Remember that Simpsons episode in which Marge asks Bart to go for a tandem bike ride, but he says no because he’s playing a video game about going on a tandem bike ride with your mom? Soon New Yorkers may fall down such a rabbit hole of Meta in which the annoying people walking like idiots on the sidewalk will have their faces buried in an iPhone, playing a new video game about walking down the sidewalk in New York. The game, for Apple devices, is called Sidewalker—Late to Work, in which you play as a guy trying to walk to work, weaving between other guys in suits, between taxi traffic in the streets, between orange cones and tourists with cameras around their necks, whom you can kick!

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In that way, the game could serve as a healthy outlet for New Yorkers’ sidewalk rage, letting them get their vicarious kicks without literally kicking. (Otherwise, would it take a certain sort of madman to want to play a game that involved doing exactly the thing he just did or is just about to do? “Let me play the ‘Cooking Dinner’ game while I eat this dinner I just cooked”?) It could also be a nice training tool for tourists planning to visit, so they can get a sense of how to behave on the streets here: jump out in front of traffic, kick anyone in your way, and never ever stop moving.

Watch the trailer:



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