self-driving cars get jammed? That's actually pretty fun.

With Freeways: Interchange Design for Autonomous Vehicles, a $3 traffic simulation game for iPad, Android tablets, and Windows, players moonlight as a largely inept traffic engineers. The goal here is to build intersections that keep freeway traffic flowing. This is easier said than done, however, as the city is prone to sloppy road construction and gridlock.

Freeways' developer Justin Smith is known for making funny games with absurd premises, including Desert Golfing, a 2D golf game that goes on seemingly ad infinitum, only to have the game come to a screeching halt at the 64,465 hole with a moat that is impossible to hit your ball across.

Like Smith's past efforts, Freeways has a good sense of humor. It's ridiculous how complicated building an effective traffic system can be. Most of my constructions resulted in massive knots of overlapping concrete. I often found myself chuckling as the little self-driving cars tried to navigate their way around roadways that were ludicrous.

As if my own ineptitude wasn't enough, the cars' pathfinding AI is a little bit screwy, leading to situations where long lines of vehicles queue up behind one car trying to turn left across a divided highway. In the game's instructions, Smith facetiously offers to give away his self-driving algorithms to autonomous automobile developers.

"It's definitely a joke," Smith told me in an email. "Anyone who sees my code will be horrified."

Despite not taking itself too seriously, Freeways is not a parody game. There is a layer of depth and strategy involved in learning the game's systems, specifically in knowing how the vehicles' AI interacts with your road designs. Like more sophisticated city simulation games, Freeways keeps tabs on intersection efficiency, measuring traffic flow and the amount of concrete you wasted. To say the least, Freeways gave me plenty to think about the next time I'm stuck in gridlock.