There's nothing that quite defines fantasy vacations so much as the idea of a cross-country road trip with friends. One can picture it now: a beaten-up Volkswagen van, a few close friends, and nothing but conversation to pass your time cruising through the open road with the wind in your hair. According to research posted on the US-based National Centre for Biotechnology Information, out of the 91.2 percent of surveyed members had a bucket list, and a whopping 78.5 percent of them had a desire to travel in some form.

This should come as little surprise. Many consider traveling across the globe a luxury for those with the money and the time to do so, but it turns out that a rich lifestyle isn't the only way to experience the joys of a road trip with companions at your side. I've been traveling Europe with the aid of Euro Truck Simulator 2 and a multiplayer mod called TruckersMP. It's worth mentioning that both Euro Truck Simulator 2 and American Truck Simulator have now had multiplayer support added since July, which makes it a lot easier for everyone to get an online game, but the official Convoy multiplayer is an eight person affair. TruckersMP, while getting on a bit, is on a different scale.

Initially released on the 1st of May 2014, TruckersMP is a massively multiplayer mod for Euro Truck 2 that allows players to join one of several servers and travel Europe with thousands of other truckers. The mod makes a multitude of changes to allow for a streamlined multiplayer experience, including removing NPC drivers and putting speed-caps on certain servers. It also adds radio channels for voice chat and even its own radio station which the community runs.

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Video games are a small window into Chinese life, but they're a window nonetheless, and video games themselves, in China, are huge. China accounts for more than half of the entire planet's PC gaming revenue. In fact, despite it being smaller than mobile gaming there, China's PC gaming market alone made over $15bn in 2018; more than half the entire amount of revenue made in the US gaming industry overall, including consoles, mobile, the lot. Going by the numbers of analyst firm Niko Partners, as of 2018 there were a total of about 630 million gamers in China - a little over 8 percent of humans on the planet.

Huge. But we know there are lots of people in China, and we know lots of them play games. What's really interesting is that these people are playing games in what is, on paper, the most aggressively censored system around. I suspect this sort of thing is why economists love visiting China, even if doing so is a risk: everything is a case study.

Games are no different. Under Chinese law, video games can't contain anything that "threatens China's national unity, sovereignty, or territorial integrity". They can't harm "the nation's reputation, security or interests". They can't promote cults, or "superstitions". They can't "incite obscenity, drug use, violence or gambling" - although loot boxes are, of course, fine (in fact Niko Partners analyst Daniel Ahmad reckons a Chinese game may have invented them as far back as 2003) - and they can't include anything that "harms public ethics" or China's "culture and traditions". They also can't include any "other content" that might violate China's constitution or law, whatever that may be, and they have to be published in China by a Chinese company.

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Which radio station do you tune into? Is it Heart in the UK, or BBC Radio something or other? Is it Z100 in New York, or KIIS FM in Los Angeles? (I had to Google those.) Or, is it Truckers.FM?

I know what you're thinking: 'There's a whole radio station for truckers?!' But it's even stranger than that. It's actually a station devoted to virtual truckers, who tune-in via virtual cab radios while thundering down Truck Simulator roads.

In your ear, Truckers.FM sounds like the real thing. It has regular presenters with scheduled shows running right around the clock. There are adverts, just like on the real radio - there are even traffic reports! There are interviews, competitions, shout-outs - all the things you'd expect. Even jingles.

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